There were still places untouched by the Shatterwake.
Not because the wave of it hadn't reached them, but because they had chosen not to look.
In the deep, stone-choked ravines of the continent's spine, far from floating citadels and memory-lit skies, there was a city buried in silence.
It had no name.
The people there had forgotten how to say it.
They called it Below.
And beneath its lowest tier, wrapped in roots and old promises, a girl dreamed.
She was twelve when the bells stopped.
Not the Bleeding Bell — that had never reached Below — but the stone chimes, the sound that echoed from the Coreward Vein, a massive living artery of light that ran under the foundation of the city. Every day since she could remember, the Vein had pulsed once at sunrise, and again at nightfall.
A heartbeat.
Then, one day, it didn't.
That was the first time she heard the voice.
"You are not broken yet. But you will be. And that is when you'll begin."
Her name was Nara.
Her hair was the color of rain-drenched rust, her eyes too pale for the dark tunnels, and her hands always bruised from climbing through rusted scaffolds. She had lived her whole life underground. Her world was lit by fungus lamps and the slow drift of luminescent spores from the Vein.
She had never seen stars.
She did not believe in skies.
But she dreamed of a boy with silver eyes and fire in his chest.
And she was starting to remember his name.
In the waking world, Nara walked through the Hollow Steps — the winding market tunnels carved by the city's ancestors. She wore a coat of stitched leather, scavenged from old priest robes and rope-threaded armor. People didn't speak to her.
She was a dreamer.
They whispered that she was touched. That the Vein had taken her soul and replaced it with light.
And maybe it had.
She could still feel it humming — somewhere beneath the stone, buried, yes, but alive. And now, since the pulse had stopped, she could hear things between the cracks of the world.
Footsteps in tunnels that were sealed.
Laughter in rooms filled with dust.
And sometimes, the flicker of a name: Kael.
That morning, she woke with a nosebleed and a single thought etched into her skull:
The world above has changed.
And it's coming for you.
She stole her way into the Inner Sanctum that night.
No one went there. Not anymore. The priesthood had collapsed two generations ago, their temples hollowed out and used for fungus farming and water storage. But the Vein's chamber — the Core — was still guarded by the oldest wards. She had learned how to bypass them from her grandfather, long before his mind had faded.
The walls inside the Core glowed faintly, pulsing with blue veins of energy, but that was just the surface.
Nara dropped to her knees and pressed her palm to the stone.
The world shivered.
A wave of images poured through her — not memories, but impressions.
Flames blooming in cities of glass.
A figure walking through ash with a sword that glowed like truth.
A mountain breaking open to reveal a library of screaming names.
She gasped.
Blood ran from her nose again, thick and black.
And then came the voice:
"The world wakes. And you are its mirror."
She fell back, choking on air that suddenly smelled of ozone and fire.
Above her, the Core lit fully for the first time in centuries.
Someone was coming.
And she had a name to give them.
Far away, on the edge of the Dreammar Cradle, Joe Kael stood in a forest where leaves shimmered like coin-silver and trees whispered like old friends. He had followed the crystal map for three days now, and it was leading him — not to a place, but to a pulse. Something beneath the surface.
His hand drifted to the hilt of the Truthbrand.
It vibrated softly.
Something's waking.
At the edge of a river made from mirrored water, he saw it.
A rift.
Not large. Not hostile. Just… open.
From it flowed a familiar energy — not Spiral-born, not Hollow-touched.
But Vein-aligned.
Joe stepped to the edge.
The Truthbrand pulsed, and a name bloomed in his mind.
Nara.
In Below, Nara sat beneath the pulsing Core, a rune of light now burned into her hand — a spiral sun, broken and whole all at once.
People in the upper tiers whispered that the dreamer girl had gone mad.
But the deeper voices, the ones that came from between stone and soul, murmured something else:
"She's not dreaming."
"She's remembering."
And somewhere across the thread that linked them both, Joe took a breath.
The Waking World wasn't his to carry alone anymore.
It was hers too.
And maybe others.
Nara stood.
Eyes burning.
And for the first time in her life, she whispered a name she didn't know how she'd known:
"Kael."
End of Chapter 18: Those Who Stayed Sleeping