I come back wrong.
It isn't a moment—it's a slow dragging, like waking inside someone else's skin.
My lungs hitch. The breath feels alien in my chest. The world around me is silent, but dense—like something pressed its ear to the tent walls, listening for me to move.
I don't.
The air tastes like melted circuitry and bitter soulglass. My tongue is dry, metallic.
Inside my skull, a low hum thrums. Not pain. Displacement. A soft, gliding dissonance, like I've been nudged out of phase with existence.
I open my eyes slowly.
Runelight stutters across the ceiling. The shelter's field-built—junctions warped, sigils bent manually. Jin's work. Vaelen wouldn't have wasted effort keeping me alive.
I try to sit up. Regret.
My stomach flips. Vision shears sideways—like the tent wants to slide off the world. My body aches in the seams holding it together.
Eventually, I push myself upright. Fingers tremble.
That's when I feel the second pulse.
Slower. Deeper. Out of sync.
I lift my hand.
There, beneath my wrist's skin, a faint flicker curls through veins like molten ink. A rune.
Subtle. Shifting. Alien. No Academy root-glyphs. No anchor lines. It pulses—glow brightening—then fades.
My breath stutters.
There's a pulse under my ribs that doesn't match my heartbeat.
It belongs to me. That's the horror.
My knees scrape through the dust and settle into the ash.
The shard still looms behind me, mute now—no more echoes, no more borrowed reflections. But something lingers in the air, like the ghost of heat after fire.
I stare down at the ground in front of me. It's still.
Flat, black earth. Fine as powder. Ancient Gate fallout—the kind that eats spellwork and dulls enchantments if you breathe too much of it in. No wind. No footprints. The world around me holds its breath.
I reach out without thinking.
Not a gesture. Not a spell. Just the kind of movement that bypasses choice entirely.
My fingers press into the ash.
And they move.
Not random.
Deliberate.
A slow curve. A descending line. A flick. A mirrored tail.
The same symbol from the vision.
The same one I didn't know I knew.
Each line comes smoothly. Not mechanical—but practiced.
Like I've drawn it a hundred times on surfaces that didn't survive to remember.
The moment I finish the last stroke, a wind I don't feel rips through the field.
The glyph glows.
Not blinding.
Not bright.
But aware.
A pulse flickers through the symbol. Once.
Then again.
The earth beneath it shifts—softens.
And the rune sinks.
Not fades.
Sinks.
Like it's been absorbed. Accepted. Claimed.
And all at once, something massive stirs just beneath the ground, not physically—but spiritually. Like a vault door clicking open deep below consciousness.
I've never studied this rune.
But my hand knew it.
My bones knew it.
I fall back onto my heels.
My heart pounds. My pulse—the natural one—races like prey in a cage.
But the deeper rhythm under my ribs?
It's steady.
Slower now.
Satisfied.
Like something hungry just took a taste and decided not to bite. Yet.
I look at my fingers.
Ash coats my skin, clinging in faint patterns, curling into hairline fractures.
I rub at the marks, but the skin underneath still hums faintly.
And in the air—around me, above me, through me—the Death Gate listens.
I can feel it.
Not as presence.
As expectation.
Something it has seen before.
Something it's waiting for again.
I reach forward again—but this time the ground resists.
No longer still. Now reactive.
Like it remembers what I gave it.
And doesn't want me repeating myself too soon.
I curl my hand into a fist.
My palm itches where the rune settled.
It doesn't glow now.
But I know it's still there.
I know because I can't forget the weight of that motion—of drawing something I never studied, never memorized, never learned.
I turn slowly, scanning the horizon.
The mist at the perimeter curls tighter now. Closer. Like it's inching toward me.
No movement.
But I feel eyes.
Not one pair. Many.
Watching not just me—but the place where the rune vanished.
Like I just lit a flare in a language no one should remember how to speak.
You drew a door, a voice inside me whispers.
Now someone knows it's unlocked.
I don't hear his footsteps.
I feel them.
