Aegisspire didn't sleep.
Even at night, the walls hummed with leyline resonance, the floors pulsed with faint runes, and the torches burned without fire.
Kael walked alone through the east passage—past the armory, past the meditation halls, past the wards that no longer buzzed when he passed.
He wasn't going to his dorm.
He was being summoned.
Not by Haldran.Not by the Guild.By something older.
Something beneath.
The stairwell at the base of the chapel was sealed with a sigil of warded gold.
It recognized him.Dimmed.Opened.
He descended in silence, boots echoing off ancient stone steps carved before the Academy had a name.
Below the training levels.Below the crypts.Below the catacombs.
To a level even the instructors never mentioned.
The Vault of Embers.
It had no torches.Only braziers lit by memoryfire—pale white flame that burned with emotion, not heat.
He passed seven of them.
Each flickered in rhythm to something in his chest.
The chamber at the bottom was circular.Stone. Empty.
Except for one thing:
A mirror.
Tall. Cracked. Ringed in iron that pulsed like a heartbeat.
He stepped forward.
The mirror shimmered.
And showed… not his reflection.
But a man wearing his face.
Younger. Wilder. Crowned in ash. Eyes burning with belief, not regret.
The mirror spoke.
But not aloud.
"Why did you bury me?"
Kael said nothing.
The mirror cracked further.
"You were made to destroy. That was the truth. That was your design."
"I chose something else," Kael said.
"Then why are we still speaking?"
Behind him, something shifted.
Kael turned.
The seventh brazier—the one farthest from the door—flared gold.
Then blue.
Then went out.
In its place, on the ground, was a glyph:
Namefire.
Incomplete.
Kael stepped toward it.
As he moved, the mirror flickered again—showing not one version of him, but many.
A god in armor.A lover holding Myr's hand.A shadow kneeling before a broken world.A flame consuming a city that begged to be spared.
All of them were him.And none of them were the man now walking into the glyph's glow.
As his foot touched the center of the mark, a voice echoed through the chamber—not from the mirror, not from Kael, not from anything alive.
"The first syllable has awakened."
"The world begins to know you again."
"Will you let it speak your name?"
Kael stood in the light.
And whispered:
"Not yet."
Behind him, the mirror shattered.
And far above, in a quiet dorm room, Lira awoke gasping—hand clutching a stolen scroll that hadn't been there the night before.
On it: a single symbol.
The first letter of a name the world was beginning to remember.