Chapter Four: The Shattered Sigil
The Starwake cut through the upper skystreams like a blade, its aether-sails shimmering with latent charge. A storm brewed to the east—too distant to matter, too early to be there. Kaelen stood at the forward viewport, eyes fixed on the horizon where clouds pulsed with soft, unnatural light. The sigil had appeared there only hours ago, then vanished like breath on glass.
Behind him, the boy—Thane, he'd called himself—sat shackled but unharmed in the ship's lower hold. Three aether seals shimmered along the hatch, maintained by Sylrae's personal codes. Kaelen hadn't slept. Not since he'd seen that symbol. Not since the whispers had begun again.
The Bound.
He hadn't heard that name since the last days of the Throne. Since the Empress told him, half-mad and encased in crystal, that the price for peace had not been paid in gold, but in souls.
"Seven citadels for seven seals," she had said. "And one to shatter them."
Skye, the broken citadel. His home.
"Kaelen." Sylrae's voice cut through the silence, calm but tight. "We've intercepted a burst transmission. Encrypted Zephyrite code. Someone else saw the sigil."
He turned, jaw tight. "Decrypt it."
She handed him the receiver. A faint hiss of static resolved into a voice. Female. Sharp. Calculated.
"To any vessel not yet claimed by madness or flame—this is Archivist Yse of the Vault-Keepers. The sigil has appeared. Vault 9B is compromised. If you possess the Ember Key, do not activate it. The Bound are not forgotten. They are waiting. Watching. And worse—calling."
The message repeated once, then ended in silence. Kaelen let out a slow breath.
Vault 9B.
He remembered it from the old maps—sealed beneath the floating ruin of Aetherhold, once a monastery for the Skyborne Ascendants. The last place the Bound had ever been mentioned in open records.
Sylrae was already keying in the new course. "We're less than a day from it, if we cut the aether dampeners."
"Do it," Kaelen said. "And prepare the boarding crew. No one goes in alone."
She gave him a look. "You think this is real?"
He didn't answer. He didn't have to.
Instead, he moved toward the lower hold.
Thane looked up as he entered, chained to the reinforced bench, a faint shimmer still lingering around him from the triple-seals. But his eyes... they had changed. No longer just wide with fear. They shimmered faintly now—like someone looking through more than just the present.
Kaelen knelt. "What did you see? The sigil—did you see what came after it?"
Thane's lips parted slowly.
"I saw hands," he whispered. "Twelve of them. Black like coal, reaching out from the clouds. And a voice... not speaking, but humming. A lullaby."
Kaelen frowned. "A song?"
The boy nodded. "I don't remember the words. But it wasn't meant for us. It was meant for... whatever's still asleep in the vault."
Kaelen stood, cold threading through his veins.
The aetherforges had built an empire.
But what if they'd also built a prison?
And what if—after all this time—it was starting to fail?
---
Above them, the storm broke open—not with lightning, but with silence. A single tear in the sky, black and burning at the edges. And from within it, a shadow passed between clouds, too large to measure, too quiet to be real.
The wind no longer howled.
It listened.
Lore Interlude: The Bound
Long before the Skyborne Empire unified the floating isles of Aerathen, the skies were wild—ruled not by men, but by forces ancient and unseen. Among the earliest known records of pre-Empire skyfolk are the Songs of the Hollow Wind, cryptic ballads half-sung, half-whispered, and rarely transcribed. They spoke of entities that did not belong to the physical world, yet moved through it like currents through mist.
These were the Bound.
They were never named as gods. Nor demons. They were concepts made manifest: gravity that thought, storms that remembered, voids that fed on memory. The earliest Skyborne artificers, driven by fear or awe, crafted seals—immense structures of aether-forged alloy and thought-bound glyphs—binding these intelligences beneath the seven great citadels.
But the cost of binding was sacrifice. Each citadel was forged with blood from its ruling line, lifeblood intertwined with the seals. One family broken meant one seal weakened. And when Skye fell, its bloodline shattered, and with it, the first crack formed.
The Bound are not singular. They are legion, but shared in one will: Return. Reclaim. Rewrite.
It was said they could not be destroyed—only forgotten.
Until now.