The world folded in on itself and the fold swallowed the edges of every certainty.
One heartbeat the air rang with steel and leather, hooves struck stone, a thousand voices rose in a single, furious chorus, torches flamed like angry suns. The next heartbeat everything stilled into a silence so absolute it felt like being held underwater: sound dimmed to a thrum in the teeth, even the torches' tongues dulled as if seen through glass.
And then the temple was whole.
Where broken pillars had leaned and moss had choked cold stone, pillars towered skyward in perfect rows, each carved with twin serpents coiling toward an open roof. The flat slabs beneath their feet gleamed like black water turned to glass, veins of glyphs running through them in slow pulses. Liquid light threaded those veins, breathing underfoot with a rhythm that matched some ancient drum. Incense hung heavy in the air, sweet and copper-sour, and the taste of old offerings and iron lingered at the back of every throat.
Sofia staggered, blade still in her grip though steel felt suddenly absurd in a place that had been remade by memory. "What sorcery-" she began, but the words broke on sight.
Around her the mob had stopped moving. Raiders stood gaping, torches clutched, halted mid-charge; the anger that had pushed them an instant ago congealed into confusion and raw, open fear. Faces that had been twisted in hatred now shone with something like worship or terror. sometimes both.
Evelyn pressed her satchel to her chest and blinked until tears pooled. "We're, inside it," she breathed. Her breath came quick and jagged. The air itself seemed to watch.
At the circle's center something worse than either memory or myth strained against its bonds. A figure was chained there, a shape that shifted between man and other, handsome then faceless, water smooth then jagged as broken glass. Blood traced slow, deliberate lines down his arms into carved channels that fed the serpent glyphs at his feet. Amber light burned in his eyes, the same molten color that had bled into Leo's face.
Robed priests stood in rows, faces masked with bone and ash. Their hands moved in slow, synchronous gestures. The chant they raised was not a language Leo recognized; it was the pressure of syllables felt in the teeth and sternum. Each cadence hammered down into the stones, and the stones answered.
Leo swayed. The shard in his chest flared, a bright fissure under skin. Veins along his forearms seemed to lift and glow, like small rivers of light running up the limbs. He dropped to his hands on the shining stone, breath tearing.
"I can't - stop it," he gasped. He tasted metal and smelled old smoke and the memory of a blade he had never seen.
The boy slipped to the ground at his side and took his hand. "You don't have to stop it," the child said, voice thin but fierce. "Just, don't let it be you."
Those words cut a clean line through the roar in Leo's head. For a second they were an anchor.
But at the same moment the chained figure's voice, both a whisper under the priests' chant and a thunder that filled the hall, spoke into the air, and Leo heard it in bone.
"They took me, bound my flesh to stone, split me into pieces and buried me," the figure said, the sound a rasp that smelled of iron and spice. "I endured. They thought that was the end. But fragments seek one another. Through you, through the child of my shattering, I will gather flesh."
The shard inside Leo answered not with words but with heat and hunger. You are mine, it said. You are what they feared. Through you we will rise whole.
"No," Leo croaked, an animal sound that scraped his throat.
"You are me," the shard affirmed, and the floor at his hands pulsed brighter, as if agreeing.
Sofia planted herself between Leo and the chained vision with a courage that looked very much like stubbornness. Sword leveled though steel meant little in a place of memory, she said anyway, "You will not have him."
The chained figure laughed. The sound unspooled and layered itself over the monks' chant until it became almost indistinguishable: pain and amusement braided together. "Do you think your defiance is a choice? You stand on woven fate. You are all threads, children of a covenant you cannot imagine."
Around the ring the vision spread, not only in Leo's head but into the eyes of men and women who had come from the town: images, suggestions, unspooling possibilities that folded over the present. Evelyn wrenched backward as if struck; she saw fields burned under twin suns, families dragged in chains of shining metal, a world rearranged so that serpents ruled and men bowed. She fell to her knees, hands over her face, sobbing.
Owen clutched at his skull as if to keep the images from falling out of his eyes. He saw towers fall and rise and fall; he saw ritual tables of bronze and glass, he saw priests arrayed in symbols that mirrored the glyphs beneath their feet. "This is not history," he choked. "This is before history. This is the old covenant."
