The dome trembled.
Only slightly at first—a high, glassy vibration that stirred the hanging brass lanterns and made the ink within open scrolls ripple. Lynchie held still. Her knees pressed to the cool observatory tiles, her hands curled atop the newly revealed spiral etching that had begun to faintly glow.
She had heard something.
Not words. Not even sound. But something beneath sound—like breath from a throat that had never known voice. A memory too vast to shape itself into syllables. A hush that remembered what it was to speak before speaking existed.
Behind her, the remaining Circle of Quiet Masks exchanged glances, their ceremonial veils fluttering with soft pulses of rising aether.
"The spiral is responding to her bloodline," whispered the white-masked instructor, their voice steady despite the radiating strangeness. "It should not respond so quickly."
"It remembers her," murmured a second—one of the masked archivists, who hadn't spoken once in the previous rites. "Or perhaps... she remembers it."
The observatory's farthest ring began to dim. Celestial runes that once illuminated the star map peeled backward like petals surrendering to a greater gravity. In the center, just beyond Lynchie's reach, a mirrored pillar of faintly turning crystal emerged. The temperature dropped. The smell of burning dust and ozone filled the air.
Lynchie blinked, breath shallow. Her thoughts drifted sideways—to that half-memory of her brother's echoes. All their voices, whispering in multiplicity. Their sorrow. Their patience. Their hope.
You are not the first to kneel before the breath of memory, something said from behind the veil of time.
She turned her head slightly.
Nothing.
You are simply the first to listen.
Then the spiral pulsed.
A gust of memory and force—half vision, half dream—blew outward, and in that moment, every member of the Circle dropped to one knee.
The mirrored pillar cracked.
Light poured from it in fluid bands, inscribing runes into the air, drawing glyphs that Lynchie couldn't read—but which she felt.
Felt in her teeth.
Her spine.
Her shadow.
And inside that shadow, briefly, she saw a face.
Not her brother.
Not fully.
A younger version. A different echo. No body, no voice—just presence. Watching her through a lattice of starlight, held together by longing alone.
She reached out, fingertips grazing the boundary of the glyphic light.
And the entire observatory inhaled.
Every rune, every relic, every glass instrument paused—as if something vast had taken its first breath in eons.
The pillar split open down the center.
And revealed—
A sealed chamber of impossible architecture. Stairs going nowhere. Books made of bound sky. A cage without bars. A bed of glass holding something that glowed with the color of unborn stars.
Lynchie's voice caught in her throat.
The masked instructor behind her murmured in awe. "No one has ever breached the Spiral Reliquary. Not even the Tribunal."
And yet, Lynchie stepped forward.
Unknowing.
Unshaken.
Unalone.
The glyphs rearranged themselves behind her. The Circle of Quiet Masks stood slowly, their veils glimmering with new inscriptions. One of them, the archivist, dared whisper:
"She walks where even the Seraphs feared to look."
Within the chamber, a voice as ancient as forgetting exhaled a name.
A name not hers.
But one she would carry soon.
Then the doorway closed behind her.
And the stars above the dome blinked twice, as if uncertain whether to shine or retreat.