It began with a slit in the silence—not torn, not screamed, but offered.
Kaela stood barefoot upon the threshold of the Echo-Silts, the realm of broken syntax, her form already unraveling into glints of meaning half-forgotten. She wore no armor, no glyph-skin, only the translucent veil of story threads unraveling from her navel like rootless sentences. Each step she took bled a forgotten vowel into the air, and even that was too loud.
"This place will not open to us," she murmured—not aloud, but into the marrow of the Codex. "It must be bled open."
Darius understood at once. Not with logic, not even with his myth-sight. But through ache.
Kaela was not piercing a portal. She was offering a wound.
Beneath her ribcage, the lines of her origin shimmered—tight with ancient restraint. And then she reached with fingers trembling—not from fear, but intimacy—and slid her hand beneath the seam of her own myth. Flesh did not part; narrative did.
