Kael woke up with ink on his fingers.
Not from his journal, or any pen he'd touched.
But from a sigil.
One he didn't remember drawing.
It coiled along his palm, thin and jagged, a broken spiral intersected with slashes. It didn't glow like the others. It bled shadow.
He stared at it, mind fogged and racing. He'd dreamed again—of that boy, the one with ancient eyes and a smile that felt too knowing.
"Find the Shattered Sigil."
Well. Apparently, he already had.
Rin raised an eyebrow the moment she saw it.
"You didn't draw that?"
"Nope."
"And it just appeared on your hand overnight?"
"Yup."
"Kael." She leaned forward, voice low. "This is getting into chosen one with a tragic past territory."
He stared at the dark lines. "What if I'm not the chosen one?"
"What if you're the cursed one?" she offered.
Kael smirked, despite the unease curling in his stomach. "Fitting, considering my luck."
Still, the new sigil felt different. Not violent. Not hungry. Just… fractured.
Like it had once been whole. Once been powerful.
And now it was reaching for something it had lost.
That day's lectures passed in a blur. The professors droned about sigil alignments, channeling efficiency, and comparative theory—useful, but pedestrian compared to what Kael now carried under his skin.
When Master Venlow asked him a question about binding matrices, Kael answered correctly.
But his tone was sharp. Detached.
Venlow gave him a long, unreadable look. "You're drifting, Kael."
Kael gave a half-shrug. "Maybe I'm just seeing further than you expect."
He wasn't trying to be rude. But the moment the words left his mouth, he knew he was pushing too far.
Venlow didn't respond. But his sigil pulsed faintly, like a warning.
Kael said nothing more.
Later, he and Rin slipped into one of the abandoned greenhouses behind the east dorms—once a botanical lab, now overtaken by moss and silent stone.
The perfect place for secrets.
Kael pressed his fingers to the Shattered Sigil on his palm.
It pulsed.
Not with heat or light—but sound.
A tone so low it was felt in the bones, not heard with ears.
"Is it reacting to something?" Rin asked.
Kael nodded. "There's something here. Under the stone."
He knelt, brushing away vines and dirt, revealing a worn floor tile etched with symbols half-lost to time. Not modern sigils. Not even pre-Epoch carvings.
These were foundation marks. The kind that predated every written history they had.
Rin inhaled sharply. "Kael, this is… older than the Academy."
"Older than the whole continent."
"How is it here?"
"I don't know," he said quietly. "But it was buried for a reason."
Using the Shattered Sigil as a guide, Kael began tracing lines in the dirt. A pattern emerged—chaotic at first, but as they worked, it began to make sense.
It wasn't a spell.
It was a map.
Not a physical one. But a conceptual lattice.
A direction.
It pointed toward the outer cliffs of the southern ridge—beyond Academy bounds. Outside permitted territory.
Naturally, Kael's first thought was: We have to go.
Rin didn't even argue this time. She just sighed and said, "Of course we do. Why wouldn't we break into forbidden ruins with an ancient curse tattooed on your hand?"
"I'm glad we've reached the reckless agreement phase of our friendship."
She rolled her eyes. "No, we reached that the night you talked a fire golem into letting us pass because 'we just needed a minute to think about our life choices.'"
"I stand by that plan."
That night, they snuck out.
The cliffs were wind-scoured, jagged and sharp. The moon painted the rocks in silver as they climbed, guided by Kael's ever-persistent sigil pulse.
At the edge of a ravine, half-covered in moss and vines, they found it.
A door.
Buried in the stone.
Not built by hands, but etched into existence.
Circular, made of obsidian with glowing red threads spiraling through it like veins. At the center, the exact shape of the Shattered Sigil.
Kael reached out.
The door opened inward.
No sound.
Just the slow breath of ancient air, exhaled for the first time in centuries.
They stepped through.
Inside was a hall of black glass. Walls that shimmered with reflections not their own—faces, cities, memories never lived.
Kael's heart pounded.
This wasn't just a ruin.
It was a record.
A preserved shard of the lost civilization.
And at the center of the hall stood a single pedestal, upon which floated a fractured crystal, glowing with shifting colors.
Kael stepped forward.
The moment his fingers touched it, pain lanced through his skull.
He fell.
And saw.
He was not Kael anymore. Not entirely.
He stood in robes of flame-threaded silk, overlooking a burning sky. Cities crumbled behind him. Voices screamed.
Beside him stood another.
The boy from the dreams.
Older now. Scarred.
"You said we could control it," the boy shouted.
Kael—no, the other version of him—responded:
"We were wrong. It's not meant to be used. It's meant to be understood."
"What happens if we fail?"
"We forget."
"And if we succeed?"
Kael's past self looked down at the shattered sigil in his hands.
"Then we begin again."
Kael gasped awake on the floor of the hall, blood trickling from his nose.
Rin knelt beside him, eyes wide. "Kael! Kael, what happened?!"
He looked at the crystal. It no longer glowed.
But the sigil on his palm had changed.
Now whole.
Now alive.
And somewhere in his chest, something had awakened.
A memory.
Not of power.
But of failure.