The scroll lay open on Ryuji's desk, the ink dry but the words still bleeding into his thoughts.
"The fracture is the warning."
He read the line again. Then again. His father's handwriting, sharp, practiced, unyielding, held no hesitation. But it left no explanations either.
Outside, the sky had darkened into a deep, clouded blue. The last lanterns flickered along the citadel walls, and the city below was sinking into cold silence once more.
Ryuji rose, taking the medallion and scroll with him. He moved through the narrow halls like a ghost, passing portraits with blank eyes and banners heavy with dust. The fortress no longer felt like a place of command. It felt like a tomb where names had been buried long before bodies.
He made his way toward the old archives, an annex half-sealed after the reformation.
The air inside was dry and thin. Rows of untouched shelves towered overhead. Some scrolls had fallen from their bindings and scattered across the floor like forgotten bones.
He found the sigil by chance.
It was carved into the side of a stone pillar near the back wall, half-covered by shadow. A circle enclosed by nine jagged arrows. Each arrow once held a symbol, but most were worn smooth. Only one remained sharp, a white mark, simple and clean.
It didn't match any faction. No court, no house, no known order.
He brushed his fingers across it.
A memory stirred.
As a child, he'd seen it once, burned into a hidden page of a forbidden tome. A priest had snapped the book shut before he could look closer. Later, they'd said it was "a mark of silence". Something old. Something buried after the Pact.
Ryuji leaned in closer.
The stone behind the sigil felt different. Cooler. Hollow.
He stepped back, studying the wall. The cracks between blocks were too perfect. A false wall. A hidden recess.
He looked around the archive, found a rusted lever near the floor, and pulled.
With a low grind of shifting weight, the wall moved. Dust poured from the edges as a thin door opened inward, revealing a narrow staircase spiraling down.
No light waited below.
Still, Ryuji descended.
The steps were slick with moisture. The air smelled of rust and forgotten paper. He moved slowly, each step echoing longer than the last, until he reached the chamber at the bottom.
It was small. A single table. A chair. And a thick tome resting in the center, sealed in iron bands.
No title.
But on the cover, engraved deep into the leather, was the same white sigil.
He opened it carefully.
The pages were stiff. Old. Handwritten in a language he mostly recognized, ancient Valemiri. Some passages were clear, others faded or burned away.
But the meaning was unmistakable.
The Dominion Pact hadn't been created to end war. It had been made to lock something away.
Something not of this world.
An entity? A force?
There were only fragments.
"Nine hands to bind it. One mind to remember. The fracture is the blood-gate."
"Do not seal what was broken to warn".
His hands trembled slightly.
This wasn't just history.
It was prophecy. A warning left behind by those who knew it wouldn't be obeyed.
And someone, maybe several, had tried to erase it.
He read on.
References to the Breach. To voices in the wind beyond the mountains. A passage that mentioned his father's name directly:
"Daima the Last-keeper of the final lock. To break it is to undo all bonds."
Ryuji closed the book.
The truth wasn't just dangerous.
It was treason.
No council would let it stand. No priest would admit it. And the elders who still lived, those who survived the Pact, had already buried too much.
If they learned he knew…
He turned toward the stair, his thoughts a storm.
So much had been shaped by lies. His training. His vows. The war. The silence.
If the fracture was growing, as Kaelris said…
Then time was running out.
And he was no longer sure who stood on which side of the seal.
---
Ryuji emerged from the archives just as the bell rang midnight.
The wind outside had changed again, colder now, with a bitter edge.
He made his way to the western wing, where the old war rooms had been left to rot. If the names in the scroll matched what he found tonight, he would need to move carefully.
Not all traitors hid in shadows.
Some wore armor polished by history.
Some called themselves guardians.
As he walked past a broken statue of the Nine Shields, his reflection stared back from the fractured marble, his face split by time and stone.
And he wondered, not for the first time,
"If truth lived long enough… did it always become blasphemy?"