[POV: Amelia]
She stood in the center of the sealed chamber.
The scriptwatcher badge was still warm.
The needle vibrated faintly in her hand. Not physically. But like something inside it was humming with an old song.
> "Why leave these here?"
She looked at the blank page. And the words her mother left behind flared softly in the air:
> This is not a letter. This is a signal.
> Not to you. Not to him. But to what waits beneath us all.
The glyph walls pulsed.
A deep, aching note thudded in the rock—a heartbeat not her own.
Amelia knelt and traced her finger around the blood ring.
> "What did you do, mother?"
She waited. No voice came. No vision. Just the low, steady hum of encoded silence.
> "You're not dead."
She said it quietly.
> "I don't care what they say. You wouldn't have left all this if you were dead. You knew they'd come for you. You let them think they did."
Her eyes narrowed at the ceiling.
> "You're hiding. Or you were caught, and you're being suppressed. Bound. Buried. But you're not gone."
> "You wouldn't leave us like that. Not without finishing your sentence."
> "You left something for Ezekiel... and something for me."
> "So I'll follow it. I'll read it. I'll become it."
She picked up the badge.
> "I'm writing too."
---
[POV: Unknown – Deep Quinsley Sub-Sanctum]
A sequence had begun.
Across a forgotten chamber beneath the first stone laid by the Founders, a table etched in silent glyphs pulsed with gold.
Seated around it, five masked figures straightened in unison. Not Watchers. Not Law-bound scribes.
But something older.
> "It activated."
> "Saelin's bloodline seal?"
> "No. The one she tied to the Vessel's first word."
> "And the girl?"
> "She opened it."
A long pause. Then:
> "Then the tongue of Below will wake. The Key and the Page will soon converge."
---
[POV: Ezekiel – Stairs That Named Themselves, Lower Half]
He paused mid-step.
Something had changed.
Not around him.
In him.
A tremor ran through the glyph-lines etched inside his bones—not Azrael's mark, but something older. Something from before the Garden.
Ilhera turned.
> "What is it?"
Ezekiel stared ahead.
> "Someone just started reading my sentence."
And for the first time, the stairs spoke back.
Not with words. But with a single, sharp concept:
> Bloodline acknowledged