The trail wasn't visible by daylight.
It took Veit two full circuits to notice the pattern—just past the obsidian fault near the western edge of the basin, where the winds died suddenly and the air hung with a burnt-sugar scent. What first appeared to be soot deposits from old drills revealed itself under starlight as something more deliberate. The lines didn't scatter with the wind. They held.
Ash. Not scattered. Drawn.
Lines five inches wide, precise, unfaded. Not carved. Not burned in the traditional sense. As if the ground itself had offered up the pattern through some forgotten rite. They curved across a thirty-meter stretch of land like the coils of a sleeping wyrm, each loop segmented with a single glyph at its center. Symbols no one recognized—sharpened spirals, twin-pointed crescents, a shape that mirrored the double-forked fire-root leaf, but bent backward.
Veit touched one of the symbols and drew back sharply.
Not from heat—but from sound. Not real, not with ears—inside. A ringing that pulsed behind his eyes like a memory he couldn't claim.
When he returned to Blackridge, it was long past midnight. Riku met him at the forge gate, already armored.
"I felt it," Riku said, before Veit had spoken a word.
"You what?" Veit blinked.
"Ten minutes ago. A sharp tone in the chest. Like being pulled by a tether. I was in the vault when it struck."
Veit nodded slowly. "That's what it does."
The two walked west together, no words shared, only the soft scrape of boots against stone and the far-off hiss of lava runnels cooling.
They arrived to find Sira already there.
She stood in the center of the spiraled trail, arms folded, staring down at the glyphs like she meant to fight them.
"I didn't touch them," she said as they approached. "Didn't need to. They're waiting."
"For what?"
"For him." Her eyes flicked to Riku.
He stepped into the spiral. The moment his boots passed the second coil, the ash reacted. The outermost glyph lit up—not fire, not glowstone, but a kind of internal clarity. Like its presence sharpened in the mind.
Kael arrived soon after, breathless, cloak dragging cinder.
"I think they're a map," he said without preamble.
Riku knelt. "Where do they lead?"
"Beneath."
"Below the basin?"
Kael nodded. "Not deep. Shallow strata. But unreachable from the surface. These glyphs mark stress points. Someone—something—etched the way in through the only paths stable enough to survive a descent."
Sira's voice was quieter now. "I don't think it's a descent."
Riku looked up.
"I think it's an invitation."
He didn't argue.
By dawn, they'd cleared a five-meter radius around the glyphs, preserving the pattern. Riku called for three builders and two flame engineers. He wanted the area recorded, traced, then sealed again. Not erased—protected.
That evening, a scout—Ashen—found an identical glyph etched into the underside of a slab half a kilometer north. Same shape. Same depth. But this one had something new: an embedded fragment of stone that hummed faintly when turned over.
Not glowing. Not powerful.
Just known.
When Riku held it, it felt like a memory not his own. Like holding an answer before knowing the question.
He placed it beside the first letter in his private chamber, then opened his ledger and began a new page.
"Basin Symbols – 61"
Underneath, he drew each glyph in slow, careful ink. He didn't assign names. Not yet. Just the shapes. Each one waited with a kind of hunger.
Kael arrived with an idea for resonance tests using vibrated heatstone. Sira wanted her own squad assigned to guard the basin edge. Veit asked to join the next deep scout personally.
Riku agreed to all of it.
But he wrote nothing further that night.
He stared at the last glyph on the page—a shape that mirrored no natural formation. Something bent inward on itself, like a clasping hand.
As the camp settled behind reinforced walls and the glow of drake-hearths painted the forge in gold, Riku sat alone.
And for the first time in weeks, he whispered aloud—
Not a command.
Not a plan.
Just a question:
"What did I already begin?"
And the glyphs, lined in ash beneath the earth, waited patiently.
Like they already knew the answer.