The next morning, Kael didn't wake to sunlight or birdsong.
He woke to whispers.
His sigil pulsed faintly beneath his skin, like a second heartbeat.
The whispers weren't words—not exactly. More like impressions, fragments of thought carried on windless air. Kael sat upright in bed, heart pounding.
Across the room, Rin stirred. "You hear that?"
He nodded slowly. "Yeah."
The whispers faded the moment he became fully alert. But the chill in the air remained, heavy and ancient.
Rin looked shaken. "That wasn't a dream, was it?"
"No," Kael said, swinging his legs out of bed. "I think… something woke up."
Later that day, Elric found them both in the training yard.
He looked worse than usual, which for Elric was saying something. His eyes were ringed with shadows, and his fingers trembled slightly, though he kept them jammed in his pockets to hide it.
"New orders," he said. "Headmistress wants you both to investigate a site near the outer faultline. Something's… changed."
Kael raised an eyebrow. "Changed how?"
"They found writing," Elric said. "Carved into rock. It wasn't there yesterday."
Rin's brow furrowed. "And you want us to go look at the haunted wall?"
"No," Elric muttered. "She does."
The faultline was a jagged wound in the earth—ten meters wide in some places, a bottomless drop in others. For years, the area had been sealed off, deemed unstable.
Now, ropes marked a new path down its ledge.
Kael and Rin rappelled side by side, sweat sticking to their backs as they descended into the ravine. When their boots finally hit stone, Kael realized why the Headmistress had sent them.
Carved into the wall was a sigil.
Massive. Intricate. And alive.
It pulsed faintly with golden light.
Rin stepped closer. "This isn't any sigil I've seen in the codices."
"It's not in the database either," Kael muttered, pulling out a sketchpad.
He started copying the lines—his fingers moving faster than he could consciously guide them. The sigil's form seemed to suggest its own replication, like his brain already knew the shape.
Rin touched one of the outer lines.
For a second, her pupils flared golden.
Then the glow vanished.
"Did you—"
"Yeah," she whispered, pulling her hand back like she'd been burned. "It… recognized me."
Kael stared at the sigil.
What was this?
Back at the Academy, the Headmistress examined their sketches in silence.
Then she turned her chair toward the window. "This confirms it."
"Confirms what?" Kael asked.
She didn't look back. "The sigils are not tools."
She held up one trembling hand. "They're messages. From something—or someone—older than language. Older than civilization."
Kael frowned. "You knew this already."
She nodded. "But now I have proof. And proof means war."
Kael's stomach sank. "With who?"
She turned to face him.
"With the other Academies."
That night, Kael couldn't sleep.
The whispers returned—stronger now. Clearer. And this time, he understood one of them.
Not through language, but through something deeper.
The sigil wasn't giving him power. It was asking something of him. Reaching. Not to control him—but to guide him.
He sat up, heart hammering.
It wants to be remembered.
He stood, barefoot, and walked to his desk. His sketchpad was open, the copied sigil half-finished.
Kael dipped his pen into fresh ink and began to draw.
He didn't stop for three hours.
By sunrise, Kael had filled twelve pages.
Each page contained a variation on the original sigil. Twisting. Morphing. Evolving.
He wasn't just copying anymore.
He was translating.
Rin walked in without knocking. "You didn't sleep again."
Kael didn't look up. "I know what the sigil at the faultline is."
She crossed her arms. "Yeah?"
"It's a key," Kael said. "But not to a place."
He tapped the final sigil, one that shimmered faintly even in ordinary ink.
"It's a key to a concept. Something buried in our minds."
Rin stepped closer, frowning. "That's not how sigils work."
Kael looked her in the eye.
"I think that's exactly how they work."
That day, Kael asked Merrow a question he'd been afraid of.
"What's the deepest known stage of sigil mastery?"
She gave him a long, steady look.
"We call it Origin." Her voice was quiet. "But no one has reached it in centuries."
"What's before that?"
She folded her hands.
"Spark. Burn. Flare. Awakened. Ascend. Transcend. Then Origin."
Kael's mind spun.
"And what separates Transcend from Origin?"
Merrow smiled faintly.
"Creation. Up until Transcendence, you master a language. But at Origin…"
"You invent a new one," Kael finished.
Merrow nodded.
"And rewrite the rules of the world."
Later that night, Kael sat with Rin by the old training field, watching the sky split with distant lightning.
"We're playing with fire," she said quietly.
Kael smirked. "We're past that. We are the fire now."
She elbowed him.
Then went silent for a long time.
Finally, she said, "Do you think we're doing the right thing?"
Kael thought of the whispers, the dreams, the writing that spoke to him like an echo of someone he used to be.
"I think," he said softly, "that the world has been forgetting something very important. And it's tired of being forgotten."
Rin didn't reply.
But she stayed beside him.
As the thunder rolled, and the old sigils in their skin stirred awake.