The ruins stretched further than Kael expected.
Twisted metal spires pierced the earth like broken teeth, half-swallowed by time and ash. Faint glints of glass and bronze flickered in the rubble, as if the place still remembered how to shimmer.
Zeyn moved through it with practiced ease, boots kicking aside fragments of old panels, fingers brushing over cracked glyph plates.
Kael followed in silence.
The bottle pulsed softly at his side—curious, not alarmed.
"You see these lines?" Zeyn muttered, crouching beside a shattered terminal half-buried in moss.
Kael knelt, watching.
The base of the structure was etched with patterns—runes, not like Hollow spellwork, but intricate spirals and fractal hooks.
Alive.
Mathematical.
Woven.
Zeyn ran a hand across them.
"Power used to hum through here. Before the storms. Before the roots took it back."
Kael tilted his head.
"What was this place?"
Zeyn didn't look up.
"A station. A relay. Maybe more. No one knows anymore. Those who built it didn't leave stories. Just bones."
He tapped a section of the stone.
"Some say it wasn't even made by people. Just… found."
The bottle pulsed—sharper.
Kael stood.
His gaze pulled across the ruins, to a circle of standing pillars deeper within the broken square. Moss climbed each one, but between them—just visible—was a ring of black metal, sunken into the ground.
It hummed.
Not with sound.
With presence.
Kael stepped forward.
The bottle grew warmer.
"Wait," Zeyn said behind him, voice suddenly tight.
Kael didn't.
He crossed the stone threshold.
And the ground responded.
Lines in the stone lit up—green-gold, like old veins catching breath.
The air thickened.
The ring at the center pulsed once.
Then opened.
Not physically.
Not visibly.
But inwardly.
Kael felt his pulse sync with it.
Felt his breath stutter.
Felt his thoughts stretch—
—snap—
—sink—
He stood nowhere.
Saw nothing.
But remembered everything.
Flashes.
A tower of crystal, shattered by time.
A voice screaming in a language he didn't know—but somehow felt.
A woman's hand holding the bottle.
Then dropping it.
Then flames.
Then silence.
Then—
Kael.
He gasped and staggered backward.
Zeyn caught him, barely.
"What did you touch?" the scavenger hissed. "That wasn't just light. That was a gate."
Kael's hands trembled.
"The bottle… it showed me something."
Zeyn's face darkened.
"Don't say that."
Kael looked at him.
Zeyn's hand went to his satchel, fingers hovering over a curved blade handle.
"You don't understand," he whispered. "If it's waking… if it's really waking, they'll come. They always do."
"Who?"
Zeyn shook his head.
"The Seekers. The Archivists. The ash-damned grave-diggers. Call them what you want. They smell power. And they burn everything around it."
Kael took a step back.
Not fear.
But clarity.
The bottle pulsed.
A slow, steady beat.
Kael spoke calmly.
"Then we don't stay."
Zeyn hesitated.
Then cursed under his breath.
"North," he muttered. "The winds won't carry your scent as far. If we're lucky."
Kael turned away from the glowing ring.
The lines dimmed as he left the circle—like eyes closing after watching too long.
He didn't look back.
But he knew.
Something had seen him.
And he had seen it.