El Como stood before the Castle's innermost chamber.
The walls seemed taller here, rising like colossal ribs curving into the ceiling where shadows pooled, ancient and immovable. Dust floated in the stillness, thick enough to blur the faint glow pulsing from the sigil engraved into the floor.
He felt the thrum of it in his bones—an alien heartbeat, steady, commanding, and waiting.
El Como swallowed. His throat was dry as though he had been walking deserts, not hallways. He muttered to himself, his voice scraping the silence:
"So… this is what you've been hiding. A pretty circle carved in the floor. And I've been chased across ruins and corpses for this?"
But sarcasm only thinned his fear; it did not dissolve it. The sigil, with its lines bending into patterns no mortal hand could have etched, pulled at him.
He mustered the courage that had abandoned him in earlier chambers, stepped forward, and felt the stone shift ever so slightly under his boots—as if the sigil recognized his weight, his presence.
He stood before it.
Minutes bled into hours—or perhaps seconds stretched so monstrously long that they became eternity. El Como could not tell. The Castle seemed determined to measure his patience, or his weakness.
The sigil glowed faintly, then dimmed, as if teasing him.
He clenched his fists, resisting the urge to smash the floor and leave.
"Do something," he whispered, "or I swear I'll…"
He never finished.
A sound, hollow and infinite, rolled across the chamber, echoing from everywhere at once. It was not a voice made of flesh and air—it was a decree carved into existence itself:
"Untamed Ability Unlocks."
The words shook him, rattling inside his ribs like caged lightning.
"The Process Begins…"
The syllables spread outward, fracturing the silence of the Castle, until El Como felt his knees weaken. The sigil flared.
And the world collapsed.
Colors bled.
Stone melted into mist.
His body elongated and shrank in the same instant, until he doubted whether he was flesh or dream.
He reached for himself—his arm, his chest, his heartbeat—but all was distant, pulled by a whirlpool of unseen design. He wanted to scream, but his throat betrayed him with silence.
Then the mist hardened. Shapes re-emerged. A place, vast and pulsing with life, surrounded him.
Not the Castle.
Not the sigil.
Something else.
El Como blinked.
He stood in a hall unlike anything he had ever seen: endless, cavernous, lit by no sun yet filled with light that seemed to breathe from the air itself.
And people—crowds of them. Hundreds, perhaps thousands.
All clad in black.
Men and women, their faces sharp with purpose, their movements synchronized like the ticking of an unseen clock. Each figure stripped their garments and replaced them with new black robes, as though part of a ritual, as though the very act of changing was sacred.
Cloth rustled like whispers. The sound filled the air more than any chant could.
El Como's mouth went dry.
"What… is this place?"
No one answered. None looked at him, though he stood among them as starkly as flame in a void. They moved around him, past him, through him almost—yet without collision, without notice.
He edged forward, shoulders stiff.
The crowd was endless. No walls, no doors, no horizon. Only figures in black, changing clothes in silence.
Every robe they shed dissolved into smoke. Every robe they donned shimmered for an instant, then darkened to the same unyielding black.
It was uniformity made alive.
And then he noticed—each robe bore a faint sigil upon the chest. Not the same as the Castle's, yet reminiscent, twisted. Their glow pulsed faintly, in rhythm with the echo of the voice that still clung to his mind:
"Untamed Ability Unlocks… The Process Begins…"
His stomach tightened. Were they like him? Were they echoes of what he was meant to become?
Or were they wardens of something deeper?
El Como dared to touch one.
His hand passed through—the man was smoke. A solid illusion.
But for a heartbeat, he glimpsed eyes behind the smoke—cold, endless eyes that stared back and recognized him.
He recoiled.
The man did not falter. He continued his silent ritual of shedding and donning, shedding and donning.
El Como's breath quickened.
He began to notice patterns. Some figures moved faster, robes melting before they touched the floor. Others moved slower, as if burdened, their hands trembling.
