Riku heard the sound before he admitted it was real.
It came not through the walls or wind, but inside—like a note rung too deep to be heard, yet so true it pressed behind his eyes. A resonance that left no echo. Just an ache.
He stood in the forge hall, hands still blackened with soot from morning reinforcement, and he felt it again. Not a bell exactly. But the after of one. Hollow and full all at once.
Kael had just walked in with a crate of spooled alloy thread when he paused, glanced up, and froze.
"You heard that?"
Riku didn't turn. "No. But I felt it."
Kael gently set the crate down. "It's below us."
They both knew where.
The southern ridge again.
It was Sira who confirmed it—without needing to be told. She arrived minutes later, helmet tucked under one arm, expression unreadable.
"I took three of the glaive recruits for a drill run along the lower passages. No traps, no tremors. But something changed."
She handed Riku a smooth black stone—fist-sized, and humming faintly with trapped heat. Across one side, thin veins had appeared. Not cracks. Not carvings. Fused marks. Natural-seeming, except the pattern was precise: circles within circles, like an eye watching backward through time.
Kael frowned. "Never seen stone mark itself like that."
"It didn't mark itself," Sira said. "It remembered being marked."
Riku weighed the stone in his hand. It was warm, too warm for how long it had likely sat untouched. The memory of something, still lingering in it. Waiting to be read. Or obeyed.
He looked at Kael. "Is the containment vault still empty?"
Kael nodded. "Only the shard inside."
Riku turned toward the command stairwell. "Then let's give it company."
They placed the stone beside the Riftglass fragment in the sealed vault, not touching but close enough that something—energy, presence, awareness—seemed to pass silently between them.
Riku waited. Nothing stirred. No light. No sound.
But that hollow bell-tone pulsed again—subtler now, like it had accepted something. Welcomed a piece home.
That night, Blackridge felt tilted. Not in structure. In sensation. The wind didn't blow right. The ash clung longer to skin. Even the heat from the forge fires seemed to hold a breath too long before releasing.
The wyrmlings wouldn't sleep.
And that was the first true warning.
The eldest of the clutch, already shoulder-high and wearing thin armor plating across its neck ridges, began pacing its pen at dusk. Back and forth. No hiss. No flame. Just pacing. Slow. Measured. Like a sentry.
Riku came down to watch it. Alone.
After a while, it turned and looked directly at him. Not an animal's glance. Not a curious gaze.
It regarded him.
And then it did something none of the others ever had.
It lifted its head and made a sound like a single, low chime—metal striking stone, once.
Then it lowered its neck and curled again.
As if to say, we remember too.
Riku didn't sleep that night.
At midnight, a new tremor rolled under the southern trench—soft, but wide. It passed under the camp like a wave beneath ice. Not shaking anything. Just moving.
Kael reported the reading without alarm. "The earth's not upset," he said. "It's making room."
By morning, the fissure at the southern ridge had widened half a meter.
Not cracked. Not collapsed.
Opened.
A clean cut, like something had been let out.
Or worse.
Like something had opened it from within.
Riku stood above the fissure's edge just before sunrise. No sound came from it. No smoke. Just depth. Infinite and immediate.
He reached down, picked up a piece of ridge-stone, and dropped it in.
No echo.
He turned to Sira and Kael beside him.
"Send two runners to the western slope. Set a beacon. Quietly. No signal flare."
Kael raised a brow. "Expecting visitors?"
"No," Riku said. "I'm warning the stone."
Sira blinked. "You think it listens now?"
Riku looked back toward the breach, eyes dark with a quiet certainty.
"I think it always has."