They traveled east across the glacier for three more days, following Mireth's instinct and Cael's increasingly unreliable maps. The glyph that had burned itself into his mana signature remained dormant, but he could feel it now like a weight under his ribs—a compass without a direction, pulling toward what shouldn't exist.
Cael's sleep worsened. When he did dream, it was silent now.
No glyphs. No figures.
Only the sensation of falling upward.
Their destination was unmarked: a faultline in the glacial shelf known only to a handful of rogue cartographers and rumored in back-alley expeditions.
Mireth had heard whispers of it in a ruin-vault months ago—The Hollow Below the Sky.
"Sounds like a poem," Cael muttered as they approached.
"It's a crack in the world that predates the Fracture," Mireth said. "Older than the Old Kingdoms. Older than the Essentia Templars. It was sealed… but not repaired."
Cael raised an eyebrow. "Why didn't anyone collapse it? Freeze it over?"
She gave him a look. "You're asking why no one tried to bury a wound in the sky? Cael, the Hollow isn't just a location. It's a scar left by something the world couldn't forget."
They arrived at the ridge by dusk.
What Cael saw didn't make sense at first.
The horizon simply ended.
Like a page torn from a painting. A vertical slit in the glacier, yawning downward into an impossible nothingness. No stairs. No path. Just a thin silver shimmer where air warped around absence.
It was deafeningly quiet.
Mireth set up a warded tether around a jagged peak of ice. "This is where we stop being tourists."
Cael crouched near the edge, frowning. "It's not reflecting light right."
She nodded. "That's because it's not a hole."
"What is it then?"
"A pause," she said grimly.
Cael glanced back at her. "You think one of the Fracture's anchors is down there?"
"No," she said. "I think something older is waiting."
That night, they didn't sleep.
Cael sat in a meditation trance, focusing on the glyph-burn inside his mana. He tried channeling Void Essentia through it slowly, cautiously.
It didn't react.
Until, suddenly—it hummed.
Like a tuning fork struck by thought.
And something below—something in the Hollow—responded.
Cael fell backward as a wave of dissonance passed through him. For a moment, he saw a cascade of images: glyphs stitched into skin, cities inverted into caverns, and a mountain bleeding stars from its peak.
Then, silence.
Mireth was already up, blade half-drawn, eyes scanning the ridgeline.
Cael whispered, "I think I called something."
They descended at dawn.
Cael floated slowly with layered mana control; Mireth used climbing spikes and anti-gravity glyphs from her Relic gauntlets. The descent was strange—time stretched. Light bent. And the further they went, the colder the silence became, like even mana didn't want to exist down here.
When they landed, they found a platform.
Not stone. Not metal. Something intermediate—like calcified emotion, black and matte and thrumming faintly with patterns that couldn't decide if they were symmetrical.
And at the center stood a pedestal.
On it sat a sphere.
The sphere was semi-transparent, filled with a swirling mist of gray-violet. No glyphs. No runes. But it felt like a thought waiting to become real.
Mireth stared at it and immediately took two steps back.
"That's not a Relic," she whispered. "That's a Root Thought."
Cael turned. "You're sure?"
"Yes. I've only read about them in secret Templar notes. They're fragments of unmade reality—concepts that never took shape, sealed to prevent world logic from unraveling."
Cael stepped forward.
The glyph in his mana burned again.
The sphere responded—its mist swirled, and for a moment, seven lines of mana flashed from it in different directions. Each felt like a direction not in space, but in fate.
One pointed straight at him.
Another toward the continent of Sura'dai, where a wild beast dreamed under stars.
Another southward, where storm and steel weaved together.
Another west, toward a floating circuit city tangled in vines.
Each line whispered: convergence.
And then they vanished.
Cael touched the sphere.
Not with his hand, but with his will.
It whispered a question—not in words, but in structure.
"Are you the wound… or the suture?"
And suddenly, he understood what the Root Thought truly was:
It was an offer.
Not power. Not knowledge.
But role.
A function in the world's restoration or its collapse.
Mireth's voice snapped him back. "Don't answer it. Not yet."
Cael exhaled and withdrew.
The sphere dimmed again, returning to sleep.
But as they turned to leave, Cael saw something new.
Etched into the far wall of the Hollow, written in a dead language but burning in his vision:
"WHEN THE VOID OPENS SEVEN DOORS, THE EIGHTH WILL CHOOSE TO CLOSE."
He felt the glyph in his palm pulse again.
They ascended in silence.
But something had changed.
Cael wasn't just reacting to the world anymore.
He was being counted by it.