The torch crackled in Jackie's hand, its light casting restless shadows along the curved walls of the cavern. Every footstep stirred centuries of dust, each mote swirling like ghost memories around ancient stone shelves. Yara moved beside him in silence, her own torch held high, illuminating a vault untouched by time. The hidden elders' library—a legend among their people, passed down in campfire whispers—was real. And now, they stood within it.
The chamber smelled of old hide, resin, and forgotten fire-pit smoke. Wooden scroll-cylinders lined the upper racks, and below them, racks of tablets etched in rough glyphs curled with age. Murals sprawled across the inner walls, cracked and faded but no less awe-inspiring. A hundred generations of knowledge carved and stored in secret beneath the heart of the tribe's oldest hill.
Jackie paused before a stone relief. It showed a circle of men with elongated limbs and helmed heads, standing around a central figure crowned with sunfire. Behind the crowned man rose a dragon-wolf hybrid, jaws open in an eternal roar.
"The Ancients," Jackie murmured.
Yara brushed dust from a runestone near the base. "Or someone who claimed to be. Look…this one bears your tribe's glyph."
She pointed to the relief's edge, where a sharp-toothed sun and the outline of a wolf were etched together. It was the same symbol carved into Jackie's totem blade, the same sigil that pulsed faintly on his chest during moments of great power.
His pulse quickened. He stepped closer, fingers tingling. For a heartbeat, the Heartstone beneath his tunic gave a faint thrum—a whisper of warmth, of recognition.
"This one's writing is clearer," Jackie said, moving to a stone tablet beside the mural. Glyphs spiraled across its face in patterns of suns and beasts, bordered by notched symbols that pulsed with mystery.
He squinted, trying to make sense of the script. It wasn't the trade tongue. Not even the root-runes used in clan tattoos or shrine blessings. These were elder glyphs, ancestral and primal. Some resembled modern signs, others defied his understanding altogether.
"What are you looking for?" Yara asked.
Jackie didn't answer at first. His eyes moved hungrily over the carvings, heart thudding with urgency.
"Proof. Of who they were. What I am."
His fingers brushed the edges of the stone. The prophecy that had stirred the tribe's warriors, the dream-king who spoke in the obsidian mirror, the sudden power coursing through his veins—none of it made complete sense. Not yet. And now, standing in this vault of truths long buried, he was desperate for a thread to tie it all together.
The mural told a story of kings. Of beasts. Of skyfire descending upon a circle of warriors. But the details—the meaning—remained just beyond his grasp.
"The Dragon's Eye," he whispered.
Yara turned. "You saw that name too?"
He nodded. Buried in the margin of one glyph-scroll, he'd glimpsed the symbol: a slit-pupil eye within a burning circle. Next to it, scrawled in faded script: 'Only in the Eye shall the heir see.'
But what was it? A relic? A place? A trial?
The answer remained hidden in shadow.
Jackie set his torch in a wall sconce and pulled his journal free from the pouch at his hip. Carefully, he began to copy the central spiral of glyphs from the mural. His sketches were crude, but he focused on precision—the hooks of each line, the direction of the swirls. These symbols had meaning. Even if he couldn't read them now, one day he would.
Yara crouched beside a cracked slate tablet, watching him with something between admiration and worry.
"Do you think the elders knew this place still held secrets?" she asked.
"Rahu must have." Jackie didn't look up. "He led me here for a reason."
He flipped the page, drawing the sun-wolf glyph in bold ink. The resemblance to his own bloodline mark was undeniable. His earliest memories of training under the smoke-birch trees, the strange dreams that began after his first totem burn—they all surged back with eerie clarity.
As he pressed his palm briefly against the carved relief, a warmth surged through his chest. The Heartstone pulsed with light under his tunic, briefly illuminating the glyph through cloth and leather.
He staggered, breath caught.
"Jackie?" Yara jumped up.
He waved her off. "I'm fine. Just…the Heartstone responded."
She stared at him. "It did that before. In the mirror cave."
He nodded, feeling the faint hum of energy fade as quickly as it had come. But something lingered—a scent of iron, a vision half-formed behind his eyes. The warrior from his dreams stood atop a cliff, blood trailing down his forearm, eyes blazing like twin stars.
"The Eye sees only when the blood remembers," a voice echoed in his skull.
"Yara."
"Yes?"
"We have to speak with Rahu. Before nightfall."
She nodded, reaching to help him up. Their hands met—and held, a moment too long.
The torchlight flickered across Yara's face, catching the soft angles of her cheeks, the braided charm at her collarbone. Jackie looked away first.
She didn't.
Outside, the night wind whispered through the valley, stirring the leaves of the ancestor trees. As Jackie and Yara emerged from the hidden vault and sealed the stone behind them, the mountain stars blinked overhead like the watching eyes of beasts.
They didn't speak until the firelight of the village came into view.
"You're changing," Yara said softly.
Jackie glanced at her. "Because of the Heartstone?"
"Because of everything. You move different. Speak like you see something none of us can."
He didn't know how to answer. She wasn't wrong. But it wasn't just him. The world was changing. The Karus raid. The dream-visions. The whispers in firelight and stone. They were all pointing to something greater.
As they reached the elders' hearth, a howl echoed faintly from the southern ridge.
Jackie froze.
Yara tilted her head. "That wasn't a wolf."
The sound came again—a long, low howl, but twisted. Echoing. As though the earth itself mourned.
Jackie looked toward the southern dark. Somewhere beyond those trees, beyond those glyphs, a new shadow stirred.
And it had heard his name.
End of Chapter 28