And among them, scattered few bore robes that glowed faintly crimson, as though marked for something other than uniformity.
He felt a pull toward those crimson-robed illusions. They were rare—so rare he could count them on one hand amid thousands.
Were they like him?
Or were they warnings?
Fragment Seven: The Silent Chant
Suddenly, the crowd stilled.
Every figure froze mid-motion. Robes half-shed, half-donned, bodies poised as though held in eternal breath.
The air thickened.
And then, though their mouths did not move, a chant echoed. Not sound. Not word. Something older—like the Castle's voice but multiplied, harmonized, weaponized.
It thundered across the hall:
"Process. Process. Process…"
Each repetition dragged the air lower, darker, heavier.
El Como fell to one knee, his chest burning, his heart pounding with resistance. He clenched his fists.
"I won't—" he snarled, but his voice cracked. "I won't be swallowed by your silence."
Yet the chant ignored him.
The floor beneath him trembled.
Not stone—no, there was no stone here. The ground was woven mist, and it quivered like water under a storm.
A circle burned beneath his feet. The sigil again. But not the same. This one was jagged, unfinished, bleeding light in crooked angles.
He tried to step away—his legs would not move.
The chant grew. The crowd's frozen bodies tilted toward him ever so slightly, heads bowed in his direction as if recognizing him at last.
The crimson-robed ones tilted further. Their eyes gleamed.
El Como's breath shattered in his chest.
"Why me? What am I to you?"
No answer—only the rift.
It opened.
For the second time, the world tore apart.
But this time, he did not fall into mist. He fell into flame.
Not flame that burned flesh, but flame that burned identity. His memories scattered—Bullteik, Darr, the Castle—torn into fragments, rearranged, rewritten.
And yet something anchored him.
Something deep. Something untamed.
"The ability," he whispered through clenched teeth, as the chant dissolved into silence. "You want me to break."
And in the silence, a new voice—one that was not the crowd, not the Castle, not the sigil—answered, faint and dangerous:
"No. We want you to begin."
El Como hovered in that place, flames licking his skin, memories unraveling, the black-clad crowd frozen above him like an audience waiting for his first performance.
His chest ached.
His blood roared.
And for the first time, the sigil beneath him did not feel alien.
It felt like a mirror.
He clenched his fists. His mouth twisted into a grin—sarcastic, trembling, half-mad.
El Como had stood too long before the shifting sigil.
The Castle's air grew heavy with anticipation, each breath weighing on him like stone. When the voice came—
"Untamed Ability Unlocks… The Process Begins…"
—it cracked the silence like thunder in his skull.
Then the world melted into something else.
The black-clad gathering stretched around him endlessly, men and women changing garments in silence. Their ritual pulsed like an unseen heartbeat.
El Como's legs trembled as he tried to step away, but the ground betrayed him. It quivered beneath his feet, slippery as water. He lurched forward, balance gone.
"Damn it—"
He fell.
But instead of crashing into mist, his shoulder collided with warmth.
A startled gasp answered his stumble. Arms—slender but firm—caught him just enough to keep him from sprawling. He staggered back, blinking at the figure he had struck.
It was not smoke. Not shadow. Not illusion.
A girl.
Seventeen, perhaps his exact age. Her hair was black, long enough to brush her waist, catching the faint shimmer of this strange place's light. Her face was pale, sharp at the chin yet softened by youth.
Her eyes—dark as ink—locked onto his. They weren't indifferent like the others. They burned with recognition.
"You…" she whispered.
El Como swallowed. His voice cracked when he tried to hide his unease with sarcasm.
"Sorry. Didn't mean to ruin your… fashion parade."
Her lips curled faintly—not in amusement, but in something between suspicion and relief.
"You're real," she said. Her voice carried an odd weight, as though certainty cost her something.
"Of course I'm real," El Como shot back, straightening, dusting off a shoulder he hadn't actually dirtied. "Last time I checked, sarcasm doesn't come in smoke form."
