The moment Lynchie stepped past the fourth archway lining the outer tier of the Dream-Hall, something unseen twisted in the air. Not a sound, but a shimmer—a humming breath of the unseen wards that lived within the stone, dormant for centuries.
Her foot brushed a circle of chalk embedded deep within the floor, once faded beyond mortal notice. It blazed to life.
An echo rang out. Not with sound, but memory. A whisper across time.
Lynchie froze. Around her, the air felt thickened, reluctant to move. The stone arches pulsed. Veins of silver light laced across them like breath drawn through ancient lungs. She turned, heart hammering, to see Professor Quillion halfway across the hall, robes flaring, lips parted in silent dread.
"Do not move," he rasped.
It was not command, but prayer.
The silver light twisted, rising into glyphs older than the language of the Academy—symbols she had seen only once before, in the vision under the Bell Tower. The Spiral Glyph etched itself midair, spinning slowly, each line threading like a loom. The wards that once protected the founders, the dreamwalkers, and the first guardians were awakening—but only in her presence.
A nearby instructor fell to one knee, his eyes wide. "Impossible. The Wards only stir when..."
"When the bearer of the first Echo walks their path again," Quillion finished, voice thin with awe.
The crowd of students had gone still. Even the most arrogant among them had fallen silent, heads tilted upward toward the woven sigils that danced above Lynchie like a crown.
A tremor built beneath her feet. Not of stone, but of meaning. Lynchie felt her heartbeat slowing unnaturally—or perhaps the world itself was bending inward. A low chant hummed in the foundations. She saw it again: the Spiral Path, each turn leading deeper toward an unspoken truth.
Then something else joined it.
A flicker of red in the silver glyphs.
Another language forced itself into the sequence.
Not Spiral. Not divine. Not known.
The symbols wavered, contorted, then split.
Professor Quillion's staff cracked against the floor, releasing a bell-tone of wardbreaking. A gust of force dispersed the glyphs into formless light. Students collapsed backward. Lynchie staggered, the pressure vanishing as swiftly as it came.
When her vision cleared, Quillion knelt before her.
"Child," he said, his voice full of something deeper than reverence. "What name whispered you into being?"
Lynchie didn't answer.
Not because she couldn't.
But because, somewhere deep within her mind, something—not a voice, but a direction, a sense—had just stirred awake.
A memory that was not hers.
A name that had never been said aloud.
And from somewhere far beneath the Dream-Hall, the Spiral Wards continued to murmur.
Waiting.