The forest broke open like a wound.
Mist pooled at their boots, cool and whispering, curling between gnarled roots like the fingers of something sleeping—something dreaming in the dark. Ryven and Kaelith stood at the edge of a valley sunken in time, where fractured stone bled soulfire and broken air. The ruin below wasn't built; it had been born. Ancient, intentional, unfinished.
Massive obelisks jutted from the earth like black teeth, slanted at impossible angles, each one humming with the slow heartbeat of something long dead but not quite gone. Faint wisps of resonance floated between them—ribbons of light and memory, soft as smoke, unblinking.
Statues lay scattered across the valley floor. Weather-worn. Eyeless. Mouths agape. One clutched a broken blade that now pulsed with moss-light and tether residue. Another had been consumed by vines and time. The silence here was weighty—not empty, but full. Full of breath held too long.
In the center of it all: a cracked dome open to the bruised sky, tetherlight flickering like veins exposed beneath skin. It looked holy. It felt haunted.
Two guards stood at a natural archway reinforced by soulsteel and runes. Their armor shimmered where soulfire touched it, and their helms were featureless, reflective masks.
One raised a hand. "Halt. Identify."
Kaelith's voice cut through the haze like a blade dipped in sleep. "Kaelith Sorevan. Wandering Class. Escorting one resonance irregular."
Ryven smirked. "That's what we're calling me now?"
"Do you want a more alarming title?"
He shrugged, mouth tilted sideways. "Soul-bomb has a certain poetry."
The guards didn't move. One touched a glyph-lit pedestal, and a pulse of blue light scanned Kaelith's pendant. It shimmered—recognized. Approved.
"Verified," said the guard. "The unbound is a risk."
"Noted," Kaelith said.
Ryven leaned close. "You guys always this charming, or is it just the armor?"
No one answered.
They stepped through.
The outpost unfolded like a cathedral half-dreamt. Crumbled arches bowed toward the open sky, vines blooming with tetherblossom as they snaked through shattered columns. Above it all, threads of pure soul-energy ran like veins through the air—cast from anchor pylons in drifting, radiant arcs.
At the center hovered the soul-anchor—an obelisk suspended mid-air, surrounded by whispering stabilizers and painted glyph-circles burning faintly on the stone. It pulsed like breath. Like memory trying to surface.
Around it: tents, forges, testing plinths. Soul-scribes in rune-etched robes drifted between armored Warders, each bearing a weapon that shimmered with a resonance tethered to more than just steel.
But the air was more than crowded.
It was saturated. With energy. With memory. With pressure. It pressed on the skull and teeth. Resonance lived in every stone and shadow here.
Ryven slowed, eyes wide. "This place feels like it's… waiting."
"It is," Kaelith murmured. "It always is."
To their left, a sparring ring flared to life.
Two Warders collided—one wielding a whip of pure resonance that liquefied mid-strike, reshaping into a blade with each motion. The other parried with a curved shard of soulglass that vibrated in tune with their heartbeat.
When the whip was knocked away in a burst of echo-static, Ryven let out a low breath. The victor turned—a tall woman cloaked in cobalt, her sword folding back into her palm like burning paper—and walked into the mist.
"They fight like dreams," he muttered.
"They fight like memories made sharp," Kaelith replied.
They passed deeper into the outpost's veins.
Three figures approached from a stone archway—cut from colder cloth.
Royal Warders.
Heavier. Older. Burdened.
One bore a glaive that crackled like static behind glass. Another leaned on a warstaff that whispered each time she moved. The third—the leader—carried a halberd that buzzed like raw tetherwire and looked at them as though already measuring Ryven's casket.
"You brought an unanchored into a stabilizer site," he said, flat and low.
Kaelith didn't blink. "Had little choice."
The warstaff woman narrowed her one good eye. "He doesn't look like much."
Ryven gave her a crooked smile. "Nobody does, right before they burn your camp down."
The youngest of the three chuckled. "Careful. The last one we let in ended up tearing a resonance basin in half."
The leader's eyes stayed cold. "If the anchor fluxes, he dies first."
Kaelith nodded. "Understood."
Ryven lingered a moment, catching the branded woman's gaze. "You should see me when I'm really unstable."
She smiled back—just slightly. But her hand never left the staff.
Later, as dusk bled violet across the cracked dome, Ryven and Kaelith stood at the dueling ring.
Two elite Warders battled beneath drifting soulfire.
One loosed arrows from a soulbow, each bolt trailing static lines that buzzed the air and cracked it open. The other wielded a sword that reshaped with every breath—a blade of grief, of memory, of fury. One moment a dagger. Next, a glaive. Next, an echo-blade of raw tetherlight.
They moved like dancers trained in war. Soulbound, tether-synced, locked in a ritual that was part duel, part song.
Ryven was still.
But his hands weren't. They glowed faintly—uncontrolled. Bleeding.
Inside him, something buzzed. Not fear. Not awe. Something else.
Hunger.
"You ever feel like something's under your skin?" Ryven asked. "Like it's crawling. Or waiting. Just laughing until you finally let it out?"
Kaelith didn't answer. But their fingers, curled at their side, twitched.
"I want this," Ryven said. "I don't know why. Maybe I'm broken. Maybe it's the leak. But I want this. The fight. The rush. The fire."
"That wanting," Kaelith whispered, "is the first step to losing yourself."
Ryven looked down. "Too late for that."
Then, of course, he picked a fight.
Tarran—chain-user, loudmouth, swaggering—called him a walking accident.
Ryven didn't argue.
He smiled.
Then he grabbed the trailing edge of the man's soulchain, his leak flaring wild, and let it surge back like coiled lightning.
The blast knocked Tarran five feet. Left a smoldering spiral in the stone.
Silence. Even the tetherlines seemed to flicker.
Kaelith didn't move. But Ryven felt the sigh behind their mask.
"You're going to get yourself killed," Kaelith said.
Ryven grinned. "Maybe. But you'll get a hell of a distraction out of it."
As night wrapped the ruin in dark silk, Ryven stood again at the edge of the ring, soul-duel still echoing in his skull.
The flare of blade. The snap of memory. The artistry of violence shaped by will.
The glow on his fingers had not faded.
"Kaelith," he asked, "why are you keeping me around?"
Kaelith didn't hesitate.
"You're bait."
He blinked. "Come again?"
"Your leak draws things. Dangerous things. Aberrant souls. Echo beasts. Entities we can't find—until they come looking for you."
There was no cruelty in the voice. No malice. Just precision.
"I'll keep you alive," Kaelith added. "As long as it's useful."
Ryven stared at his hands.
Unstable. Beautiful. Wrong.
Then he looked back toward the ring, where soulglass still glowed hot in the dust.
"Well," he muttered, "at least you're honest."