The silence inside the obsidian chamber didn't return after Kael's scream. It lingered. Thick. Vibrating. Listening.
Kael sat on the smooth floor, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The vision still clawed at his thoughts—the burning cities, the crumbling sky, the other him.
That version had held the same sigil, whole and bright. But his eyes…
They had been full of regret.
"Kael," Rin said, gently. "Talk to me. What happened?"
He looked up at her, eyes wild. "I think I remembered something I was never supposed to."
She frowned. "A memory?"
"No. A life. Or... a piece of one."
She didn't scoff or laugh. She just waited.
Kael explained everything—the boy from the dreams, the sky ablaze, the words. The sigil was never just power. It was a record. A seal. A promise made, then shattered.
And now... beginning again.
"Do you think," Rin said slowly, "you've been chosen to finish what they started?"
"I don't know," Kael muttered. "But it's not just me. There was another. A friend—or something close to it. They broke the world together."
Rin sat beside him. Her voice was soft. "Maybe this time, you don't have to do it alone."
That struck something deep.
A part of Kael that still hadn't forgiven the world for making him survive without anyone.
The moment they stepped outside the ruins, everything changed.
Kael didn't see it immediately. But he felt it.
The world was slightly sharper. The wind whispered just a little louder. His footsteps resonated, faintly.
The sigil on his palm wasn't dormant anymore. It pulsed with awareness. It wasn't a tool.
It was a companion.
Rin noticed the difference first.
"You're walking like you just remembered you're descended from gods," she said with a dry grin.
"Maybe I just remembered I have good posture," Kael replied.
But inside, he was reeling.
The next few days at the Academy were a blur of tension and whispers.
Kael and Rin weren't the only ones poking into forbidden corners. Other students had begun reporting strange anomalies—sigils behaving oddly, flickering lights in the deep tunnels, instructors acting... evasive.
One morning, Kael received a sealed note under his door.
"You're not the only one who remembers."
No name.
No signature.
Just a faint imprint of a sigil Kael had never seen.
But it felt... familiar.
When he showed it to Rin, her expression darkened. "Someone's watching. And they're not trying to scare you. They're trying to recruit you."
Later that night, Kael found himself drawn to the old archives in the east tower—rarely visited, barely maintained.
A place full of dust, whispers, and books that no one bothered to read anymore.
He lit a lantern, making his way past cracked shelves. One of the scrolls practically jumped out at him—sealed in wax with a forgotten crest.
He broke it open.
Inside, a single phrase written in an older dialect:
"The Sigils were never ours to wield. Only to contain."
A list followed—seven names.
Each one marked with a symbol.
Each symbol broken.
He recognized one of the names: Aeris Valen.
The boy from the dream.
And next to it, scratched into the parchment in a different hand: He remembered too late. Don't follow his path.
Kael ran a hand through his hair. "Too late for that, ghostwriters."
Training the next day was brutal.
Venlow, now visibly colder toward Kael, assigned them precision exercises—controlling multiple sigils under pressure, maintaining geometric consistency while shaping heat through illusion constructs.
Rin excelled. Her control was better than most already.
Kael?
Kael was struggling.
Not because he didn't understand.
But because the sigils kept changing on him.
His constructs morphed mid-cast, shifting to match patterns from the ruins. Glyphs that shouldn't even exist twisted into his intentions.
Venlow pulled him aside after class.
"What are you doing, Kael?"
Kael blinked. "Channeling. Like you taught us."
"You're doing more than that. You're re-writing the rules. On instinct."
"I didn't mean to."
"That's worse."
Kael's voice dropped. "What if the rules are wrong?"
Venlow looked like he wanted to say something more. But he just shook his head and walked away.
That night, it happened again.
Another vision.
But this time, he wasn't watching from behind another's eyes.
He was himself.
And he was not alone.
He stood on a platform in the sky, staring across a chasm at someone else—a woman cloaked in black flame, a crown of twisting sigils hovering behind her like a halo.
"You found it," she said, voice both amused and bitter. "Faster than the last time."
Kael didn't recognize her. But the feeling in his gut said she recognized him.
"You said you'd never come back," she whispered. "You lied, Kael."
He tried to speak, but the words caught.
She pointed to his sigil. "That bond cost us everything."
Then she vanished.
Kael awoke in a sweat.
The sigil burned on his hand. Not with fire, but memory.
And now it wasn't just fractured.
It was splintering.
Piece by piece, the truth was coming back.
Not just about what the sigils were.
But what they had taken.