Chapter 4 – Lines in the Ash
Riven – Sector 12 | 06:12 UTC
The light filtering through the fractured dome above the warehouse was blood-colored.
Not literally—but the way it caught the haze from the smog towers and mixed with old spell residue made it feel like the world was bleeding in slow motion.
The warehouse was dead quiet, save for the mechanical hum of the city beyond. Broken husks of transport drones and rune rigs lay scattered around, their glyphs long since burnt out. The air still smelled of scorched crystal and old ward smoke.
My crew was already waiting.
Cree leaned against a stacked crate of defunct core modules, arms crossed, still wearing the half-charred coat from last night's run. Vex stood nearby, visor flicking as he parsed data through one of his hacked subgrid links. Ash and Wren were mid-convo until I stepped in.
They went quiet.
"Well?" Cree asked, eyes sharp. "You went dark for five hours. That's not like you."
"Emeric's gone."
Vex straightened. "Gone as in...?"
"Turned." I didn't bother to elaborate. The static clinging to my coat told the story.
Cree's jaw worked. "Nullspawn again? That makes three sightings this month. But if Emeric—"
"He wasn't infected. Not at first. He was close to something. Too close for too long."
I tossed the Lucari visor onto the table. Still flickering. Still humming like it wanted to scream.
"He mentioned a Vault," I said. "Under Sector 7. Old backup logs. From the Twinsoul Project."
Vex hissed low. "That was decommissioned twenty years ago. Burned to the root."
"Then someone missed a matchstick. Because the Gate knew him. It reached through and changed him. I saw it happen."
Ash crossed her arms. "You think the vault still holds active code?"
"I think whatever's behind that Gate isn't just reacting. It's remembering."
Wren, quiet till now, finally spoke. "If there's a Vault, there could be answers. Or worse—keys."
"So what now?" Ash asked. "We raid Sector 7 and hope we don't get erased by a military lockdown?"
"We don't hope," I said. "We plan. And we move before the city catches up."
The artifact blades on my wrist hissed into their dormant configuration. That final image of Emeric—splintering, reshaped into something beyond death—clung to my thoughts like oil.
"This isn't a revenge play anymore," I said, voice low. "This is a containment breach. And we're already too late."
New Elysium Academy | Perimeter Block | 07:48 UTC
Mira stood in the filtered morning light, her eyes locked on the containment dome that still pulsed above the city skyline. Veins of faint gold and black ran like infected blood through the air—evidence that the Gate hadn't just opened.
It had awakened.
A faint scent of scorched iron lingered in the air. The runes etched into the city's outer towers flickered irregularly. Technomancers and aerial guardians paced in the distance, their sigils strained to keep the dome stable.
Thyrr was the first to break the silence among their group.
"We go back in."
His words dropped like a grenade.
Lira turned toward him sharply, her arms folded tight across her chest. "You can't be serious. We barely made it out. Cael and Jin were last seen inside. If they're alive, it's a miracle."
Seris stood slightly apart from the others, arms folded behind her back, her white-rune uniform pristine, her face unreadable. "With half our team missing. We don't even know if Cael or the others are alive."
Mira's voice cut through quietly. "We don't know that they're dead either."
Thyrr's frustration was painted across every movement. "So we do nothing? Wait for the officials to file them as 'presumed lost'? We saw what that thing did. We saw what it became."
Lira's eyes narrowed. "And we also saw the patrol team that tried to 'rescue' someone from a Gate last year. They came back twisted. Or they didn't come back at all."
Seris finally spoke, her voice even. "The instructors are blocking any attempt to open a return path. There's no backup support, no rune-tether route, and Verren won't authorize another drop."
Thyrr's hand hovered near his sidearm. Not as a threat, but as a reflex. "Then maybe it's time we stop waiting for permission."
Mira shook her head slowly. "It's not that simple."
The air buzzed around them, thick with tension and residual static from the Black Gate's pulse. Rune-ward lamps cast long shadows across the courtyard's obsidian pavement.
"I'm calling in sick today," Mira said abruptly.
Lira blinked. "Now?"
"There's something I need to check," Mira said. Her voice was calm, but distant. "Back home."
"Your family?" Seris asked.
Mira nodded. "My parents worked on the old rune infrastructure. Before the war. Before the Gate. Before the Twinsoul Project was supposedly shut down. They had access to files I wasn't supposed to see."
Thyrr raised a brow. "You think they were involved?"
"I think they knew something. Maybe not everything. But enough to hide it."
Lira exhaled hard. "You think this all ties back to the Twinsoul mess?"
"I think it never really ended."
They stared at her.
Mira didn't flinch.
"You'll go alone?" Seris asked.
"I have to."
No one spoke after that.
"Be careful," Seris finally said.
Mira nodded and stepped toward the city transit lift, her coat catching the wind as the containment dome throbbed overhead like a heartbeat trying to remember its rhythm.
Alliance Council Chamber – Undisclosed Location | 08:22 UTC
The chamber was sealed tight—an ancient dome carved into an obsidian cliff somewhere between dimensions. No light filtered in from outside. Instead, the glow came from arcane lanterns set into stone walls, humming with eternal runes and subtle chrono-silence loops. It was a place forgotten by time.
Twelve figures sat around the blackened stone table—one for each voice of the Five Dimensions.
Lucari. Ferren. Lorn. Silarin. And the Human Dominion.
Their presence alone bent the air.
The Lucari emissary sat unmoving, draped in robes the color of a starless night. Glowing psionic glyphs flickered along his sleeves. The twin Ferren warmarshals flanked him, armored like ancient gods, unmoving but alert.
From the Silarin Delegation—home of the Veyari—Chancellor Avyren leaned forward.
"Let's drop the illusion," Avyren said. "The Black Gate has changed. It feels aware."
A shiver of silence passed through the room.
"The Gate's alpha-wave emissions mirror sentient neural maps," murmured the Lorn Velispeaker, her layered voice shimmering with echoes. "It thinks. Or dreams."
One of the Ferren muttered, "The experiment was terminated two decades ago. The Twinsoul Project was erased."
"Then why is the Gate still reacting to soulbound echoes?" asked the Lucari emissary, his tone like cracking stone.
Avyren's knuckles whitened. "We buried everything. Dismantled the soul-split prototypes. Destroyed the lab sites."
"Except Sector 7," the Velispeaker added softly.
The table fell into thick silence.
"That coldsite was locked," Avyren said.
"Then explain the alpha resonance traced to Emeric Valen—recorded hours before his transformation," said the Ferren warmarshal. "Twinsoul signatures. Unstable."
The Lucari emissary's eyes narrowed. "You said it was shut down. But you lied. And now we're standing at the edge of something worse than a breach."
No one refuted it.
Above them, the Gate's pulse echoed faintly through the projection screen—a rhythm that sounded disturbingly human.
And for the first time in decades, the alliance had no answer.
End of Chapter 4