It started with the walls.
One by one, the stones began to hum. A low, almost shy vibration, like the sound a throat makes before it screams.
Cael was shelving echoes in the Archivists' Den when the jars began to flicker.
At first, it was just light — the dim kind that passes for calm.
Then the sound followed.
Whispers. Thousands of them.
Some soft. Some broken.
All saying one thing: wake up.
Lioren dropped her quill. "No," she whispered. "Not here. Not yet."
"What's happening?" Cael asked.
"The first Bloom," she said. "The city's memory is fighting back."
---
They ran to the lower tunnels. The walls were sweating — droplets forming and sliding upward instead of down. Every echo jar on the shelves pulsed like a heartbeat.
When they reached the central corridor, the world was already bending.
Light folded at the edges, forming a slow spiral that led deeper underground.
And at its center, reality had grown something new.
A Bloom.
It looked like a flower made of glass and memory — translucent petals growing from the floor, each one filled with fragments of reflected scenes.
Cael saw faces inside them.
Sera's. The woman from the market. Even his own reflection.
They all mouthed the same silent words: Remember me.
---
Lioren threw a sigil into the air — ink burning to light.
The petals shuddered. "It's leaking," she hissed. "The city's filters are collapsing."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the world's starting to remember what the Order erased."
Cael stepped closer. The hum in his chest matched the rhythm of the Bloom.
He could feel it calling him — the same frequency as his mark.
He reached out. Lioren tried to stop him, but he was already touching the nearest petal.
The glass was warm.
Suddenly, every sound disappeared.
Then came the flood.
Memories, hundreds at once — lives that had been wiped clean.
A boy drawing stars on a rooftop.
A woman singing to a mirror.
A soldier watching the sea turn red.
All of them collapsing into him, as if the world had mistaken him for a vault.
He screamed.
Not from pain — from the weight.
Ashes and voices pressed into his veins, whispering stories that didn't belong to him.
Lioren's voice echoed faintly, distant: "You're resonating! Let go!"
But he couldn't.
The Bloom wasn't killing him. It was recognizing him.
> You're one of us, it said in a hundred broken tones. You didn't forget.
---
Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
The light faded. The hum went quiet.
Cael fell backward, breathing hard. The Bloom's petals were still.
The glass cracked once, twice — then collapsed into dust.
The tunnel fell silent except for the faint drip of ink from the broken sigil.
Lioren helped him up, eyes wide.
"You didn't die," she said.
"Was I supposed to?"
"Everyone who touches a Bloom turns to glass."
She stared at him as if trying to decide whether he was human. "What are you?"
Cael opened his mouth to answer, but something flickered in his shadow — a second outline, faint, standing just behind him.
It looked exactly like him.
It smiled.
> "That," he said quietly, "is what I'm trying to find out."
---
That night, Vaelith's sky changed.
A faint crimson thread stretched across the darkness, connecting the towers like a heartbeat drawn in light.
The Order called it an anomaly.
The Archivists called it hope.
Cael called it a warning.
---