She blinked once, then glanced at the endless crowd of black-robed figures frozen around them.
"They don't see you. They're not meant to. Yet you stand here. That means the Process has begun."
El Como stiffened. The words echoed the voice he'd heard.
"The Process. Untamed Ability. All these fancy announcements, but no one tells me what it actually means."
The girl's expression sharpened. "It means you've been chosen. And now you can't run."
Her words settled in him like iron. Chosen.
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to spit the word back into her face. He had never been chosen for anything but trouble. Yet here she was, claiming his very presence meant inevitability.
"And who are you supposed to be?" he asked, narrowing his eyes. "Another echo in the parade? Or something else?"
She didn't flinch. "My name doesn't matter. Not yet. But if you must call me something… Lyra."
"Lyra," he repeated, testing it, distrusting it. "Fine. And what exactly do you do in this nightmare tailor shop? Change robes until your arms fall off?"
For the first time, her lips curved—not into a smile, but into the faintest shadow of one. "No. I watch. I wait. And now, I warn."
"Warn me of what?"
Her eyes, dark pools of something ancient, flicked briefly to the crimson-robed figures scattered through the crowd.
"That you are not safe. Not even here."
Beneath them, the mist-floor quivered again. Another sigil flickered into being, jagged and incomplete, glowing beneath El Como's boots like a snare.
He tried to step away, but again his legs resisted—as though the floor clung to him, claimed him.
Panic nipped at his chest. He shoved against it with his usual sarcasm.
"Great. So not only do I get kidnapped by glowing circles, now I'm glued to the floor. Perfect."
Lyra's gaze hardened. She reached out, her hand grazing his wrist. Warm. Real. Anchoring.
"Don't fight it too much," she said. "The more you resist, the harder it breaks you. Let it flow, or it will tear your body apart from the inside."
Her touch steadied him. But it also unsettled him more than the sigil itself.
Why was she real when the rest were illusions?
Why did her words carry the weight of someone who had seen this before?
"So let me guess," El Como said, voice sharp. "This is where you tell me I don't have a choice."
Lyra tilted her head, her black hair falling like a curtain.
"If you had no choice, you wouldn't have stumbled into me."
He frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means even the Process can make mistakes. Or… allow interruptions."
Her words dug into him like thorns. If she was right, if his fall was not an accident, then his collision with her was a divergence—an anomaly.
"So what are you? Another mistake? Or part of the Process?"
Her eyes glimmered strangely. "That depends on you."
The crowd stirred.
For the first time, the endless black-robed figures shifted their heads, not in ritual but in unison—toward El Como. Their eyes opened, glowing faint silver.
Lyra stiffened. Her grip on his wrist tightened. "They see you now."
El Como's heart lurched. "I thought you said they couldn't."
"You've been marked by the sigil. There's no hiding anymore."
The chant began. Low. Endless.
"Process. Process. Process…"
The ground burned hotter under his boots, sigil light spilling upward like chains. He pulled against it, but Lyra yanked him closer, her eyes fierce.
"Listen to me, El Como. Whatever happens next—you cannot let them strip you of yourself. The Process bends you until you break. But if you break wrong, you won't be you anymore."
His throat tightened. "And if I break right?"
She leaned close, her whisper sharp as a blade:
"Then you unlock the Untamed Ability. And you begin."
The chant swelled.
The crimson-robed figures leaned forward, their glowing eyes fixed only on him.
El Como's fists clenched. His sarcasm felt thin here, brittle against the weight of thousands. Yet Lyra's hand still anchored him—warm, steady, real.
He looked at her. At her strange youth, her eyes carrying centuries.
"Why me?" he rasped.
Her answer was simple, merciless:
"Because only chaos births power. And you are chaos itself."
The sigil roared. The floor cracked. Light erupted.
El Como screamed—not in fear, but in defiance.
And Lyra's grip held on as if she had no intention of letting him fall again.