Callux slept with his eyes open now.
Liora sat cross-legged across from him in the ruins of the sanctum, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. It wasn't comforting. The way his body moved was… off. Too precise. Like a puppet mimicking the rhythm of breath.
The soul fusion worked—too well.
He was alive. Technically.
But he wasn't just Callux anymore.
Every few hours, a different voice slipped through his throat. Sometimes it was a whisper, sometimes a child's laugh. Sometimes a scream that came from no mouth at all. And she'd hold him until it passed, until his eyes cleared and he remembered who he was.
Sometimes… he didn't.
Liora traced a circle in the ash with her finger.
She hadn't told anyone what she did yet. Not Dareth. Not Eliane. Not even the Archivist, who would've torn her apart for breaking the soulbound sanctity of the Echo Rites. But she didn't care. Not really.
She was afraid.
Not of death.
But of what she brought back with her.
Callux stirred. A breath. A flicker of light in his eyes.
"You haven't slept," he rasped.
She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Neither have you."
"I don't think I can anymore."
Outside the sanctum, the world was shifting. The storm clouds that circled Virellos had changed—no longer storms, but something worse. Magic pulses now rose in waves through the city's underground, humming like drums beneath the cobbled streets.
And the people could feel it.
Children cried without knowing why. Animals refused to cross certain thresholds. The priests of the Ninefold Flame had begun to burn their own archives, claiming prophecy had turned on them.
But the worst was the fire.
The Hollow Flame.
It burned beneath the royal crypts now—white fire with a black heart, rising through cracks in the marble like veins. It devoured magic and left behind silence.
The White Circle sealed off half the city in response.
But it was already too late.
In the Circle's High Tower, Master Jorvan faced down the cracked mirror of the Grand Tribunal, his hands stained with old blood.
"We're losing control," he said.
The mirror flickered. Eight masked figures stared back at him—only one spoke.
"Then it's time to awaken the Bound Ash."
Jorvan paled. "That rite was sealed for a reason."
"And the girl just performed a full fusion without breaking. She's more than we thought."
"She's dangerous."
"Exactly."
The mirror went dark.
Jorvan turned away slowly, knowing what he had to do.
Back beneath the sanctum, Liora finally stood.
Callux followed, slower, as if his muscles still hadn't remembered how to move without pain. He touched her shoulder gently.
"There's something I need to show you."
They moved deeper—through a part of the ruins that had been sealed even from the oldest maps. Liora felt her skin itch as the stones changed. Older here. Carved by hands long dead. Words in a tongue she couldn't translate crawled across the walls like fungus.
Callux's voice echoed behind her.
"When I crossed the Veil… I saw this place. In the dreams. In their memories."
Her spine stiffened. "Whose?"
He didn't answer.
They stepped into a chamber lit only by the glow of soul remnants embedded in the walls—hundreds of them, like stars. In the center stood a single pedestal, and on it, a book.
Bound in silver-threaded flesh.
Alric's Codex.
Liora's breath caught.
She approached slowly, the weight of it all dragging at her heels. The book pulsed with latent magic—old, wild, and aching. She reached out, fingertips grazing its surface.
It recognized her.
Pages flipped open on their own, revealing a passage inked in violet flame:
To fuse a soul is to defy death.
To hold it is to be consumed.
The cost is not just yours. It echoes backward through your bloodline.
Her stomach twisted.
"My family," she whispered. "They've done this before."
Callux nodded slowly. "And now it's waking up inside you."
That night, she dreamed of fire and bone.
Of a man in a red crown standing over a pyre, laughing as cities fell behind him. His face was not her father's. But it was familiar. Too familiar.
She woke to silence.
Callux was gone.
But in his place, etched into the floor in burned ash, were five words:
THE FLAME KNOWS YOUR NAME.
And far off in the distance, something ancient began to stir.