Kier stood slowly as the spiral dais dimmed beneath his palm. The red light faded into the stone like breath released from tight lungs. The silence remained.
Not the silence of nature or meditation.
This was structural silence. Built. Maintained. It watched. It remembered.
He moved from the center of the hall, boots echoing faintly on smooth obsidian. The architecture here was too deliberate—angles meant not just for aesthetics but for function. Every step aligned with memory flow.
He reached what once may have been a meditation alcove. Now, it held rot and crushed stone. He knelt anyway, brushing moss from the floor, revealing faint etchings like a shattered wheel. Not spiritual. Not decorative.
A thread-binding array.
Kier drew a silver needle from a cloth sheath at his side—too thin to be a weapon, too sharp to be casual. He pricked his thumb, letting a single drop of blood fall onto the pattern. It sizzled.
The stone trembled beneath his knees.
A circle flared around him—pale gray, almost unseen. Lines of unseen force extended through the stone floor in a pattern too complex for the untrained eye to follow. He could feel the convergence now. Beneath the ruin, the soul engine still spun its slow, impossible thread.
Weak. But present.
There's still something here.
Kier pressed his bloodied thumb to his forehead, completing the pattern. Not a prayer. Not a plea. Just an invitation.
The air split—soundlessly—and a figure emerged.
No feet. No face. Just silhouette. A memory echo, shaped by old rituals and buried hate.
It hovered, silent.
Kier didn't flinch. "Function?"
The echo said nothing, but the glyphs on the floor began to shift. Symbols rearranged, forming words not meant for mouths.
"Thread anchor compromised. Core decayed. Echo integrity: 17%."
Kier tilted his head. "Accessible?"
"Only through binding."
The meaning was clear. He would not be a guest. To gain control, he must offer connection. Not servitude—compatibility.
He stepped forward. "Then bind me."
The ruin trembled again, but did not collapse. The figure surged forward and vanished into him. The circle flared. The glyphs on Kier's ring lit up—brief, precise. One by one, the lines along his spine heated, not painfully, but with depth. Memory carved into bone.
A heartbeat passed. Then two.
Kier exhaled.
Not yet power, he thought. But position.
Now, he wasn't just a visitor of Morsilith.
He was linked to its root.
He stepped back into the hallway, direction clear. The core chamber lay beneath, likely submerged or sealed. He didn't need to reach it immediately. The engine's awareness had registered him.
That was enough.
He turned toward the southern wing. The air thickened again. Not from decay—something else.
Essence.
Faint, but rich. Wild. Not shaped by technique, but by instinct.
Someone else had been here recently.
He knelt by a fractured stone tile. Ash.
Not the cold, gray kind. This was violet—left only by spiritburn. A ritual gone wrong? No. A clash.
And something had lost badly.
Kier touched the ash. It bit into his finger like dry fire. He narrowed his eyes, then wiped the residue clean.
There were only two types of people who entered Morsilith: fools chasing rumors, and those who knew better.
Neither would survive what he planned to wake.