The first scream came from the lower archives.
It was not loud—but it was wrong.Twisted by distance, warped by wards, stretched thin as if reality itself had tried and failed to carry it properly.
Vahn felt it like a hook behind the sternum.
He was already moving before the bells rang.
The Descent
The stairwell beneath the Atrium spiraled deeper than it should have. It always had—but now the distortion was worse. Each step pulled at his senses, the Source Stream growing thicker, heavier, like wading through a current that pushed back.
It's awake, the Weaveborn mark whispered through heat and pressure.Not fully. But enough.
Vahn passed two Archivists fleeing upward, faces pale, hands shaking.
"Lockdown," one gasped. "Something breached the memory vaults—"
Vahn didn't slow. "Seal the upper corridors. Do not engage."
They didn't argue. That alone told him how bad it was.
The air changed three levels down.
Cold—not the absence of heat, but the presence of nothing. The crystalline veins in the walls dimmed, their glow swallowed rather than extinguished.
Void-adjacent, Vahn thought grimly.
And then he saw it.
The Listening Scar
The archive chamber had collapsed inward—not physically, but conceptually. Shelves bent at impossible angles. Tomes hovered half-open, pages frozen mid-turn. At the center of it all was a tear in the Source—a vertical scar of distorted light and shadow, pulsing slowly, patiently.
Like an eye.
Three figures stood before it.
Two were Circle operatives—robes reinforced with sigil-thread, faces hidden behind suppression masks. They were chanting, voices strained, feeding controlled resonance into a containment lattice already failing.
The third—
Vahn's breath caught.
Elias.
He stood closest to the scar, hands bare, eyes unfocused. Symbols crawled up his arms like ink beneath skin, rearranging themselves with every pulse of the void.
"Elias," Vahn said sharply.
The man turned.
And smiled.
"You feel it too," Elias said softly. "Don't you? The quiet between things. The place where the Source stops pretending it's benevolent."
"What did you do?" Vahn demanded.
"I listened," Elias replied. "What you should have done from the beginning."
One of the Circle operatives shouted, "He destabilized the anchor! We can't hold it much longer!"
The scar pulsed in response—stronger this time. A low tone filled the chamber, not sound but attention. The kind that noticed you back.
Vahn stepped forward.
The pressure intensified immediately.
Elias laughed under his breath. "There it is. Recognition. It knows you."
Vahn's jaw tightened. "That thing isn't the Eleventh Seat."
"No," Elias agreed. "It's what feeds it."
The words hit harder than any strike.
"The Seat was never a failsafe," Elias continued. "It was a mouth. A way to bleed excess will, excess convergence, into something that could digest it. But mouths hunger, Vahn. And the Circle has starved it for centuries."
Another pulse.
The containment lattice shattered.
One of the operatives was flung backward, unconscious before he hit the wall. The other screamed as shadow-laced resonance wrapped around his leg, dragging him inch by inch toward the scar.
Vahn moved.
Storm Against Silence
Lightning didn't strike.
It asserted.
The air bent as Vahn crossed the chamber, each step anchored by unified resonance. He grabbed the Circle operative and wrenched him free, severing the void-tether with a sharp pulse of flame-wind synthesis that burned without heat.
The scar reacted instantly.
The chamber darkened.
The eye focused.
Elias spread his arms. "You can feel it, can't you? It doesn't want to consume you. It wants to be completed."
"By erasing everything else?" Vahn snapped.
"By ending fragmentation," Elias shot back. "By returning will to silence. No divisions. No chaos. No storms."
Vahn looked at the scar.
And for a terrifying moment… he understood the appeal.
No struggle.No loss.No endless breaking and rebuilding.
Just stillness.
Then he remembered Leslie's voice.
You are a bridge, not an ending.
Vahn inhaled.
And sang.
Not aloud—but through the Weave.
The Source Weave mark flared, threads of every affinity interlacing around him, not in dominance, but in dialogue. Lightning carried intent. Flame carried warmth. Wind carried motion. Shadow carried boundary. Light carried memory.
The scar recoiled.
It had never been spoken to before.
"Listen," Vahn said, voice layered now, harmonized. "You don't get to erase what you don't understand."
The eye pulsed violently.
Elias screamed—not in pain, but rage—as the void tore the symbols from his arms, rejecting the incomplete offering.
"You're making it worse!" Elias shouted. "It needs to feed!"
"No," Vahn said, stepping closer to the scar, lightning feathering into something precise and gentle. "It needs to learn."
He placed his hand on the edge of the distortion.
Every alarm in the Academy went silent.
Not broken.
Listening.
Vahn pushed—not power, not will—but structure. The same way he had stabilized the Weave. Giving the void a rhythm. A boundary. A place to exist without consuming.
The scar shrank.
Slowly. Reluctantly.
Until it folded inward, collapsing into a single, dim point of shadow that sank into the floor and vanished.
Silence followed.
Real silence.
Elias fell to his knees, gasping, stripped of the void's favor. The remaining Circle operative stared at Vahn in open horror.
"You… spoke to it," he whispered.
Vahn sagged slightly, breath heavy. "No," he said. "I refused to let it speak alone."
Aftermath
By the time Ardyn and the senior wardens arrived, it was over.
The chamber was damaged, but intact. The void breach gone.
Elias was taken into custody, unconscious, his fate uncertain.
As Vahn turned to leave, Ardyn caught his arm.
"That wasn't in any record," the Principal said quietly. "What you just did."
Vahn met his eyes. "That's because the Seat was never meant to be silent. It was meant to be answered."
Far below Mystara, something ancient shifted again.
Not in hunger.
In consideration.
And for the first time since the Founding, the Eleventh Seat did not seek a vessel.
It waited—
—for a conversation.