Vigil: The Second Descent
The shard pulsed day and night.
Alaric kept it sealed in a circle of silver and salt, far beneath the ridge, where no untrained mind could hear it whisper. And still, it called out—not in words, but in feelings: pressure in the chest, the taste of ash, visions of places that didn't exist. Mira warned him daily. Each pulse in the shard stretched something thin inside the weave of the world.
But they couldn't destroy it.
It wanted to be destroyed.
And the moment they did, Mira believed it would act as a flare—an invitation to whatever had made the Harbinger.
So instead, they followed the echoes.
This time, their destination was the ancient Sunken Reaches—a region drowned long ago when the seas turned against their masters. Nothing grew there now but kelp forests, jagged black rocks, and the ruins of cities that had once traded knowledge with the stars. But something had awakened in the Reaches. Ships vanished in its waters. Sea beasts rose from the deep, wearing symbols of the Spiral carved into their scales.
The Vigil moved in silence.
Alaric took fewer companions this time: Mira, of course, and Caelen, whose flames now carried voices when the wind bent right. They were joined by Tova, silent Anden, and a newcomer—Vasra, a sky-born outcast who had walked the stormpaths of the north and returned with bones that glowed under starlight.
Their passage was cloaked in fog. The ship they used had no sails—only a runed engine that hummed with warding spells. Even so, the sea moaned as they crossed into the Reaches, as if the waters themselves resented their presence.
Mira dreamwalked every night. She no longer slept as others did; her eyes remained half-open, glowing faintly. The dreammark led her now—not in directions, but in questions. And it pointed to a single place beneath the waves:
Kel-Rimak, the drowned city.
Once a place of prophecy. Now nothing but barnacle-crusted stone and the restless dead.
As they descended using breath wards and glyphs of pressure, they entered a city that was watching. Eyes glimmered from cracks in statues. Whispers echoed in bubbles that rose from streets with no air. Alaric led them down corridors of coral-encrusted glass, past murals that showed figures turning into something else—creatures not quite man, not quite god.
And then, in the deepest hall, they found it: an altar still warm with power. Carved with the same spiral rune the Harbinger bore. Around it stood ten figures of salt and gold.
Guardians.
Not living.
Not dead.
And when Mira stepped forward, they moved.
The battle was surreal. Every blow struck echoed three times—once in the present, once in the dream, once in a timeline that never existed. Caelen burned one to ash, only to watch it reform from his own shadow. Tova was skewered—only for Anden to reverse her death by casting her soul backward in time five seconds.
And Mira—
She didn't fight.
She sang.
A song in the tongue of the First, a lullaby that rose from her dreammark like mist. The guardians slowed. Faltered. Then, one by one, shattered—not from violence, but release.
The altar cracked. From beneath it, water poured forth not salty—but sweet and warm, like lifeblood from the world itself.
Alaric stepped forward, raising the shard of the Harbinger. It trembled violently.
"Bury it," Mira whispered. "Bury it here. In the city that remembers."
And so they did.
For now, the shard sleeps—held beneath Kel-Rimak, watched by water, by silence, by death.
But far above, across the stars, something shifted.
A light blinked out.
Another Harbinger was coming.
And it would not ask questions.