Subtle pressure shifts in the earth—measured, precise, the kind of approach designed not to spook a predator or a bomb. That's Vaelen. He walks like someone who's killed quietly before and expects he'll need to again.
I stay kneeling.
Let him come to me.
His shadow folds across the ash as he stops at my side. Not close. Three strides back. Just enough room for a draw-and-strike if it comes to that.
He doesn't speak right away.
Neither do I.
The air hangs heavy between us—thick with heatless tension and that faint hum of a Gate-line too close to the surface.
Then, cool and flat:
"You drew it again."
Not a question.
"It was already there," I say. "I just remembered it."
He exhales sharply through his nose. Not quite amusement. Not quite disgust.
"That's worse."
I slowly stand. My legs are unsteady, but I make the motion fluid.
No sudden moves. No challenge. Just presence.
We face each other across two paces of cursed earth.
His eyes lock onto mine. Cold. Unreadable. But something behind them twitches.
Not hate.
Not suspicion.
Fear.
Vaelen doesn't fear monsters.
He fears uncertainty.
And I've stopped being a variable he can calculate.
"You don't even realize what you're doing, do you?" he says.
"You think I'm choosing this?"
"No. I think something already chose you."
His hand is loose near the hilt at his hip. Not threatening. But ready.
"That rune," he says, voice low, "it's not a symbol. It's an access key. Lorn glyph-root. Pre-collapse. Reconstructed from the last living soul-architecture matrix we could recover."
I blink. That's knowledge I've never heard spoken outside sealed Academy archives.
"You know what it does?"
"I know what it calls."
I take a half step forward. Not challenge. Just closeness.
His jaw clenches.
"You're afraid of me."
"I'm afraid of what you'll let through."
"You think I'm corrupted?"
He studies me like a soldier assessing a breach charge.
"No. I think you're a door."
That lands like a fist to the ribs. Not because it hurts.
Because it fits.
"Then you should've left me behind."
"I tried," he says. "Jin wouldn't."
Silence.
The mist shifts behind him. Subtle. Like a ripple watching.
Vaelen glances over his shoulder, then back at me.
"If you fracture again," he says, voice flat, "if that thing comes out of you instead of through you—if I think for one second that this Gate starts speaking with your voice—"
He lifts two fingers off his weapon.
"—I'll put you down. Quick. Clean."
I don't flinch.
"I'd expect nothing less."
A beat. His eyes narrow slightly.
Not approval. But maybe recognition.
We stand like that for another moment—two silhouettes on the edge of something neither of us asked for.
Then he turns.
Walks away.
No dramatics. No final words.
Just the sound of his boots crunching through ash and the unspoken vow hanging in the air behind him:
If I become the key, he'll be the lock.
The wind's back to being quiet again, like it's trying not to interrupt the argument that just ended.
I sit alone for a while. Same ash. Same obsidian ground, still warm where the rune vanished. I press my palms to it and feel nothing—but I know the glyph isn't gone.
It's just waiting.
Like everything else out here.
A sound behind me—soft footfalls, slower than Vaelen's, heavier than mine.
Jin.
He doesn't speak when he sits. Just drops into a crouch beside me and holds out a flask.
I take it. Drink. Bitter. Warm. Just barely clean.
"You're not dead," he says eventually.
"Working on it," I mutter.
He exhales a short, humorless breath. Not a laugh. Something quieter.
"He's rattled," I say.
"He should be," Jin replies. "You're drawing runes that haven't been spoken aloud in four dimensions for fifty years."
"I didn't mean to."
"I know."
"…but I did."
He looks at me for a second. Not suspicion. Not pity.
Assessment.
"You said something in your sleep again," he says.
I glance sideways. "What?"
"Not words I recognized. Not from any human dialect. You repeated it three times."
"Did I sound like myself?"
That stops him.
His answer's slow. Careful.
"You sounded… like someone remembering their own echo."
That shouldn't make sense.
But it does.
He pulls something from his side pocket and drops it in the dirt between us.
A piece of cloth. Wrapped. Stiff with old blood.
"I found this in your bag. It wasn't there before we fell."
