The candle burned low.
Wax pooled like blood at the base, slow and silent, untouched by time.
He watched it flicker—dancing shadows curling against the walls like fingers reaching for something long gone. Or something not yet born.
The chamber was silent, but it never felt empty. Not truly. Not here, beneath the old stone.
Not beneath the Veil.
A ripple passed through the room, subtle as breath.
He felt it.
There it was again—that pull. Faint. Distant. But real. The kind of sensation he hadn't felt in years. The kind of magic that had been buried.
And now…
It stirred.
"She's waking it," a voice rasped from the corner.
Not human. Not quite spirit either.
A figure cloaked in ash-gray rags stood with its head bowed. No face. Just darkness beneath the hood. Like the void itself had decided to wear skin for a while.
"Careful," he murmured, not to the figure, but to the thing beneath the floor—the ancient thing sealed in runes and chained in silence.
It dreams of blood again.
"The girl does not know," the figure whispered.
"But the curse remembers," he replied.
He traced a sigil into the air—slow and practiced. It glowed briefly before vanishing, absorbed by the stone walls like a swallowed secret.
"Then she must not be touched yet," he said. "The cycle hasn't reached its bloom."
The figure did not move.
"But it will," he added.
Another flicker. Stronger this time. A tremor in the wardlines. As if the curse had breathed, just once, through the blood of a girl too proud to weep.
And somewhere, in the hollow heart of the hidden city, something ancient uncurled. Something that had waited through generations of silence.
The spell circle cracked.
He didn't react. Didn't blink.
Only whispered, "She's coming undone."
And smiled.