They buried the silence in movement.
After the constructs vanished and the glyph-spire dimmed, Cassiel declared they should keep moving—ever forward, as if distance could delay the truth of what they'd seen. What they'd felt.
Kael walked with his hands tucked into his cloak, the faint tremble in his fingers hidden from view. Not from fear. Not even fatigue.
From the resonance.
Whatever had awakened inside him hadn't settled. It pulsed in the corners of his awareness, not yet violent, but watching. Waiting.
The Gatewalk had torn something open, and Kael suspected it wasn't just in the world around them.
It was in him.
The group had narrowed to twenty-two.
Five had never arrived at the spire. Another three fell during the construct attack—shattered, scattered, or simply erased by the unnatural things that bled through the void.
Cassiel hadn't acknowledged the losses.
"Push through," he'd said. "We're being measured."
That was true.
Kael could feel it too.
Not eyes.
Not watchers in the traditional sense.
Something older. Something conceptual. Like the world itself was judging them, weighing their shape and thought and soul.
And it didn't care for lies.
They made camp beneath the skeletal remains of what might once have been a temple. Bleached pillars jutted out of the ground like broken fangs, twisted and half-submerged in the crimson soil. The sky above had turned deep violet, but the "light" it cast wasn't warm or even clear—it simply existed, like a concept painted over the horizon.
Cassiel kept watch with two others. Veyra meditated a few feet away, her mind flickering through illusions that shimmered with faint violet heat.
Elias approached Kael, wordless, and handed him a dry, tasteless ration.
Kael raised a brow. "You're not going to ask what I did earlier?"
Elias sat cross-legged, setting down his own share of food. "You don't look like you know what you did.
Kael didn't answer. He chewed in silence.
Elias nodded to the sky. "This place... it's like someone tried to copy reality from memory and got half the details wrong."
Kael glanced around. "It's unstable."
"Deliberately," Elias said. "I've read about Shard Realms. They're not places—they're... echoes. Traumas. Leftovers from the world before the System codified it. And the Gatewalk drags us into them to see what breaks first—our bodies or our minds."
Kael's eyes narrowed. "You sound like someone who's done this before."
Elias looked away. "Not exactly."
A pause.
Then, softer: "My older brother walked a Gate three years ago. They said he passed."
Kael studied him. "They lied?"
"No," Elias said. "They just never clarified what passed through."
That night, Kael dreamed of mirrors.
He stood in a field of glass—each shard floating, turning, and within each, a different version of himself. Some were stronger. Some twisted. One wept blood. One smiled with no eyes.
They spoke, but not in words.
They thought into him.
And in the center of them all was a figure shrouded in veils. Not cloth. Conceptual. As if it existed only partially in this realm. It reached toward him—and Kael stepped back.
When he woke, the shardlight sky was still pulsing.
And a notification hovered just beyond his vision:
[Veilcore Stabilization: Incomplete]
[Illusion Drift: Passive field expanding. Observation distorted.]
Kael sat up slowly.
Across the camp, Elias was already awake. Watching the woods.
Not sleeping.
Still.
A rustle to his right made Kael turn.
It was a girl—thin, red-haired, face drawn but not weak. Her uniform was stained, the left sleeve ripped and re-sewn with thread that didn't match.
She met Kael's gaze without hesitation. "You were the one who broke the pattern in the fight."
Kael blinked. "What?"
"You moved," she said. "And didn't move. All at once. You confused them. You gave the others time to kill."
He looked at her more closely now. She hadn't said a word during the fight. He'd barely registered her presence at all.
"And you are?"
"Rei," she said. "From the Graymarch district."
"Not noble?"
"Not important," she said dryly. "I'm here because I beat everyone else in my region by too much to ignore."
Kael didn't smile, but something close touched the edge of his voice. "Not bad."
Rei crouched beside the makeshift fire pit. "I don't need to be in charge. But I'm not going to die because I let someone else make all the decisions."
Kael's gaze flicked to Cassiel across the camp.
"He's going to get someone killed," Rei said simply.
Kael nodded. "Probably more than one."
She looked at him.
Then, unexpectedly: "Stick close. You're not stable yet, but you're... different."
Kael frowned. "Different how?"
Rei stood. "You don't react like the rest of them. You don't panic. You calculate."
She walked off without another word.
Kael watched her go.
And for the first time since stepping through the Gate, he didn't feel entirely alone.
The next day, they found the first broken cohort.
Three bodies. One dismembered beyond recognition. One with their throat carved out in a spiral pattern. The last was impaled on a construct's blade, half-melted into the ground like they'd tried to phase through it—and failed.
A fourth student knelt nearby, alive but barely.
Her name was Anya. Pale-skinned, Path of fleshweaving—light healing and regeneration. She'd used every bit of it and still barely clung to breath.
They carried her back to the rest of the group.
Rei and Elias took point without asking.
Cassiel didn't argue.
Kael watched them all with a cold clarity.
The Gatewalk wasn't about challenge.
It was about attrition.
[System Sync Update]
Prototype Node Progress: 34%]
Echo Affinity Detected. Matching in progress…]