The cavern glowed like the throat of a star pressed against the earth. Its walls were clad in long, tapering crystals—some clear as frozen breath, others clouded like ice hoarding a thousand trapped bubbles. Between them ran hairline fractures, glittering as though dusted with salt-light. The cold bit at the skin. It was not a simple chill, but one with intention, like a wind that knew exactly who had just arrived—threading through bone, sliding into the joints, piercing the pores until each breath carried the tang of iron.
Rae halted a step from the lip of the stone terrace. Her eyes adjusted to the blaze ricocheting in a thousand directions, until her own reflection broke into shards across the crystal faces, each fragment gazing back in watchful silence. She inhaled—and the scent here was strangely familiar, like beach sand roasted far too long. A thin, burnt bitterness that twined itself into the cold. If the earth could weep, Rae thought, this would be the smell of its tears.
"Don't breathe too fast," said Irix. The Warden's voice carried no echo, yet seemed to stand in many places at once, like a line doubled over itself. "This cavern favors rhythm. It listens."
Rae nodded, gripping the seams of her gloves, steadying the tremor she refused to name as nerves. "Glassveil," she murmured, repeating the name the guides had whispered. "Odd name."
Irix's smile was a thin arc. His face—usually greenish under the glow of corridor fungi—was here brushed with a fleeting, electric blue. "The name comes from an old habit. There used to be a sheet of something transparent at the mouth of this cave; thin as gauze, hard as a blade. That was… before the cracks began to remember."
"Remember?" Rae turned to look. Beneath her boots, the floor felt slick—not with water, but with glass dust so fine it was untouched by time.
"Cracks usually mean forgetting." Irix moved forward, his thick robe sweeping up dust that caught the light in faint chimes. "But these are different. Every line keeps something. They rewrite the world they've touched—how sand is steered, how men and not-men walk. You'll see."
Rae tried to laugh, but it escaped as a short breath. "You make it sound like we're here to read a book."
"We are." Irix brushed a crystal wall with his fingertips. "Only, the pages are sharp."
⸻
They descended three terraces, each marked by crystal pillars taller and thicker than the last. When struck by light, the pillars wove a fine net of shadows across the vaulted ceiling, so that walking here felt like moving beneath a frozen lake—light trapped in motion, shivering.
Among the pillars Rae heard a sound she first mistook for the rustle of her jacket or the scuff of her boots. But the rhythm was too precise for accident.
"Listen," Irix said, halting. Rae obeyed. Silence—then: ting… ting… ting.
Not metal. Not water. The sound was like two crystal goblets meeting far away, repeating at almost even intervals, quickening slightly when they stepped forward. Rae held her breath. Something moved behind a pillar.
It was knee-high, its body slender as a sword-blade, translucent, threaded with pale veins of soft luminescence. Its face—if one could call it that—was a cascade of facets catching light and scattering it into fleeting gleams. It tilted its head at Rae, and its jointed, prism-like fingers tapped together, producing the crystalline chime she had heard.
"Silicae," Irix whispered, as though naming an old friend. "They rarely show themselves. Don't move quickly."
Rae's knees locked instinctively. The creature stepped closer and tapped the floor with the tip of its foot: three beats, a pause, two beats. Rae glanced at Irix.
"A greeting," Irix murmured, replying with his staff—glass, not wood—against the stone. Three taps, pause, two taps. The Silicae's chest brightened in a brief flare, then dimmed. It spun once, as though aligning itself to unfamiliar stars, then bounded away, leaving a fading chime in its wake. Rae noticed other shapes watching from a distance—three, maybe four. They made no noise; they pressed silence tighter.
"Are they… guards?" Rae asked carefully.
"Not in that sense." Irix resumed walking. "They are older than the idea of guards. They are the cavern's memory given slender bodies. Don't fear them. If you don't break their rhythm, they'll let you read."
"And if I do?"
Irix raised an eyebrow, recalling something from long before Rae's birth. "Don't."
⸻
The final terrace curved inward into a broad, bowl-shaped hollow. At its center hovered a flat crystal disc, suspended a hand's breadth above the floor on slender, glassy pillars no thicker than wrists—pillars that stopped short of touching the disc, yet held it effortlessly. Around it, the cracks in the walls converged, and where they met, light pooled, as though the fractures were rivers channeling starlight to a single mouth.
"This is the reading table," Irix said. "Place your hands here, palms down, fingers spread as if to catch the rain."
Rae swallowed. "Is it… safe?"
"No." Irix traced a hairline on the disc's surface. "But we aren't here for safety, Rae. We're here for truth."
Some answers are better kept in the mind than on the tongue. Rae chose silence, pulling off her gloves and resting her hands upon the stone. The cold was bottomless, like touching the skin of a well that had no end. She braced for pain—but instead came something quieter: a distant drizzle falling from the cavern's dome, passing through layers of frozen water, touching the tiny bones in her wrists. The disc quivered faintly, like a sleeping animal aware of a new hand on its back.
