The pact changed everything.
When their palms touched—Ash, Kael, Nia, and Ren—it was as if their Roots recognized each other. Something ancient stirred, quiet but undeniable. The ember inside Ash pulsed in a way it never had before—not with danger, but with connection.
They had started as scattered sparks.
Now they were a flame.
***
That Same Night – Inside the Memory Vault
It was well past curfew when they slipped through the archive wing. Nia led, silent as moonlight. She retraced her path exactly, every step timed with the flickering shadowlights that patrolled the corridors.
Kael picked the locks.
Ren disabled the perception sigils.
Ash brought up the rear, ember glowing faintly beneath his shirt.
They reached the sealed door.
Nia touched the sigil again—🜂 and 🜃 side by side—and the door opened without a sound.
Inside, the room was unchanged. Frost hung thick on the stasis coffins. Rows of frozen students lay in magical suspension, their names lost to time and silence.
But Ash's eyes went straight to the unnamed one.
Subject 6.
Silver-blue hair. Chest faintly rising. Root sigil unknown.
"Is he... alive?" Kael asked.
"He's not decaying," Ren noted, kneeling beside the glass. "That means the stasis weave is active. Pulse spell layered. But... something's wrong. His Root is flickering."
Indeed, the sigil on the boy's chest flashed like a broken lantern. One moment ice, the next fire, the next shadow. It didn't settle.
"It's unstable," Nia whispered.
Ash felt the ember stir. Not in warning. In recognition.
"He's part of us."
"How do you know?" Kael asked.
"I just do."
He placed his hand on the glass.
And the coffin flared.
Resonance Trigger
Without warning, the Root sigils of all four teens began to glow.
🜂 – Ash🜃 – Nia🜁 – Ren🜄 – Kael
Symbols of the elemental Roots—Fire, Ice, Air, and Earth—flared and spiraled in mid-air above them, rotating in a ring.
At the center, the sigil on the frozen boy's chest pulsed once—
—then fractured.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the coffin.
"Wait—" Kael stepped back.
"Move!" Nia shouted.
The glass shattered outward in a shockwave of freezing mist and pure memory energy. The force threw them all to the floor. Alarm runes lit the ceiling. A high-pitched siren began to echo.
Ash stumbled to his feet.
The boy had fallen forward, gasping for breath, naked, trembling, coughing out memory as if it were smoke.
Then his eyes opened.
Every color—shifting like oil, shimmering like mirrored rain.
Ash took a step closer.
"You're the sixth."
The boy blinked.
Then spoke.
"Who... who am I?"
Ash reached out a hand.
"Someone who needs to remember."
Escape from the Vault
They had less than ninety seconds before the enforcers arrived.
Ren took the lead, summoning a slipstream of wind to shield the sixth boy, who still couldn't walk without support. Kael gritted his teeth and lifted him with one arm, the other gripping a blade he'd smuggled in for emergencies.
"We can't go back the way we came," Nia snapped.
"East wing route," Ren said. "Through the sigil drain shafts."
"That's suicide," Kael muttered.
"Better than expulsion—or extraction."
They moved.
The vault door slammed shut behind them.
Alarms screamed through the corridor. Walls shifted. The Cradle was reconfiguring—its very structure altering to contain the breach.
"They're using Lockdown Protocol," Ash said. "We'll never outrun it."
"We're not going to," Nia said. She turned to him. "You're going to light us a door."
Ash blinked. "I don't know that spell."
"You will."
"How?"
"Because your Root's not normal. Neither is he." She nodded at the sixth boy. "Use him."
Ash hesitated.
Then knelt.
The boy stared up at him, dazed. "Do you remember your name?"
"No," the boy whispered. "But I remember falling. Fire. Chains. The sky broke."
Ash touched his chest.
The Root flared again—this time expanding, brushing Ash's own.
And just for a moment—
—Ash saw something impossible.
Echoes of Before
He stood on a battlefield.
Not one made of stone or wood, but of thought—an arena of echo and spell and idea.
Six figures stood in a ring, backs to each other.
Each burned with a different light.
One was Ash, unmistakable.
The others he couldn't place—faces hidden by memory fog—but he knew them.
And the sixth?
The boy now before him.
"You were the key," Ash whispered. "Back then. You held us together."
The boy nodded.
His voice echoed with impossible depth. "And now, I break the seal again."
Back in the Present – Spell Unlocked
Ash's ember exploded with power.
A sigil he had never seen before burned into existence—🝊—a composite of all the others.
He raised his hand.
"Gateform: Phase Pulse!"
Reality shimmered.
A tear split open in the wall—showing the open woods outside the Cradle perimeter.
Kael whistled. "That's a Phase-class spell."
"You've been holding out on us," Ren muttered.
Ash felt faint. The spell had cost him more than mana—it had burned memory. He clutched his head.
"Go," he croaked.
They jumped through.
The Forest Edge – Dawn Breaking
They stumbled out into the snow-laced forest beyond the Cradle's floating grounds. The air was clean, cold, and eerily silent.
Ash collapsed.
Kael caught him before he hit the ground. "You're not dying here."
"I just need... a moment," Ash said.
Ren laid the sixth boy gently beside him. The boy's breath had steadied, but his body still flickered between hot and cold.
"What do we call him?" Nia asked.
The boy blinked, as if waking again. "Call me... Luin. I think that was part of it."
Ash smiled faintly. "Luin. Welcome back."
Kael stepped away, eyes scanning the sky. "We'll have search parties soon."
"We're fugitives now," Ren muttered.
"Not fugitives," Ash said, rising slowly. "Hunters. We have to find the last one."
Nia nodded. "And figure out why they locked Luin away."
Ash looked to the Cradle in the distance. Its towers shone gold and red in the early morning sun, but behind that warmth, he could see it now:
A cage.
Somewhere Else – The Seventh Stirring
Far away, beyond the mountains, in a temple buried beneath ice and forgotten spelllocks, another chamber hummed with awakening.
A girl opened her eyes.
She had no memory.
Only a name etched into her cell wall.
Iskra.
And a whisper from the dark.
"Wake, Seventh. They've found Six. You must not let them complete the ring."
Her eyes flared.
Ice cracked.