Kael stood over the jagged altar, its black stone pulsing with warmth beneath his boots. Lira’s hand clutched his sleeve, her voice tight with disbelief.“That name… Kael, say it again.”Kael’s voice was hoarse from the echo of it. The moment he had spoken that single syllable—Vareth—the entire vault had quivered. Walls etched with forgotten scripture had begun to bleed fire, and chains of shadow had recoiled from the slab as if burned by it.He stared at the runes lining the altar, now glowing in sickly green. The spiral mark on his back ached. Not with pain this time—but hunger. Recognition.“It’s his name,” Kael whispered. “The one beneath the sea. The one they called the Veiled God.”Lira’s breath hitched. “You should not know that. That name was sealed by the first tongues.”“I didn’t know it until just now,” Kael said, tightening his grip on the twin-bladed shard he had taken from the false High Seer. “It came to me like it had been sleeping in my blood.”Something ancient stirr

The sun had long dipped beneath the horizon when Kael crept through the thorn-wrapped ruins of what once had been a cathedral. The only light now came from the fractured moon overhead and the shimmer of the spiral mark burning faintly on his wrist. Wind hissed through shattered archways, carrying the distant murmur of chanting. Something was stirring below the earth. Something old.He stepped over a broken slab of obsidian, and the stone whispered his name in a voice like Lira’s—only wrong, as if sung backward. He froze. The air tasted of rust and rain. His pulse quickened.Behind him, Nyra landed silently on a fallen column. Her blades were drawn, glinting with oil and dried blood.“We are close,” she said. “The threshold is thinning.”Kael nodded, eyes fixed on the abyss yawning ahead. A jagged spiral had been carved into the ground, one far older than the ones on his skin. Beneath it, a circular stairway twisted downward into the earth like a buried fang. The chants echoed louder f

The sky split open like torn parchment, spilling violet light over the scorched peaks of the Ashfang Divide. Kael stood at the jagged edge of a crumbling cliff, his boots leaving scorched prints on the obsidian ground. His blade pulsed at his side, still humming with the fury of the last battle. The wind carried the smell of burnt stone and something older, something buried.Below, the canyon opened like the throat of a beast. Fire roared deep beneath the surface, casting wild shadows on the broken walls. Lira was at his side, her breath shallow, her eyes flickering with fading light. The cost of keeping the veil open had bled her nearly dry.“You said there was a path,” Kael muttered, scanning the ledges below.“There is,” she breathed. “But it’s not meant for the living.”Kael tightened his grip on the sword. “Then good thing we’re not exactly living.”She gave him a weak smile, but it vanished as the cliffs groaned under their weight. The ground behind them was collapsing, inch by

Kael dragged his hand across the wall, the texture smooth yet humming with buried magic. Each footstep echoed deeper into the hollow corridor beneath the Ashvault Keep. Behind him, the others followed in silence. Lira walked closest, her blade already half drawn, while Nyra stalked just behind with her cloak tight around her. The passage spiraled like the mark on Kael’s chest, curving down and down into a place the world had forgotten.They had followed the broken map hidden within the Archive’s last page, traced the ink made from blackroot and burned gold, and now the path was opening into a chamber unlike any they had seen.A circular chamber pulsed with violet light. The stone was carved with runes older than the Veiled God, older than even the Dead Cities. Suspended at the center of the chamber was a stone disk floating in midair. It spun slowly, casting mirrored reflections against the walls, but none of them reflected Kael.Nyra’s voice cut through the silence. “This is a gate.”

Kael stood over the fractured altar, the silver of his blade still glowing faintly with the remnants of the last rite. Blood had pooled around his boots, not all of it his. The chamber trembled as if the very mountain had begun to breathe, and he could hear the echo of his name whispered back by the stones. But they were not his stones. This was not his sanctuary.He looked up. Lira knelt in front of the shattered idol, her shoulders shaking with grief or fury or both. She held what remained of the sigil scroll in her hands, but it was burned through the center, its glyphs crawling in pain before they dimmed. She did not look at him.“You destroyed it,” she whispered.“I had to,” Kael said. His voice was hoarse. “That rite was not salvation. It was a snare.”“You think you can choose for all of us?” Her voice cracked, and when she turned to him, her eyes were wet but blazing. “Do you even know what you just gave up?”He said nothing. His hand clenched around the hilt of the sword, and