The mob poured into the hollow like a tide of fire. Torches flared against broken pillars, throwing warped shadows that crawled across the ring of stone. Shouts rose in a single, angry voice. Weapons rattled in hands. Horns split the night and sent questions through the air.
"Form ranks!" Sofia bellowed. Her command cut through the chaos. Steel sang from scabbards as her guards drew blades and pushed forward, forging a jagged line around the wagons. Horses screamed, hooves striking sparks on stone. Men shoved against men, shields meeting shields, flesh and iron grinding together.
But the ruin had already changed.
The hum that had been a vibration now became speech. Not a single voice, but many layered and old, threading together beneath the feet of every living thing in the circle. The stone floor glowed faintly where the twin serpent glyphs ran, molten lines uncoiling beneath their boots. The air pressed against lungs and teeth, a physical weight that made breathing an effort.
Evelyn stumbled backward, both hands pressed to her temples. "The ground," she gasped, voice small. "It is singing."
Owen's lips moved soundlessly. His eyes were wide and wet. "Not singing," he croaked, as if speaking too loudly might break the spell. "Remembering."
At the center of the circle, Leo dropped to one knee. The shard in his chest flared as if someone had struck a bell inside his ribs. Amber light leaked through his skin in thin threads that crawled along his veins. The world folded. The sounds of the present, the mob, Sofia, the clang of steel, smudged and dulled at the edges until they were distant things, seen through water.
And then the past cracked open.
He stood in that same ring of stone but whole. Pillars rose whole and proud. A great open sky crowned the hollow. Faces gathered in silent ranks, robed and masked, the hush of a ritual holding the audience breathless. At the center of all of it was a stone block and on it a figure, bound. It was a man, perhaps, or a shape more ancient than any word for man. Blood ran in bright rivers into carved channels that fed the serpent glyphs. Priests chanted with mouths painted black and white. The chant struck his bones like thunder.
The shard inside him roared with recognition. This was a covenant, it said. They took. They bound. They poured blood into the lines. When I rose against them, they smashed me and scattered my pieces. Through you, it crowed, I will be whole again.
Leo staggered backward against a pillar of the ruin. "This is not mine," he said aloud, though the word felt foolish in his mouth.
It is, the shard whispered, triumphant and patient at once. You bear the fragment they could not bury. You are what they feared. You are their undoing.
In the real circle, the clash surged. Sofia drove her blade into the mob's front line, steel ringing. Guards pushed, shields locked. Sparks leapt where steel met steel. Blood splattered the glowing floor and vanished into the bright veins of the stone as if the rock drank it. The chant grew louder, and with every drop of offered iron, the serpent lines drank deeper.
"What is this cursed ground?" one raider screamed, stumbling as the floor seemed to pulse beneath his boots.
"It is a trap," another howled as he dropped his torch and scrambled back. "Cursed ground!"
Some pressed on anyway, hunger and fury carrying them forward into the flash and hammer of combat.
Evelyn crouched at Leo's side and shook him hard enough that his head snapped. His eyes were amber, glazed and unfocused. "Stay with me, Leo!" she shouted, voice raw. "Do not go where the stone drags you!"
The boy wept, hot and helpless. He leaned in close and whispered into Leo's ear, urgent and fierce. "Come back. Please. Do not let it take you."
Owen watched with a scholar's horror. "If the shard tethers him to the memory, he cannot hear us," he said, voice thin. "He is inside it. Saints preserve us, he is inside it."
Inside the memory, the bound figure lifted his head. Where his eyes should have been were the same molten amber that now lit Leo's face. He spoke and his voice folded into the chant, both whisper and command. "They broke me. They scattered me so their children would not tremble in the dark. But through you I will rise. Through you I will walk again in flesh."
The shard surged as a tide. Leo's scream split both the remembered ritual and the present circle. The sound tore out from him and was both echoed by the priests in the memory and answered by a hundred throats in the real hollow.
The ruin answered. Stone groaned. Hairline cracks webbed outward from the fissure they had opened. Light bled up through the slabs, white and blue and something like old iron. The air smelled of rust and rain and the sick sweet tang of old offerings.
Every soul standing inside the ring of stone felt the pull. Friend and foe alike shuddered as the memory strain wrapped around them. Men staggered, some clutching at ears as if to keep the sound from tearing them apart. Shields dropped heavy. Torches guttered and flared against an unseen wind.
Sofia planted her feet and shouted orders, her voice a blade trying to cut through the tide. "Hold! Do not break ranks! Do not give them ground!"
But the chant struck deeper than armor. It touched places inside men that could not be covered by steel. Eyes rolled up, faces slackened, and for a breath the battlefield stilled, caught in the memory's net. Even the mob faltered, uncertain whether to strike or fall.
The chained figure in the memory laughed, a hollow, terrible sound that folded into the chant. "We bound what we could not kill," he said. "We thought stone would hold what we feared. But stone remembers what men forget. Through the living, the pieces call back to bone."
The shard inside Leo devoured the words and grew brighter yet. The amber in his eyes deepened, pouring light into the vein carved stone beneath him. Lines along the floor responded, glowing hot where blood had fallen. The glyphs drank and sang.
Around them, the circle throbbed. Stones shifted, hairline fractures yawning into open seams. Dust poured from the cracks and filled nostrils with the taste of old iron. From the fissures rose tiny motes of light that spun like insects and sank upward, pooling around the ruined pillars until each column seemed to pulse from within.
A cry rose from the mob. Whether of fear or wonder it was impossible to tell. Some dropped to their knees, hands lifted as if in worship. Others clawed backward, hands scrabbling for grip on slick stones.
Sofia did not yield. She closed on Leo, sword horizontal, voice raw with command. "Hold him!" she shouted to any who could hear. "Bound him if you must. He is not to be given to the cult."
A guard lunged, metal catching in the torchlight, and slammed a rough coil of rope around Leo's shoulders. For a moment the ropes bit, then slackened as the air itself seemed to push them aside, as if the ruin refused to be contained by simple cord.
Leo teetered on the edge of whatever it was pulling him into. The shard sang in his bones: This is the place. This is the memory. This is the way to be whole.
He screamed, a raw, animal sound that pulled at the roots of everyone's being. The memory swelled and the present bent. Stone cracked further. Light poured up. A wind from nowhere swept through the circle and blew the mob's torches backward, throwing burning sparks into the night.
The storm had begun. Stone remembered bone, blood, and chant. The hollow no longer held only flesh and anger. It held something older, and it wanted to be remembered fully.
The moment broke only when a high, piercing note rang from beyond the ridge, sharp as a struck glass. The note cleaved the chant, and for an instant the world lurched sideways. Men staggered, the amber in Leo's eyes flickered, and the memory recoiled as if slapped.
Who had sounded it? Where did the note come from? No one knew. But it bought a breath, and in that breath, Sofia dragged Leo back, blood and dust streaking both their faces. She shoved a dagger between his teeth and barked, "Bite down and hold. Hear me. Hear me and do not go."
He bit so hard the metal scraped his teeth. The shard's song battled the dagger's cold press, and for the first time since the ruin stirred, Leo felt something in him answer that was not the shard.
The hollow shook. Pillars trembled. The chant did not stop, but it faltered, and the stones remembered again that they had been stones long before men had knelt and long after. The storm thrummed, and every living throat in the circle found a place between roar and prayer, between rage and fear.
The night was no longer simply fire and hunt. It had become a contest between remembering and resisting. The ruin had reached for what it had lost, and the small, ragged company in its bowl now stood on the thin line between being claimed and fighting back.