Ten years had passed since the night the city swallowed Elias Varin.
The apartment where he vanished was long gone—demolished, rebuilt, forgotten.
In its place stood a thrift store called Second Life Antiques, where the scent of old wood and rusted brass clung to the air like ghosts.
Lira Kaden worked the closing shift.
She wasn't superstitious—just unlucky enough to attract strange things. Watches that stopped ticking when she touched them. The lights that flickered when she walked past. Static that clung to her skin like invisible frost.
Tonight, the air felt heavy again.
She was sorting through a box of donations that had arrived that morning—books, old trinkets, a cracked porcelain doll—when her fingers brushed against something cold.
A silver ring, tarnished and faintly warm.
It looked ordinary, but the moment she lifted it, a sharp pulse ran up her arm, like a heartbeat that wasn't hers. The metal felt alive, faintly vibrating in her palm.
"Weird…" she muttered, turning it over. Inside the band was a strange engraving—circular sigils that shimmered faintly under the flickering ceiling light.
She almost dropped it when the whisper came.
"Lira…"
Her name. Spoken softly. Inside her head.
She froze.
The shop was empty, save for the creak of wood and the faint hum of the old refrigerator in the back.
"Who's there?"
Silence.
Then again, the whisper—clearer this time.
"So long… divided… we waited…"
Her heart pounded. She set the ring on the counter, backing away, but the whisper followed, threading through the air like silk.
"Not harm… not hunger… need…"
Something flickered at the edge of her vision—shadows bending toward the ring, drawn to it like dust into a magnet. The temperature in the shop dropped. Every bulb dimmed.
Then—bang—the back door slammed open.
A gust of cold wind swept through the room, sending papers and dust swirling. The ring slid off the counter, clinking against the floorboards, spinning once—twice—
—and then it stopped.
The air vibrated. A faint shimmer spread from the ring, like ripples on water. Within it, the shadows deepened, and a shape began to form.
A figure, translucent and barely human—half mist, half light. A soul puppet, fragile and incomplete.
Lira stumbled back, colliding with a shelf. The apparition turned its hollow gaze toward her.
"You…" the voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere, "…you can hear us."
"I—what the hell are you—?"
"Bearer."
The word hit her like a hammer. The puppet raised a hand of light, pointing toward the ring.
"Take it… or be taken."
The instinct to run warred with something deeper—an invisible pull that reached from the ring straight into her chest. Her breath came ragged. And before reason could stop her, she reached out—
—and the moment her skin touched the metal again, the world shattered.
The shop vanished.
For a heartbeat she stood in a vast, endless dark, surrounded by constellations made of pulsing runes. Her reflection drifted in front of her—only it wasn't her. Its eyes glowed silver. Its veins shimmered with flowing symbols.
"Fragment found," said the reflection. "The soul stirs again."
Then she was back—
collapsing to the floor of the antique shop, gasping for air.
The ring was on her finger. It wouldn't come off.
The puppet was gone. Only faint traces of light hung in the air, fading slowly.
In the silence that followed, Lira could feel something new—a faint thrum beneath her heartbeat.
Not pain, not fear—something deeper.
Connection.
And far away—somewhere beneath the skin of the world—the other relics felt it too.
The book turned a page in a forgotten library basement.
The totem cracked open its eyes deep in a collector's vault.
The crystal pulsed beneath the sea, reflecting an image that wasn't water or light, but a man's broken face trying to reform.
The relics whispered in unison, their voices echoing across unseen planes:
"One awakens… the rest will follow."