Chapter 8 part : 1
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pov: cael
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The land changed again.
It does that here—without sound, without warning. One moment you're walking on scorched obsidian cracked like ancient glass, and the next the ground hums, exhales, and reconfigures underfoot. This place doesn't remember being solid. It's trying to become something else—like it forgot what stability feels like.
We move in a line. Jin leads now, mapping the pulses beneath the crust. Vaelen follows just behind him, blade in hand, scanning the edges of the mist. I'm at the rear. No one says it, but I know why.
Not a position of trust. A position of caution.
The silence between us is different today. Not just tired, not just survival. It's weighted.
"Left," Jin says, voice clipped. He doesn't look back.
Vaelen veers with barely a pause. I follow. I don't ask why. I can feel the pull anyway—the Gate's rhythm tilting us like we're walking along the edge of a massive heartbeat.
Every few steps, the ground beneath me shifts like breath caught in stone. The ash curls strangely around my boots—backward, like a reversed tide.
"We're near a pressure vein," Jin says over his shoulder. "Gate tectonics are flexing."
Vaelen scoffs. "This entire realm is a pressure vein."
"I'm saying if we stay on this line, we'll hit a convergence point."
He doesn't need to explain it. Even I can feel it now—a low vibration in my chest that doesn't sync with my heartbeat. A second rhythm. Always the second.
It flared again last night. The rune on my wrist didn't glow, but I swear I could hear it. Not sound. Thought. Like something beneath the fracture whispering between the lines of my breath.
"Another flare incoming," Jin mutters, slowing. He lifts his wrist-band. The runes are flickering yellow now—erratic. "We need to shelter before the crust slips."
"There's a ridge ahead," Vaelen says, eyes sharp. "I saw the edge of it past the next basin."
Jin nods and picks up the pace.
I follow, but every step feels off. The world's curvature is wrong here. The light doesn't come from above—it bleeds in from angles I can't name. A violet glare from somewhere beneath the horizon, casting shadows in directions that shouldn't exist.
And always that hum.
It's louder now. Not a sound. A presence.
I stumble once. Catch myself.
Jin glances back. Just for a second. A flicker of concern—or suspicion. Hard to tell, lately.
Vaelen doesn't look. He hasn't looked at me since we broke camp.
The mist curls tighter the further we go. It doesn't feel like fog anymore. It feels like breath held too long.
Suddenly, Jin stops.
I halt too quickly behind him and almost crash into his back.
Before I can ask, he points.
The basin ends in a jagged drop—a ledge of fractured stone that hangs like the mouth of something ancient. Beyond it: the ridge Vaelen saw. Beyond that…
Movement.
Just for a second. A shimmer. Like something slithered between dimensions.
Then gone.
"Tell me you saw that," Jin says.
"I saw it," Vaelen replies.
"I felt it," I whisper. My hand twitches at my side. The rune there burns faintly—just for a heartbeat.
Jin takes a slow breath. "We're near something old."
Vaelen tightens his grip on the blade. "We're always near something old."
"No," I say. "This is different."
And it is.
I feel it in my ribs, in the echo where the second pulse lives.
This isn't just Gate residue.
It's something watching.
Waiting.
And we're walking into its teeth.
We rest at the edge of the ridge. Not because we're tired—though we are—but because the ground won't let us go further yet.
The stone here feels... recent. Not like it was built or left, but grown. Its surface is veined with silver channels that pulse faintly when touched—organic and wrong. Jin brushes one with the edge of his boot and jerks back when it throbs beneath the contact.
"Don't touch the marrow lines," he mutters, more to himself.
Vaelen crouches near the far slope, watching the lowlands beyond like they're planning an ambush. He doesn't speak.
Jin sets down a small drone—a salvaged recon unit, shaped like a silver beetle with burn marks across half its plating. He hooks it to a stabilizer node and lets it crawl over the rock.
He watches its feed on his wristband. Doesn't say anything.
I sit with my back to a spiraled stone—half-buried, vaguely skeletal. Maybe fossil. Maybe architecture. Either way, it breathes.
That's the part I'm trying not to think about.
I stare down at my hand.
The mark is still there—faint now. The rune from the ash. It doesn't glow unless it wants to, and right now it's content to sleep like a serpent in warm soil. But I can still feel it—itching, like a forgotten memory just under the skin.
I close my fingers into a fist.
> Fractured.
The word isn't spoken aloud.
But I hear it.
It slips through the cracks of my thoughts like water through a broken pipe.
I glance at Jin. He's still focused on the drone feed.
Vaelen, unmoving.
Neither of them reacts.
Only me.
That's the worst part.
It's always just me.
> He listens when you're alone.
The voice doesn't sound hostile.
It doesn't sound kind either.
It just is. Deep. Patient.
It doesn't belong in my head, but it fits there too easily.
I reach into my coat pocket.
Fingertips brush metal.
The strip of synth-paper. The same glyph. The same curve and mirrored tail.
I haven't shown it to Jin since that night. Haven't looked too hard at it either.
But now the rune feels awake in my pocket. A second heartbeat.
Across the stone, the recon drone stops moving.
Jin frowns. Taps a command.
Nothing.
He kneels and pulls it back manually. The shell is cold. Too cold.
"It froze," he says quietly.
"How?" I ask.
"No frost out here."
Vaelen stands. Blade already drawn.
The wind has changed.
Only slightly. But we all feel it.
A current sliding the wrong direction.
