The south shaft had collapsed in the middle of the night.
No one knew what caused it. Some whispered of tremors. Others swore they heard chanting echo through the lower caverns before the rocks fell. But when the horn sounded and the ground shook, the entire camp knew one thing: something deep had cracked—and not just stone.
Grath barked orders like a war hound, sending crews to clear the debris. The guards whipped workers from pen to pit while engineers scrawled panicked notes on parchment, muttering about structural breaches and old faults.
Kael watched from the edge of the labor ring, eyes narrowed. "That wasn't just rock," he whispered to Mira.
She nodded slowly, voice trembling. "The air shifted. Like it remembered something."
Renn, standing nearby, dropped a coil of rope and muttered, "Might be more than the shaft. Something beneath it is waking."
Brenn didn't speak. He just stared at the black smoke curling up from the ruin, jaw tight.
The brotherhood was assigned to the emergency clearing crew. It was Grath's punishment—for "lingering too long in the shadows," as he put it. Kael knew better. The Overseer was watching them. Closely.
The four of them hauled carts of rubble for hours. Sweat soaked through rags. Dust clogged lungs. And all the while, the wind from the broken shaft howled up like a whispering mouth.
"You feel that?" Renn asked during a short break, hand pressed to the stone. "It's humming."
Kael crouched. The vibrations beneath the surface weren't natural. They were rhythmic. Pulsing.
Like a heartbeat.
Or a signal.
He traced a glyph into the side of the tunnel wall.
☿↯⟆⟹ — Veilcut.
The glyph shimmered faintly, and Kael's breath caught.
A pattern of veins beneath the stone appeared—lines of old metal, etched symbols, and bones. Not just a collapsed shaft. A buried chamber.
"It's not just damage," he said. "It's an entrance."
Mira paled. "To what?"
Kael shook his head. "Something older than this prison."
That night, they met in the hidden alcove again. The scroll from Varn lay open, and Kael pointed to a faint symbol near the bottom of the page.
☵⟁⧖⟴
"Renn," he said, "this one looks like the shape you sketched two nights ago. The one you said stopped the guard from hearing you."
Renn leaned over, eyeing the sharp lines. "Yeah. That's the one I carved near the fencepost. I called it Null Sigil."
Kael tapped it. "It's meant to erase echoes. Mute space. If we draw this around us when we move into the shaft, we can go unseen—and unheard."
Brenn reached into his belt and pulled out the stone he had retrieved near the waterline. "When I dropped this into the shaft today, it sang."
Mira's eyes widened. "Sang?"
"Felt like pressure inside my skull. Like a bell underwater."
Kael took the stone. It vibrated faintly in his palm. "It's responding to something below."
He turned to Mira. "Any dreams?"
She hesitated. "A woman with no eyes. Singing in a tongue I don't know. The melody loops. Repeats. I think… it's trying to teach me."
Kael nodded slowly. "Then it's time we listen."
The next day, as chaos reigned around the collapsed shaft, the four of them crept toward its edge—tools in hand, glyphs drawn in blood and soot across their wrists.
They moved in sync, without words.
Kael led with Veilcut. Renn activated Null Sigil, the space around them falling into eerie stillness.
No footsteps.
No breathing.
Just silence.
They climbed down a cracked rope ladder, deeper than anyone else had dared since the collapse.
Below, the air was cooler. Wet. Ancient.
The stone here bore markings—spirals, triangles, fractals—but they weren't carved.
They were grown.
Mira gasped. "The walls are alive."
Kael nodded. "Or remembering something."
At the bottom of the shaft, they found it.
A door—not made of stone, but of bone fused with obsidian. It pulsed slowly, like lungs inhaling dust.
Kael pressed his hand to it. Nothing happened.
Then Brenn stepped forward and did the same.
The door shivered.
A light flared from its center.
A new glyph appeared across its surface:
⚝⟁✠⩪
It hovered in the air.
Mira's breath caught. "I know that song…"
She began to hum—a soft, lilting melody from her mother's cradle songs.
As her voice rose, the glyph grew brighter.
Kael joined her with a whispered glyph:
☽⟁⫷⨀ — Varn's Grasp.
The door pulsed once.
Then opened.
Inside was a chamber that glowed with memory—thousands of small runes dancing on the walls, lighting the faces of long-dead guardians whose bones knelt in prayer.
And in the center, a pedestal with a crystalline shard—hovering above it.
Kael reached forward.
The shard sparked.
All four of their glyphs glowed at once.
And the chamber spoke.
"Four minds. One spark.
Fragmented. But aligned.
The trial begins."