Riku heard the knock three times before he responded.
Not because he hadn't heard it, but because he already knew it was Sira. She didn't knock unless she was bracing herself to report something she couldn't explain.
When he opened the chamber door, she stood there with her brow furrowed and a map roll tight in her fist.
"You need to see something," she said.
Not long after, Riku stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her and Deylan, one of the newer scouts, on the northern rise where the land had always been flat and open. Their boots now pressed into the edge of an incline—a slope that hadn't existed three days ago.
Before them, rising like a pulse from the earth, stood a hill. Thirty meters high. A steep, smooth dome of pale stone and crimson-veined shale. It shimmered faintly in the morning air as if heat clung to it even in the wind.
"It wasn't here two nights ago," Deylan said.
Riku didn't respond immediately. He ran his hand along the map Sira had brought, the parchment already sun-faded and rimmed in sweat. The terrain it showed was simple: flatland, with minor stone fractures and one shallow basin. But the hill before them hadn't just emerged—it looked settled, aged, dusted with fine wind erosion and ringed by natural stone.
"Same route?" Riku asked Sira.
"We walk it daily. Patrol. Every marker's the same. Except this."
Riku circled the base of the formation, dragging fingers through the chalky soil. The air was wrong again. Not hot. Not sulfuric. Just… tuned. Like stepping into the middle of a silent song.
He motioned for Kael, who arrived carrying a collapsible pick and a ground-heat lens. While Kael knelt and began scanning, Riku pressed a gloved palm against the slope.
Stone—smooth, cold on the surface. But beneath, he felt it: the telltale hum of trapped warmth. Not geothermal. Not molten. Something… rhythmic. Contained.
"We break it open," Riku said.
It took fifteen minutes. Kael and Sira worked in tandem, chipping and prying at the hill's skin until a fault line began to emerge—hairline cracks running through the stone's seam. When the first section peeled back, it came off too easily, like lifting damp paper from coals.
The interior was not rock. It was hollow. And inside, a sphere. Roughly the size of a forge cauldron, hovering just centimeters off the ground. No roots. No base. It floated in a vacuum of air that gave no sound.
Riku stepped closer.
The surface of the orb shimmered, not reflecting light, but bending it. He didn't see his own face—he saw shadows. Familiar shapes. For a moment, the outline of Blackridge's eastern watchtower appeared in the bend of the orb.
Then it screamed.
Not aloud. Not through the air. But inside the chest. Every person near the orb recoiled, grabbing at their own ribs. Riku's knees nearly buckled—not from pain, but because the sound hadn't passed through his ears. It had burst directly into his bones.
Kael fell back. Deylan collapsed, clutching his temples. Even Sira staggered. And then, as quickly as the noise had struck them—it stopped.
The sphere cracked down the center like glass under boiling water.
It didn't shatter.
It dissolved. Into grey dust. Into memory.
And with it, the hill caved in. The entire structure collapsed into a cloud of fine ash that settled like snowfall.
No rubble. No stone debris. Just air and quiet.
Riku stood in the silence, eyes narrowed. "It wasn't meant to be opened," he said.
Sira nodded mutely, still catching her breath.
Kael glanced at the instruments he'd dropped during the collapse. His heat gauge had melted. Not from the outside in—but from the inside out.
"We'll mark the location and seal the edge," Riku said. "No one walks here unsupervised."
He didn't sleep that night.
Instead, he stood at the outer balcony of the forge hall, watching the wind drift over the crater rim. The camp lights flickered. The stars held steady. The world was behaving.
And that made it worse.
At dawn, Tharn came running.
No alarm, no weapon drawn. Just breathless urgency in his eyes.
"It's back," he said. "The hill. It's… it's there again."
Riku followed him with silent steps, heart thudding without rhythm.
When they reached the site, the hill stood just as before—untouched. Whole. Smooth.
Except now, there were two things different.
First, the top of the hill bore a single circular engraving—small, perfect, etched into the shale like an old mark reborn.
And second: the metal pick Kael had left buried in the soil during the collapse was standing upright. Not placed. Embedded. Its handle pointed toward the forge. Its blade buried in solid rock.
But none of them had touched it.