Weeks passed.
Noir blended into the rhythm of the Academy: training by day, whispering with the Book by night.
His glyph mastery grew steadily, quietly.
His name had not yet echoed in the tower halls—but whispers began among the professors.
The Book had bonded.
And that meant the old prophecies stirred again.
Deep inside the Vault of Applied Thaumaturgy,
Caleb stood beside a rusting steel door marked with four symbols: Energy, Time, Memory, and Void.
Professor Druan—the cold scientist from the Arcane Mechanics Department—typed a series of codes into a console.
"I shouldn't be bringing you here," he said without looking back.
"But after your Echo results, I needed to confirm something."
The door unlocked.
Inside was a suspended chamber glowing with raw glyphlight.
Within floated an artifact sealed in time: a core crystal corrupted by shadow and frozen mid-implosion.
"Ten years ago,"
Druan began, "we tried to split a shadow glyph across quantum boundaries.
We thought we could 'store' darkness in fractured dimensions.
But something… came through."
He turned.
"And left this."
Caleb felt it before he saw it.
The artifact called to him.
The Book throbbed at his side, pulsing like a heartbeat.
"This is… alive."
"It is," Druan said. "And it's whispering in Old Glyph.
A language no one's used in centuries. Except you."
Caleb stepped closer.
The glyphs around the crystal flared—reacting to him.
Druan took a step back.
"Noir. I brought you here to observe.
Not interact."
Too late.
The glyph "Merge" burned into Caleb's arm.
Shadow erupted in the chamber.
Screams of memory.
Flashes of failed experiments.
And then—
Silence.
The crystal shattered.
The entire tower trembled.
Emergency glyphs activated.
Lockdown began.
But in the epicenter stood Caleb—unharmed.
Glowing.
Changed.
The Book whispered:
"We remember now."
High above, Headmaster Veyros watched the alert from his floating sigil mirrors.
His eyes narrowed.
"So the Merge Glyph has awakened…"
He turned to a cloaked figure beside him.
"Send for the Assembly.
And alert the Inquisition Circle.
If he's not careful—"
"He'll become the Experiment."
Back in his dorm, Caleb sat alone.
Sweat on his brow.
Glyphs spiraling slowly around his wrists.
He wasn't supposed to awaken that core.
But he felt stronger.
Like a door had opened.
A flood of forgotten spells lingered in the corners of his mind.
A new word etched itself on the next page of the Book:
"Weave."