The first change wasn't dramatic.
It was intimate.
It started with warmth.
Not the gentle warmth of stone holding light, but something deeper, slower. A heat that didn't sit on my skin. It moved under it. Through muscle. Through bone. It gathered behind my ribs, right where the pressure had lived since the corridor, and for the first time… it didn't stay contained.
It spread.
I inhaled sharply.
The sound of it echoed too loudly in the vast chamber.
Devansh felt it immediately. His hand tightened around my wrist. "Ira," he said, and my name in his voice carried a note I hadn't heard before.
Not warning.
Uncertainty.
The low vibration in the chamber deepened.
The faint seams along the columns brightened, thin lines of pale light tracing upward in irregular paths. Dust lifted from the floor in slow spirals, hanging in the air as if gravity had briefly forgotten what to do.
Meera gasped behind us. "The room—"
She didn't finish.
Because the room wasn't just changing.
It was aligning.
The curved walls leaned subtly inward. The distant shadows shifted. The light that had always drifted without direction began to gather, faint streams bending toward the center of the chamber.
Toward me.
The presence inside my chest surged.
Not violently.
Decisively.
My knees weakened. Devansh stepped closer, his free arm sliding around my back to steady me. His body was warm, solid, unmistakably real.
And the moment he touched me like that—
the city answered.
A deep sound rolled through the core, low enough that I felt it in my teeth before I heard it. The floor beneath us pulsed once, like a slow heartbeat.
Devansh's breath left him.
The color drained subtly from his face.
"What is it?" I asked, though my voice shook.
His gaze wasn't on the chamber anymore.
It was distant.
Internal.
"I've lost access to the eastern frameworks," he said quietly.
My stomach dropped. "Lost access how?"
"They're still functioning," he replied. "But they are no longer resolving through me."
The words hit harder than any explosion.
Devansh wasn't just connected to Vayukshi.
He had always been its reference.
And now…
"They're routing somewhere else," he said.
The presence inside me pressed outward.
A strange sensation followed, like something unfolding behind my sternum. My vision blurred at the edges, light bending strangely as if the air itself were thickening.
"Ira," Meera whispered. "Your eyes…"
I didn't ask what was wrong.
I felt it.
A faint pressure behind my eyes. A warmth along my spine. The sense that something inside me had found a pathway it had been searching for.
The city's low vibration surged.
The faint light in the chamber flared, then softened, arranging itself into slow, orbiting currents.
The core was activating.
Not like a machine.
Like a nervous system.
I clutched Devansh's arm.
"I don't feel like I'm standing in the city anymore," I said. "I feel like it's… standing in me."
The words weren't poetic.
They were terrifying.
Because they were accurate.
I lifted my free hand without deciding to.
The air above my palm distorted.
Not heat.
Not light.
Space.
The dust suspended in the chamber didn't drift around my fingers.
It reorganized.
Each particle sliding into new, precise alignments, forming faint, shifting patterns that hadn't existed a moment before.
Meera's breath hitched. "Ira… you're not touching anything."
I stared at my hand.
At the way the city was responding to a gesture I hadn't been taught how to make.
"I'm not moving it," I whispered.
"I'm… placing it."
The realization made my heart pound.
The presence inside me wasn't pushing against the city.
It was informing it.
Devansh's arm tightened around me.
The closeness mattered now more than ever. The warmth of him. The way his chest rose and fell behind my shoulder. The simple human fact of someone standing there when everything else was becoming unrecognizable.
"Ira," he said softly, close to my ear, "whatever is happening… you are not alone inside it."
I turned my head slightly.
Our faces were close.
Too close for distance.
Too close for the city.
The chamber's light bent subtly around us, faint currents drawing inward, outlining the space we shared.
My breath caught.
So did his.
For one fragile moment, the fear thinned.
I could feel his hand at my back. The steady line of his body. The way his presence anchored something in me that the city couldn't touch.
"I can feel you more clearly than the city right now," I whispered.
His gaze softened in a way that hurt.
"That may be the only stable thing left," he said.
The warmth between us deepened, dangerous in its simplicity.
And then—
the city screamed.
Not in sound.
In rupture.
A violent pressure tore through the chamber. The faint lines of light snapped bright. The orbiting currents shattered into chaotic motion. The floor lurched beneath us, throwing me hard against Devansh's chest.
Rehaan shouted somewhere behind us.
Meera cried out.
The air split.
Literally.
A vertical fracture tore open in the space to our left, not in stone, but in depth. The chamber folded inward around it, light bending sharply, like reality had been creased.
Cold rushed out.
Not cold air.
Cold absence.
The presence inside me reacted violently, surging upward, burning along my spine.
I gasped.
And then I felt them.
Not nearby.
Present.
A pressure unlike anything I had felt before pressed against my awareness. Ordered. Precise. Vast.
The Scribes.
They weren't observing.
They weren't testing.
They were here.
The fracture widened.
Within it, the chamber's light vanished, replaced by a depth that did not reflect, did not echo, did not carry the city's hum.
Something moved inside it.
Not a construct.
Not a probe.
A presence that carried intention the way a blade carries an edge.
Devansh's breath left him sharply. "They have entered."
My vision swam.
The dust suspended in the air froze.
Every faint current in the chamber halted as if caught in invisible glass.
The city had stopped responding.
For the first time since I had known it, Vayukshi did not know what to do.
The presence inside me surged again, hard enough that I cried out.
The fracture pulsed.
And from within it, something began to step forward.
Not into the city.
Toward me.
The clock had not just started.
It had struck.