"Breathe in sync," Irix instructed, standing before her with one palm pressed to the wall, the other raised as though holding an invisible thread. "Three counts in, five counts out. Repeat."
Rae obeyed. At the third breath, the wall cracks deepened their glow—soft at first, then brightening, then unfurling like frost growing leaves of ice. The Silicae gathered silently at the rim of the hollow, their bodies angled toward her.
"Look," Irix said gently. "Let yourself be seen."
Light dripped from the cracks—an odd phrase, yet it was exactly that: tik… tik… tik—not water, but a brittle tone that broke each time it struck the disc. From the dripping came an image: first black mist, then silver ash, then lines drawn by no visible hand.
A man appeared. His mouth was open, yet no sound came. His eyes reflected the same light as the cavern's glow, but within his irises spiraled a pattern that seemed to breathe. He lifted his hand as if speaking to someone unseen. Behind him, seven more figures—men, women, some still in youth. Their clothes were tattered, their hands calloused, and their stares carried the weight of labor, not mere misdirection.
"They're human," Rae whispered. Her skin prickled. "Miners."
Irix said nothing, only matched her breath. "Continue."
The scene shifted to a narrow cavern: low ceiling, sanded floor casting hard-edged reflections. The man—or his likeness—pushed a short cart with unfamiliar wheels. His mouth opened again in a soundless shout. This time a crack to Rae's right shivered. The absence of sound was louder than any noise she'd ever heard, filling the spaces between her breaths.
A chill scraped her nape. The mute scream etched a spiral beneath her sternum. She glanced down—and saw, just for a heartbeat, a faint shimmer on her skin: a spiral formed of light-points fine as dust, pulsing, then vanishing.
"Irix," Rae breathed. "Am I—"
"Yes," he said, eyes catching the wall's reflection. "I see it."
"What is it?"
"A map," he said, tapping the air above the disc. At once, the image shifted: hands tracing patterns in glass-sand—not letters or numbers, but a spiral that contracted and bloomed, a chart for movement rather than distance. "A rhythm map."
The Silicae's joints struck the floor, echoing the spiral's tempo. The cracks brightened and dimmed in turn until the cavern felt like lungs learning to breathe again.
Rae closed her eyes. The spiral spoke—not in words, but in bone-deep timing. She was no longer copying the rhythm; she was part of it.
"You respond well," Irix murmured. "Resonance."
"I don't even know what I'm doing."
"Because it was done long before you arrived. Something in you remembers."
The vision shifted to an underground workshop: stone tables, tools made of mineral bone—and a machine Rae recognized in outline: frame, levers, great gears. Not a surface-world machine, not entirely, but the thought of a machine shaped in stone. A dark-skinned, gaunt man stood before it, his eyes fierce despite his weariness. He lifted his palm to the device—fingers spread like Rae's.
He screamed without sound. The cracks blazed in answer, and the machine sent a thread of light along its gears to a small disc on the table. The disc flashed, dimmed, and etched a spiral.
"Alignment operator," Irix whispered, as if brushing dust off an old lie. "That's what the palace calls it."
"Aligned with what?" Rae asked. The cold was no longer an intruder—it had merged with her pulse.
"With the cracks," Irix said. "With the cavern's memory cycles, the Core Source's tides. With the rhythm that moves everything here without moving at all."
Rae gave a tight, nervous laugh. "I'm just—"
"—someone who carries a spiral map in her chest," Irix finished, his gaze neither accusing nor letting her escape. "Rae, look at me."
She did. His face bore the lines of both age and burden.
"You're saying I'm—"
"—the one I've been searching for. Not for me—for the truth we need."
The image jumped: a narrow tunnel, figures dragging each other, carrying a small disc that blinked like a stone heart. Their panic was practiced, disciplined. Light in the cracks pulsed rapidly, matching the Silicae's frantic tapping.
"This," Irix said, voice heavy, "is when it all changed."
"What were they facing?" Rae began—but the answer came as a face.
It wasn't fully human. Glass-slick skin, eyes too deep, a smile grown from nothing. Behind it, the cracks looked pulled, as though threads were being yanked from a woven cloth.
"Overlord," Irix mouthed—or thought, and Rae felt the word ripple through the disc.
The figure raised its hand. Another spiral glowed in its palm. Its lips moved—and Rae heard a drawn-out chime, like glass blades singing. The cracks obeyed, some glowing, some darkening. The miners moved like stars rearranged.
The vision faded. Rae gasped, dizzy. The Silicae dimmed, then slipped away.
"Enough," Irix said. "For now."
Rae lifted her tingling hands, the spiral gone—or hiding. "Why show me this?"
"Because Glassveil chooses no side," Irix said. "It remembers every hand that marks it. Miners, Silicae, Wardens, even the Overlord. Each crack is a sentence."