The city of Serrin had not heard its emergency horns in almost twenty years. The last time they sounded, a beast tide rolled down from the northern marshlands and slammed into the outer districts. Hundreds died before the legions pushed the creatures back.
This time, the threat was not a tide of claws or teeth.
It was a single runaway heir.
And the empire responded with the same force it used for monsters.
The horns shook the rooftops. Civilians abandoned market stalls and fled indoors. Patrol captains barked orders down every street. Gates slammed shut. Resonance arrays hummed to life along the walls, sending pale threads of power into the sky.
Inside the central command hall, High Marshal Tirian Kyron stood before the projection table, a vein in his temple pulsing hard enough to be seen from across the room.
"Again," he snapped.
The array master swallowed and replayed the map projection. Lines of light traced the plains. Heat signatures flickered where gliders swept in hunting formations. A blinking dot pulsed red just beyond the eastern gates.
Ravel's trail.
Tirian stared at the red dot with a fury so cold it brushed the edge of disbelief. His jaw tightened. His fingers curled into a fist.
"How," he said, and his voice carried through the hall with the weight of a falling blade, "does a boy who has not trained a single day in the legion manage to outrun four glider units?"
Silence followed.
Officers shifted uneasily. Commanders glanced at each other, waiting for someone else to answer.
Finally, a strategist cleared his throat. "Marshal, we believe he may have had outside help."
Tirian turned his head slowly. "Outside help?"
"A former ranger. Seris Vale. She was spotted near the southern watchtower this morning."
Murmurs rippled across the hall.
"A deserter," one lieutenant muttered.
"A madwoman," whispered another.
Tirian looked back at the projection. "Seris Vale… That explains the evasion patterns." He exhaled, a barely controlled breath. "But it does not explain the pulse."
The hall fell silent again.
No one wanted to address it.No one wanted to admit what they all felt minutes ago when the sky flashed like a slit opening in the clouds.
It hadn't come from the city.It hadn't come from any imperial weapon.It had come from the fields.
Where Ravel was.
Tirian leaned over the table, bracing his knuckles against the projection surface.
"I want all readings from the pulse. Now."
The array master scrambled through crystalline interfaces. Symbols shifted, lights flared, strings of data streamed across the projection. A distorted waveform appeared, full of sharp peaks and unstable curves.
Tirian's stomach tightened.
Impossible.
He'd seen this pattern once before, years ago.
A resonance signature that the empire had cataloged as an anomaly, then buried in the restricted archives.
A signature that came from a fallen star core.A signature no human should possess.
A signature very close to what the old legends called Primordial Echo.
Tirian straightened, face grim. "Seal every gate. No civilian movement in or out. Send the Third Legion to the eastern plain. Issue a pursuit order to all units."
An officer stepped forward. "With capture orders, sir?"
Tirian didn't look at him.
"No."
The hall froze.
Tirian's voice carried like steel dragged across stone.
"Kill on sight."
Gasps erupted from the officers. Even the strategists looked stunned.
One brave commander spoke. "Marshal… that is your son."
Tirian faced him fully, cold eyes unreadable. "That is a threat to the empire."
The room fell silent.
Tirian lifted his hand and pressed a sigil on the table. A new projection flared to life, showing a map of the Kyron estate.
"Deploy a protection unit to guard the shrine vaults. If the boy took anything from beneath the estate, it must not leave the continent."
The officers bowed and scattered.
Alone now, Tirian looked at the waveform again. The peaks. The pattern. The shape he tried to forget.
"No," he whispered to himself. "It cannot be."
But the pit in his stomach said otherwise.
Ravel had left the empire at twelve years old. He'd walked away with nothing but a satchel, some tools… and a sphere he found buried beneath the ancestral shrine.
A sphere no one else could activate.
Tirian closed his eyes.
If that sphere was what he feared…
Then his son wasn't just running away.
He was waking something the empire wasn't prepared to face.
And Serrin might already be too late.