I woke up choking on dust.
My lungs burned. Everything hurt. I rolled onto my side and coughed hard enough that something in my ribs popped.
"Fuck—"
The word scraped out, raw and ugly. I blinked, eyes stinging, trying to get my vision to settle. Stone ceiling. Cracked pillars. The faint smell of rust and old blood.
I was back.
Back in the chamber. The same one I'd found the box in.
Except the box was gone. Just a shallow dent in the rubble where it used to sit, surrounded by faint scorch marks that hadn't been there before.
I pushed myself up on one elbow. My whole body felt wrong. Not broken, just... heavy. Like someone had filled my chest with something solid and warm while I wasn't looking.
I pressed a hand there, right over my ribs.
The Sigil.
I could feel it. Not just the mark on my skin, but deeper. A weight sitting behind my sternum, pulsing faint and steady. Like a second heartbeat I'd never had before.
"Holy shit," I breathed. "It's real."
I looked down at my hands, and that's when I saw them.
Tiny specks of light. Hundreds of them, drifting through the air like dust caught in sunlight, except they weren't dust. They moved wrong, flowing in slow currents, some bright, some dim, all of them humming faint enough that I felt it more than heard it.
Resonance.
I'd heard people talk about it my whole life. Seen Sigiled users pull from it, shape it, burn through it. But I'd never seen it. Not like this.
It was everywhere. In the air, in the stone, bleeding faint from the cracks in the walls. The whole ruin was soaked in it.
I reached out without thinking, fingers passing through a strand of light. It didn't react. Just kept drifting.
"Whoa..."
"Cael."
I jumped, head snapping around.
Floating a few feet away, just above the ground, was a small shape. Dark. Too dark, like someone had cut a piece out of the air and left a shadow behind.
He was tiny. Maybe the size of my forearm, if that. Smooth body, no real features except for two horns curving up from his head and those eyes, pale white, glowing faint in the dim light of the ruin.
He wasn't moving. Just... hovering there. Watching me.
I stared.
He stared back.
"...Ael?"
The little shape tilted forward slightly, like a nod.
My brain took a second to catch up. "You're small now."
"Yes."
His voice was different. Still inside my head, but quieter. Less like an echo in a cave and more like someone sitting next to me, speaking low.
I sat up fully, wincing as my ribs protested. "I mean, you said you'd shrink down, but I was picturing, I don't know, human-sized. Not..." I gestured vaguely at him. "Pocket demon."
He drifted a little closer. "This is what I can hold without draining you. Anything larger would burn through your Resonance too fast."
"Right. Because I'm still weak. Got it."
"You are," he said simply. No malice. Just truth.
I huffed, but didn't argue. Up close, I could see faint bits of him breaking off at the edges, tiny fragments of shadow that dissolved into nothing before they hit the ground.
"You're leaking," I said.
"I am stable enough."
"Doesn't look stable."
"It will hold."
Before I could push him on that, the ground jolted.
Not hard. Just a low tremor that ran through the stone under my hands. The kind of shake that meant something big was moving, or breaking, or both.
I froze.
Ael's glow flickered.
"The fracture," he said quietly.
Another tremor. Stronger this time. Dust rained from the ceiling, and one of the cracked pillars groaned like it was about to give.
"Shit." I scrambled to my feet, legs shaky but holding. "It's closing, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Not long."
I grabbed my daggers from where they'd fallen and shoved them back into my belt. My body still felt off-balance, like I was carrying extra weight I wasn't used to, but there was no time to figure it out.
"We need to move," I said, already heading for the archway. "Now."
Ael followed without a word, drifting behind me like a shadow on a string.
The corridor twisted as we ran.
Not in the way ruins usually shift when they're old and crumbling. This was wrong. The walls bent inward like ribs closing, stone warping at the edges where the fracture was pulling apart. Cracks split through the floor, glowing faint with that same pale light I'd seen in the void.
I vaulted over a chunk of collapsed ceiling, boots hitting stone hard. My legs didn't shake. They should have. I'd been running on fumes before, barely holding myself up, but now?
I felt good.
Fast. Steady. Like my body had finally caught up to what I'd been asking it to do my whole life.
"This is insane," I muttered, grinning despite myself.
Ael drifted beside me, keeping pace without effort. "You are stronger now. Your body has adapted to the Sigil."
"Yeah, no kidding." I jumped a gap in the floor, landed clean on the other side. Didn't even stumble. "I could get used to this."
"Do not get comfortable. You are still fragile."
"Sure, but I'm less fragile. That's progress."
The ruin shuddered again, harder this time. A pillar to my left cracked down the middle and toppled, slamming into the ground with a boom that rattled my teeth. Dust exploded into the air, thick enough to choke on.
I covered my mouth with my sleeve and pushed forward. The exit had to be close. I remembered the route, mostly. Left at the split corridor, straight through the collapsed hall, then up the slope toward daylight.
Assuming the fracture didn't eat the exit first.
Another tremor. The Resonance particles in the air scattered, swirling wild like they were panicking.
Then I heard it.
Claws on stone. Scraping. Heavy.
I froze mid-step.
Ael's glow dimmed. "Cael..."
"I know."
The sound came from ahead. Low growls, wet and rattling, echoing off the walls.
I drew both daggers, grip tight. My pulse kicked up, but my hands didn't shake.
Three shapes stepped out from the shadows at the far end of the corridor.
Hounds.
Big ones. Bigger than I remembered. Each one stood chest-high even on all fours, shoulders hunched, muscle rippling under matted purple fur that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in years. Their mouths hung open, dripping thick black spit that hissed when it hit the stone. Eyes pale and empty, locked on me.
One of them snarled, lips peeling back to show teeth that were too long, too sharp.
"Of course," I muttered.
Then the middle one lunged.