Three days passed.
The breach was sealed. Not by stabilizers or runes, but by collapse. Stone folded in on itself like dead lungs, the vault swallowed whole by Vel'Thara's belly. No one had heard Raka's voice since.
The council chamber fell quiet when his name came up. Not out of grief. Out of fear.
War Table – Morning
Kael traced the edge of the updated frontier map. Its parchment still wet with blood stamped sigils. Spiral hotspots flared in ink-red clusters along the eastern ridges. Two new fractures. One confirmed seed gate.
Silver Lance Eirien stood to his left, her helm under one arm, face lined with too little sleep.
"The south wilds are failing," she said. "Nest sites forming faster than suppression teams can move."
Claire leaned over the table, her splinted arm still strapped tight. "We need more crystal stock. And we need Kaelen back in the field."
"He's not ready," Lira muttered from the shadows.
"He doesn't have to be," Kael replied. "He just has to burn."
Missing
They hadn't recovered Raka's body. Not fully. A boot. Scorched cloth. Faint glyph residue that still flickered static-blue when touched.
Jace's scans found nothing beneath the rubble but a collapsed energy signature folded in on itself like memory being buried.
Tiv refused to believe it. "His seed's still active," he argued, adjusting his fractured lenses. "The glyph field's twisted, but stable. Like it's... hibernating."
Claire was less poetic. "He's dead, or lost. Either way, we can't wait."
Kael said nothing. But his hand never left the edge of the table, where a knife had etched a crescent-moon spiral into the wood absentmindedly, without thought.
Orders
At sunset, the summons came.
The Judge's voice crackled over the array relay. Thin, sharp, and final.
"All operatives prepare for deployment. Spiral emergence in the Hollow East. Rift zone expanding. We strike now. No second wave."
Vel'Thara did not cheer. It moved. Quiet and efficient but tired.
FarSouth – Beneath the Stone
There was no light. But Raka dreamed in pulses. Broken images. Half-formed whispers.
A girl's hand brushing his cheek. A scar shaped like a crescent carved across her collarbone.
A voice, his own, saying "You're stronger than this."
And Sereth, kneeling before an altar, her hands bleeding from carving glyphs into stone.
The dagger glowed faintly at his belt. He breathed in dust. And remembered fire.
March
The road east of Vel'Thara was no longer a road.
What had once been a clean-cut path cleared by Kael's old squad with blood, fire, and glyphsteel. Had now begun to rot. The earth itself sagged in places, stone sagging like skin over too-thin bone. Black roots cracked through cobbles, pulsing faintly when stepped on, like veins under translucent flesh.
Rain fell, not in sheets but in slow, steady droplets that hissed where they struck the ground. The scent was all wrong. Too metallic. Too warm.
Kael walked at the head of the vanguard, his cloak weighted with ash. His flame had gone quiet. Not dead, but waiting. Listening.
Behind him came Claire, all edge and exhaustion, her splinted arm wrapped in reinforced leather now hardened with grime and blood. She walked like she was hunting something with every step.
Lira, silent and deliberate, brought up the left flank. Her glaive was unlit, but her eyes missed nothing.
Tiv and Jace trudged behind them, their gear bristling with unstable crystals, humming as they adjusted field suppressors. Neither spoke much anymore unless they were arguing about resonance flow.
And trailing near the rear, wrapped in too-new armor that still hadn't lost its polish, was Kaelen.
Reforged. Reassigned. Regretful.
No one had asked who'd lead if Kael fell.
But every single one of them had already imagined it.
The Hollow East
They reached the breach at dusk.
The land fell away without warning. Like someone had gouged out a piece of the world and left it to bleed. It wasn't just a crater. It was a message. The earth didn't rupture outward. It spiraled downward. A wound that had been folded, not torn.
Glyphs lined the edges like scars.
Tiv dropped to one knee at the ridge, pulling his scanner free. The sigils were faint, silver and violet, flickering like stars beneath a cloudy veil.
"It's recursive," he murmured, tapping controls. "The glyphs are nesting… each symbol wraps inside another. This isn't raw Spiral bloom. This is… built."
Jace hovered nearby, sweat beading at his brow. "These aren't reaction signatures. They're calculations. It's thinking."
Claire exhaled through her teeth, scanning the ridgeline. "No Spiral bloom on the surface. No shrikes. No spawn. Just this… hole."
"Not a hole," Lira said, crouching beside Kael. "A mouth. It's not bleeding. It's waiting to speak."
Kael said nothing.
He had seen these glyphs before. Not just on walls. On Raka's skin. And on the dagger still buried under a sealed vault back home.
The Guardian
They weren't alone. Kael felt it before he saw it. Like a second heartbeat beside his own. Movement at the far end of the breach. Slow. Deliberate.
A figure emerged from the tree line. Wreathed in mist and static. It walked like a man, but its joints bent wrong. Each step dragging slightly, like a puppet on frayed strings. Glyphs shimmered across its chest. Mirror sigils, reflecting light from torches that hadn't been lit.
Its face was smooth. Blank. Stone. But etched into the brow was the unmistakable serpent-and-moon.
Claire's breath hitched. "That's not Spiral."
"No," Kael said. "That's a message."
The figure stopped ten paces from the ridge. Then it knelt. And held out its hand. Something small and white sat in its palm. A tooth, burned at the base.
Claire stepped forward, slowly. "That's his. Raka's."
Jace swallowed. "Then he's…"
"Not gone," Tiv whispered.
Kael didn't hesitate. He moved down the slope, blade drawn. Not raised, just visible. The Guardian didn't move. When Kael reached it, the glyphs on its chest pulsed once, then went dark.
Kael reached for the tooth. The moment his fingers closed around it, the sky shivered.
Signal
A static burst shrieked through Tiv's scanner. Jace yelped as the resonance spike flared across his screen, the device flashing crimson.
"Spiral signatures just jumped across the entire valley," Jace gasped. "But it's… wrong. They're not activating. They're mimicking."
Tiv's eyes widened. "It's copying us. Our suppression grids. Our field patterns. It's learning."
Lira rose from her crouch. "Or remembering."
Kael stood over the Guardian's still form. The tooth in his hand burned. Not physically, but with memory.
He clenched it tighter.
"Tell the Judge," he said. "The Spiral's shifted tactics."
Claire narrowed her eyes. "You think this is connected to Raka?"
"I think," Kael said slowly, "this is his trail."
Echoes Beneath
Far beneath the stone. Where the air did not move and light could not reach, Raka's body lay still. But his mind did not.
He wandered ruins that smelled of old incense and dying stars. He walked halls filled with silent ghosts. Some wearing Kael's face, some Sereth's. Some, disturbingly, wore his daughter's.
At the center of the dream, a great mirror cracked from top to base. Behind it stood Sereth.
Her hand pressed against the glass.
"Find me," she said. "Before they do."
The glass shattered.
Raka awoke with a gasp. Swallowed in blackness. His hand still clutched the serpent-and-moon dagger.
The Message
Back at the breach, the Guardian's chest pulsed once more. Glyphs shifted. Rippling like breath across skin.
A single word wrote itself across its torso:
"Alive."
Kael didn't breathe for a long moment. Then he turned.
"Double the perimeter. Lock down every glyph root. No one touches the body."
Claire crossed her arms. "And if the Spiral comes?"
Kael's voice was like stone. "Then we burn it. But we follow his trail first."