The raiders were not immune. One hurled his torch into the air and did not let it fall; it hung suspended for an impossible beat, burning brighter as if feeding on the glyphs. Another, face twisted, clawed at his own skin as though to tear away an image he saw reflected in the serpent coils. Some men dropped to their knees, hands raised as if answering an old call. Others staggered back, eyes wide with the knowledge of the unnameable.
Leo's vision shifted and folded again until he saw himself standing where the chained figure now stood. He saw power pouring from his hands, from his eyes, light that broke shields and melted bone. He saw Sofia on her knees before him, pleading. He saw Owen and Evelyn and the boy bowing or broken.
The shard did not whisper then. It roared. This is your path, it promised, this is what being whole will look like.
Leo did not want it. He did not want the faces he saw in the vision to be the future of those who had stood with him. He tore at his chest as if he might physically wrench the shard free. He screamed until the sound cracked like a struck bell.
Around them the ruin answered. Hairline fissures burst into seams. The veins of glyphs brightened until the floor shone like a wound. The chant rose, then bent, caught between the memory that fed it and the present that resisted.
The world trembled. The temple swayed in a way that was not wholly architectural and not wholly mental. Stone dust sifted from the columns and tasted of old iron and the breath of something that had been starved for ages.
Sofia did not have time for hesitation. She moved like a blade: fast, precise, obscene in her refusal to yield. She barked a single order and a guard lunged, throwing a coil of rope around Leo's torso. The rope bit; the guard wedged himself and pulled, teeth gritted as he hauled Leo upright.
"Bite," Sofia snapped, thrusting a dagger between Leo's lips. He obeyed, metal pressing into his gums with a pain that anchored him to the flesh of the now.
"Do not let it drown you," she said, loud enough that the words cut across both songs and visions.
For a breath the shard shrieked at the intrusion. The amber in Leo's eyes flickered. For an impossible moment he felt himself not as a conduit but as a boy who had once fetched water and carved a bowl with a blunt knife. The past and the possible separated by a fine, fragile membrane.
But the ruin's appetite was not sated at a single hesitation. The chained figure smiled, and his teeth were many bright shards. "Through him," it promised, "we will be whole again."
The chant climbed higher. The priests' hands moved faster. Light seeped up from the fissures and pooled into the serpent glyphs until the entire floor seemed to be a living thing, breathing in time with Leo's heartbeat.
Then, as the memory's storm threatened to overtake every mind in the hollow, a sound like glass struck with a perfect, high note rang from beyond the ridge. It was pure and piercing and it cut through the chanting the way a blade will cut silk.
Everything that had leaned one way recoiled. The priest's hands dropped for a fraction. The chained figure's head snapped as if pulled. The men and women kneeling rose, blinking as if from sleep. The amber in Leo's eyes sputtered, flicker by flicker. The shard's roar tumbled into something ragged and vocal but not complete.
No one saw who sounded the note. No one knew whether it had come from the ridge or from somewhere else entirely. That single, impossible tone bought a slender breath.
Sofia used it. She reached up and slammed the hilt of her sword into Leo's jaw with a force that was more command than cruelty. The pain made him bite down harder. The cold of the dagger between his teeth grounded him where the memory tried to pull him away.
"Hold," she told him, so the words were not a plea but a command that could be obeyed. "Breathe. Hear me. Remember me. You are not them."
He tasted iron and leather and the dagger's edge. The shard still sang, but now there was the sound of human voices too, Sofia's, Evelyn's, Owen's, small, stubborn things layered under the old chant.
The temple trembled. Stones shifted and dust fell like pale rain. The chanting did not end, but it hiccupped, as if uncertain in a throat newly forced to speak two languages at once. The fissures widened, but the seams between ruin and present did not wholly tear. Men staggered, teeth clenched. Some vomited; others pulled knives and cut ropes and screamed for light.
The night outside was still fire and hunt. Inside the circle memory struck and present rock pushed back. The old covenant tugged, hungry for a body to reorder the world, and a small ragged band fought, more with stubbornness and fear than with any real power, to keep that from happening.
The world was no longer simply divided into mob and caravan. It had become a contest: the past reaching through stone to reclaim itself, and the living clinging, ragged and furious, to what they were still allowed to be.