The shard would not stop pulsing.
Riku laid it on the center table inside the eastern strategy chamber—just a sliver of oxidized metal pulled from that underground hall—but it vibrated faintly with an energy that wasn't mechanical. No heat. No current. Just a kind of persistent presence, like a memory locked in metal, refusing to fade.
Kael leaned over it, eyes narrowed. He'd stripped his usual gear, down to his linen base layer, and still a fine sheen of sweat ran down his back. Not from heat. From focus.
"It's not responding to magnetics or current," he said. "But it's resonating with something inside the stone."
Riku didn't look at it. His eyes were locked on the engraved crown-emblem scorched into the shard's edge. A ring shattered into four crescents, with an incomplete circle looping the center—like a sun that had forgotten how to rise.
"None of the other sovereigns use this mark," he said.
"Not publicly," Kael added.
Sira entered with a quiet step, her cloak still dusted from the southern patrol. She nodded toward the fragment. "Still alive?"
"In a way," Riku murmured. "Not broadcasting. Just remembering."
She stepped closer and laid her palm on the table, not touching the shard. "I've seen stone hold heat for a week. But this feels different."
Kael picked up a polished obsidian mirror from his tool pouch and angled it carefully above the shard. The reflection shimmered, warped. Not like heat haze—like a ripple.
"It's reacting to light now?"
"No," Kael muttered. "It's reacting to reflection."
Riku turned sharply. "Pull the room's light down."
They did.
Only the smallest forge-glow remained, casting faint shadows up the curved wall.
In the mirror, the shard pulsed once—and then, for just a second, something flickered.
A face.
Gone.
Kael dropped the mirror. It clattered on the stone and spun once before falling still.
Sira's hand was on her blade before the sound stopped.
Riku bent over the mirror, picked it up again, and steadied the angle. But the shard was just a shard again.
No pulse. No shimmer. Nothing.
Kael whispered, "What the hell was that?"
"Riftglass," Riku said.
Kael blinked. "What?"
He finally looked at them both. "That's not iron. It's not forge-grade. It's Riftglass alloy. Cut from the outermost shell of a dormant gate. Old tech. Pre-collapse era. That's why it remembers."
Sira frowned. "You said no known sovereign had ever opened a Riftgate."
"They haven't," he said. "Not in this cycle."
The weight of that silence stretched long.
Sira exhaled slowly. "Then what did?"
Riku didn't answer.
Instead, he lifted the shard gently, as if it might vanish at any sudden motion, and set it into a lead-lined containment box Kael had reinforced weeks ago. It hissed once as the latch shut, and the strange weight in the air lifted immediately.
They could breathe again.
Riku stepped back from the table and crossed to the eastern wall, where a long map of the crater's subsurface veins was pinned. Kael's work—painstakingly built over sixty days of scouting.
He marked a small "X" just beneath the southern ridge.
Then another. Near the geyser field where they'd found the signal stone.
A third followed—deep in the western flats. An old ruin now buried in obsidian drift. No one had spoken of it in weeks.
"We're not just sitting atop an outpost," he said. "We're in the mouth of something older. A vault, maybe. A cage. Possibly more."
"More?" Kael echoed.
Riku turned. "This place was never unclaimed."
A long silence stretched.
Then Kael said quietly, "So what do we do?"
"Nothing," Riku said. "We wait."
Sira stepped forward. "Wait for what? An answer? Another face in a mirror?"
"No," he said. "We wait to see who else finds the next piece."
He stepped toward the outer balcony, opening the windward panel and letting in the rising heat of midmorning. The wyrmlings glided across the far sky, circling something unseen.
"Because if this gate woke even a little," Riku added, voice low, "then someone else already heard it open."
And he wasn't sure yet… if they'd knock before entering.