Kael moved like someone else's memory.
At first, no one said anything. He was sharper, more focused, more fluid in drills. He anticipated strikes too early. He walked like the hallways bent slightly for him. He stopped reacting to heat—his body had adapted. Or the flame inside had decided it no longer needed permission.
Jace noticed first. "Kael's shifting early," he muttered during a partnered spar.
Tiv glanced sideways. "That's not a shift. That's prediction."
Sylva said nothing. But she remembered how Raka used to move. And how that movement was never meant for this world.
That same week, the humming began. Not music. Not human. Just a low, warbling resonance that traveled through the academy walls like water through pipes.
No source. No schedule. Just a presence humming the halls awake.
Tiv followed one trail into the library archive. He left a recorder crystal running. The sound translated to a sequence of short Spiral glyphs.
He checked them one by one. They were names. Some of the names were of instructors. One of them was Raka.
Sylva was walking perimeter when she heard someone crying. She rounded the training yard and found a first-year student kneeling before a cracked Spiral seal. A glyph the team had flagged for removal two weeks ago. It should've been inert.
The student's hands were clasped. She was praying. Sylva approached slowly. "Hey. What's going on?"
The girl looked up, tear tracks down her cheeks but smiling. "I asked for help," she said. "And it listened."
Sylva froze. "Who listened?"
"The Spiral. It remembers me. It forgives."
The glyph beneath the student flared bright—soft, golden white and let out a single, pulsing tone.
Sylva yanked her away just before the flare distorted into a ring of glyphs that collapsed inward.
"Don't touch it again," Sylva barked.
"But it helped"
"No. It didn't. It's feeding."
The girl didn't stop smiling.
Sylva filed a report to Lorr. Three hours later, the entry vanished from the system. She wrote it again. Saved. But then it's gone. The file left only one word behind:
"Faith."
Jace couldn't explain the way his research had begun to write itself.
At first, it was small glyph annotations shifting a word or two. Then entire paragraphs reorganized themselves. He tried to show Tiv.
But by then, the document had rewritten itself to a single, repeating sentence: "Flame forgets. Spiral remembers."
Coren came back from the outer forest pale and shaking. He didn't speak to anyone until midnight, when Jace caught him pacing in the hallway.
"Did you see something?" Jace asked.
"No." Coren's voice was cracked. "It saw me."
He didn't sleep that night. Or the night after.
Kael stopped dreaming of Raka. He started dreaming of himself. older, standing in flame that bent toward him instead of away. His body glowed with glyphs he didn't understand. His name didn't feel like Kael anymore.
He didn't know what to do with that. So he trained more. Harder. Colder. The flames were always ready.
The next day, Lira confronted Kael during a team check-in. "You're not sleeping," she said.
"I don't need to," Kael replied.
"You're bleeding fire during cooldown."
"I'm stable."
"No, you're not. You're becoming something. You just haven't decided what yet."
Kael's eyes flickered gold. Lira stepped back. Then said, "Raka would've..."
"I'm not Raka."
"Then stop walking like you carry his ghost."
Sylva returned to the memorial wall near midnight. She hadn't planned to. Her boots led her there without thinking.
The hallway was empty. The flicker torches along the corridor swayed slightly, though there was no wind.
She stopped in front of the name: Raka. She'd passed it a dozen times. Seen it etched, plain, still.
But tonight…
There was humming. Soft. Gentle.
The lullaby. She spun. Nothing. Not a soul.
Just the humming… and the feeling that something stood behind the wall.
She stepped forward, pressed her palm against the blackstone.
It felt warm. It should've been cold. Then she heard breath. She turned around again. Nothing.
Only a Spiral glyph pulsing faintly beneath the torchlight. It hadn't been there before.
Tiv's glyph map cracked that night. Not tore but cracked. The parchment split as if something had grown inside it.
From the center, the Spiral mark bled gold ink that dried before he could blot it. There is one word At its core. It is, "Shepherd."
Across the academy, doors opened by themselves. Not wide. Just enough to creak.
No wind. No footsteps. Just the sense that something had passed through. The kind of presence that doesn't knock. The kind that doesn't need to.
And in the glass outside the observatory window, a reflection that didn't belong flickered once.
A white robe.
A spiral mask.
Eyes that saw through time.
Then gone.