Kael didn't sleep that night.
Not because of fear.
Because the silence had changed.
It breathed.
The walls of Shack #6 seemed thinner, as though stretched by something within them. The shadows, no longer merely content to linger, gathered at the corners of his vision. They pulsed faintly. Not with malice—but with memory. Something old. Something watching.
At dawn, he stepped outside and watched the upper halls of the Academy flicker with spelllight. Students passed overhead, elemental crests sewn into their robes—families that had ruled for centuries. None looked his way.
He didn't mind. The fewer who saw him now, the better.
Someone was watching him. Not with eyes, but with attention. The kind of weight that filled a room without form. He'd felt it during the Mirror Trial. He felt it now, in every step he took through the southeast corridors, in the way even the air shifted when he passed.
It was growing.
The stillness.
As though something beneath the Academy was waking—and recognized him.
By the fourth hour, he was called to clean the old archive vaults. A task reserved for the Ashbound because the lower halls were unstable. The others feared magical collapse. Kael suspected the truth was less structural and more historical. No one wanted to face what had been sealed below.
The vault doors hadn't been opened in years.
Moss clung to the frames. The locking runes had long since faded. He pushed them open and stepped inside.
It was colder than it should have been.
Not the temperature. The feel of it. Like the room had not held heat for centuries, like memory itself had failed to survive here.
Books lined the shelves in crooked towers, some pulsing with faint wards. Glyphs scrawled across the floor in multiple dialects. A broken summoning circle glowed briefly as he passed, then dimmed, recognizing something in him it should have forgotten.
At the very back of the room, a door he hadn't been told existed.
It was barely visible, choked by cobwebs and slanted stone.
Kael hesitated.
Then touched it.
The stone receded.
Not opened—recoiled.
He stepped through into a chamber that felt wrong.
It wasn't large. But it was deeper than it appeared. As if the walls curved inward, into a space that disobeyed structure. In the center, a single dais made of obsidian and rootwood. On it, a sphere of dim light hovered in silence.
Kael approached, each step heavier than the last.
Not fear.
Resonance.
The sphere flickered.
And the air folded.
He was no longer in the room.
He stood in a hall of mirrors, each pane filled with swirling symbols—no two alike. They spun and shattered, reformed and bent. Each one reflected a version of himself: one with flame-eyes, one with stoneflesh, one with burning wings.
And one with no face at all.
That one stepped forward.
"You're not ready," it said in a voice Kael knew and didn't.
"I never was," he replied.
The mirrors shattered.
And he was back.
The sphere floated quietly, undisturbed.
Only now, it hovered above his open palm.
He hadn't touched it.
But it had chosen.
Kael turned to leave—and found the door sealed behind him. No trace of cobwebs. No hinge. Only blank stone.
No panic.
He simply stared.
And said, "I'm not afraid of being locked in anymore."
The wall shimmered.
Then opened.
He walked back into the archive without a sound.
The task scroll he'd been given was gone from his belt.
In its place, a single black slip of parchment that hadn't existed before.
No ink. No words.
Only an imprint, faint but pulsing.
The same mark that had burned into his palm the night of the dream.
He folded it, tucked it into his sleeve, and left the archives behind.
That evening, he returned to Shack #6 and stared at his reflection in the broken shard of glass nailed to the wall.
His eyes were darker now.
Not hollow.
But deep.
And when the wind rattled the frame, it carried a sound he hadn't expected.
Whispered chanting.
Not in any tongue he knew.
But he understood it all the same.
It wasn't a name.
It was a call.