I unwrap it.
Inside: a strip of black synth-paper, rune-burned with the same symbol I drew in the ash. Same arcs. Same tail.
Only this version—older.
Not ink. Pressed.
The paper's scorched. Slightly warped at the edges. It smells of static and melted sigil-bone.
"You didn't draw that out here," Jin says.
"No."
"You brought it with you."
I turn it over. The back is marked with a faint Veyari grid-stamp. Old. Military archive format.
A relic.
"That's a command glyph," Jin says.
"To trigger what?"
"A gate-echo. Or suppress one. Depends how it's nested."
He gives me a look. Serious. Quiet. Unflinching.
"Do you want to remember who you are?"
I don't answer.
Because I'm not sure that's the right question anymore.
We sit in silence for a while. Just the sound of breath and ash, and the distant beat of the Gate's pulse—no longer random.
"I don't know what I am," I say finally.
Jin's reply is simple.
"I don't care."
"You should."
"No."
He leans back against a half-buried support pylon.
"You pulled me out of a nullfield three months ago when everyone else left me for dead. You waited for me to move before you moved. That's enough."
"That was before I started bleeding dead languages and dreaming in symbols."
"Doesn't change who you were when it mattered."
My throat catches.
He doesn't notice. Or pretends not to.
"Vaelen's ready to end me."
"Vaelen doesn't know what it means to survive without protocol. He's scared. He's just pretending it's strategy."
"And you?"
"I'm pretending too," Jin says softly.
"But I'll still stay."
The wind shifts again. This time warm.
The shard near the crater hums once.
Then goes still.
I look at the flask in my hand. Still half full.
"If I turn," I say.
"You won't," he cuts in.
"If."
He turns to look at me.
"Then I'll go with you."
The mist changes after dark.
It thickens, sure. But it does something stranger—it remembers where we are. Where I am.
I'm standing near the far edge of the camp now, just past the outer stabilizer ring. The runes hum. Jin's array is still holding. Barely.
He's inside, packing gear. Vaelen's sharpening his blade, like the sound alone keeps him from unraveling. Neither said much when I stood up and wandered toward the edge.
Maybe they know what I'm looking for.
Maybe they're waiting to see what finds me.
The fog dances, low to the ground, curling in figure-eights where my boots step.
I kneel, press my palm to the ground.
No heat this time. No glyph bloom.
But the pulse is there. Faint. Deep.
A heartbeat that doesn't belong to anything alive.
Then I feel it.
Not sight. Weight.
Across the field, just beyond the light of our camp, something stands.
Tall. Thin. Motionless.
Watching.
Like it's waiting for me to speak first.
I stare. Don't blink. Don't move.
The mist around it folds inward, like reality's trying to keep it blurred—like it shouldn't be here, but won't leave.
Then the figure lifts its arm.
And draws a single glyph into the air.
Familiar.
Curved.
Mine.
The same one I burned into ash.
The one from the vision. From the dream. From him.
It flares.
Then dies.
The figure turns.
Steps into the fog.
Gone.
I don't move right away.
Not fear.
Recognition.
I turn back toward camp. Jin's at the edge now. Watching me.
"Same one?" he asks.
"Yeah."
"It ever speak?"
"Not yet."
Jin hands me my coat. Tosses me my satchel.
"Then we better start moving before it does."
Vaelen appears beside us, already strapped for travel. His blade sheathed, face unreadable.
"This Rhael'an," he says. "The Elarin said it listens. Not that it shelters."
"It's better than dying here," I reply.
"That's a debate," Vaelen mutters, but he doesn't stop me when I walk.
He falls in beside us.
We breach the outer stabilizer ring together.
The fog parts reluctantly. Like it doesn't want to let go.
The direction we head is southwest, toward where the land folds into jagged ridges of burnt bone and silver ash. The Gate's pulse is softer here, but not gone. The ground still breathes. The air still remembers.
I glance back once.
The camp is shrinking behind us.
The shard is silent now.
But something beneath it is still awake.
The wound remembers. And Rhael'an still listens.