Jin looks up, expression tight. "Something nearby is bleeding heat from the local layer."
He doesn't mean weather.
He means presence.
The Gate doesn't just send things through.
It builds them. Shapes them. Learns from us. Repeats patterns it shouldn't be able to remember.
And right now… I think it's remembering me.
Not me now.
Me before.
Or the version I was supposed to be.
---
The pulse beneath my ribs slows—but not in the way that brings peace.
It's too deliberate.
Too still.
I'm starting to think this thing inside me isn't reacting to the Gate anymore.
It's syncing with it.
I press my palm to the stone behind me—just resting, just grounding myself.
But the moment skin touches surface, I feel it.
Not warmth. Not cold.
Recognition.
Like the Gate itself is exhaling around my fingers. Accepting. Bracing.
I don't speak. I can't. My mouth is dry. My breath hitches like it's caught on something I can't see.
Jin and Vaelen still haven't noticed.
They wouldn't.
They see the world in patterns and probabilities.
But this isn't that.
This is older than probability. This is myth cracking its knuckles inside a living body.
My body.
I hear something then—quiet, like a whisper folded between two thoughts. A voice without shape, but layered with age.
> "The fracture was not your fault."
A beat.
Then:
> "But you will be asked to finish what others feared to begin."
I pull my hand away like it's burned.
But there's no mark. Just the same skin. Same dirt.
Same breath that doesn't feel like mine anymore.
---
I look at Jin and Vaelen again.
They don't know.
They can't know.
If they knew how the mark hums when I'm not looking…
If they knew how I can sometimes feel the terrain before we reach it…
If they knew what I heard during the collapse…
Would they stay?
Would they already have tried to put a blade through my chest and called it mercy?
I don't want to be this.
Whatever "this" is.
I don't want to fracture.
But I don't think I get to decide anymore.
---
I rise slowly. The stone shivers underfoot as I move.
No tremor. Just… anticipation.
Like it knows I'll come back.
Like it's counting on it.
Jin glances at me. "You alright?"
"Yeah."
Lie.
"Just… dizzy."
Vaelen doesn't look. Doesn't ask.
He knows it's not dizziness.
He's waiting for the crack to widen.
And he'll be ready when it does.
Not to help.
To end it.
Just in case.
---
Jin adjusted the field stabilizer on his wrist, watching its flickering runelight pulse against his skin with diminishing frequency. The mist had crept closer again, dense and heavy, curling low across the ashen ground like it knew their names.
Ahead, Cael stood motionless—his back to the others, one hand lightly brushing a shard of ridge-stone as if tracing something only he could feel.
Jin didn't call to him. Not yet.
Instead, he turned slightly to where Vaelen crouched at the edge of a half-collapsed ridge, his movements sharp and deliberate. The Veyari noble was tracing a defensive glyph into the earth with the butt of his blade—shallow, efficient, exact.
Jin hated how clean it was. How confident.
"How long have you been thinking it?" Jin asked without looking at him.
Vaelen didn't pause in his carving. "Since the second pulse."
"You could've said something."
"You'd have ignored it."
Jin's jaw tensed. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder harness. "You're not seriously proposing separation protocol."
"I'm proposing we survive," Vaelen said, standing. Dust cascaded off his coat as he turned. "And that means preparing for the worst."
"Cael's not the worst."
"Not yet."
Their eyes locked across the sliver of space between them. Jin felt the pressure behind Vaelen's words—controlled, cold, sharpened by a lifetime of hierarchy and war doctrine. But there was something else there too.
Fear.
Buried beneath all that certainty.
"I'm not abandoning him," Jin said.
"You might not get a choice." Vaelen's voice didn't rise. If anything, it softened, and that made it worse. "If the Gate chose him, if the glyph roots we've seen are responding to his presence, he's not just another student anymore. He's a variable."
"He's a person."
"That too," Vaelen allowed. "But we're not in an academy test anymore. We're inside something that breaks laws we haven't even written yet. You saw what the Elarin said. Flameborn. Fractured. That wasn't metaphor."
Jin folded his arms, trying to keep the tremble from reaching his hands. "You think he's a threat."
"I think he's the threshold."
Jin looked past him toward Cael, who still hadn't moved. The red-gray fog bent slightly around his frame. Like it respected his shape. Like it recognized it.
"I trust him," Jin said.
Vaelen's silence stretched.
Then: "Then you're already compromised."
Jin turned away before he said something he'd regret. The tension between them didn't snap—it stretched, taut as wire, pulled to its limit but unbroken.
He knew Vaelen meant well, in his own rigid, survivalist way. The Veyari had no room for sentiment. That was drilled out of them early—pushed out with ritual, precision, obedience. He operated like a blade: useful until dulled, deadly until broken.
Jin wasn't like that.
He believed in people. Maybe foolishly. But belief was the only thing that hadn't betrayed him yet.
Cael had saved him once. Pulled him out of a nullfield collapse when everyone else had written him off. That mattered.
Even if Cael didn't remember.
Even if the Gate did.
---
Vaelen returned to his silent watch. His sword remained sheathed—but his stance said he was ready to draw at the first sign of change.
Jin knelt near a collapsed fragment of pylon, adjusting the proximity runes. The air was pulsing oddly. Not just pressure. Not just heat.
Rhythm.
He blinked. Rechecked the calibration.
The pulse was… matching something. No, not matching. Echoing.
Jin looked toward Cael again.
Cael wasn't just syncing with the Gate.
The Gate was syncing with him.
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