The sky had turned the color of bruised pearl by dawn.
Kaelen woke with sand crusted at the corners of his eyes and the remnants of a dream that bled ash and whispers. He didn't move at first—just lay there on the basin floor, the salt cracked beneath his weight, listening.
The hum was louder now.
It didn't come from above. It came from beneath.
The Weave pulsed faintly in the world around him, like a heartbeat beneath skin. That same echo from yesterday—the one buried deep, the one waiting—now pressed more insistently, as if the memory they had disturbed had begun a slow unwinding of things long sealed.
"You heard it too," Aelira said beside him, already sitting cross-legged, sharpening her knives. Her hair was disheveled, a dark braid slung over one shoulder, but her eyes were clear. "It's pulling."
He nodded. "There's a hollow space under this basin. It wasn't here in the real world before."
"That echo you shattered… created it?"
"No," he said, standing. "It revealed it."
They reached the outcrop by midday. Kaelen used both hands and the threads of Matter around him to feel the vibrations between the stones. There was a seam—not visible, but willed into being long ago. A geometrical scar in the Weave itself. The signature was foreign, yet uncannily familiar.
"I can cut it," he said. "But it won't be a door. It'll be a wound."
Aelira nodded, pulling her cloak tighter. "Then bleed it."
Kaelen closed his eyes. Threaded his will through the fabric of space.
He sliced.
Reality parted with a silent scream.
Beyond the wound was a narrow spiral tunnel made of shifting black glass and weeping stone. It spiraled down into a dim, pulsing violet haze. Strange symbols rippled along the walls, flickering like thoughts half-forgotten.
He stepped in.
Aelira followed without a word.
The descent was slow, steep, and impossibly long.
Time bent. After a while, neither of them could tell how many steps they'd taken, or how long they'd been walking. Seconds felt like hours. Hours like days.
Kaelen finally spoke.
"The walls are made of Nullglass. Dead matter, harvested from collapsed timelines. This tunnel shouldn't exist."
"Then where does it lead?"
"To something left behind. Or left out."
They reached the bottom.
And the whispering began.
Not out loud.
Inside.
A choir of voices, indistinct, clawing into Kaelen's mind. They weren't words. They were suggestions. Colors. Memories he didn't own.
Aelira winced, clutching her head. "They're inside me."
"Don't listen."
"Hard not to."
They passed into a wide chamber.
It looked like a cathedral built for forgotten gods.
Columns of twisted bone and iron. Statues of faceless beings with elongated limbs, kneeling to an altar that held no icon. The floor shimmered with ash that never settled, floating in spirals.
Kaelen stepped forward—and the voices surged louder.
He fell to one knee, gripping his head.
Aelira rushed to him, grasping his shoulder. "Kaelen—"
"I know this place," he said through clenched teeth. "I've seen it before."
"In the echoes?"
"No," he said, standing slowly, "in the memory of my first death."
The altar pulsed.
Something beneath it was alive. Not in the flesh-and-blood way.
It was a thought, trapped.
Kaelen moved toward it. The floor resisted—literally pushed back with each step, like walking through rising water.
Aelira followed, swords in hand.
Kaelen reached the altar and pressed his palm against the cold, smooth slab.
The chamber breathed.
Stone melted.
And the altar peeled back—revealing a circular pit lined with silver runes and dead roots.
At the center hovered a heart.
Not organic. Not human.
A crystallized core of pure Weave energy—charred, cracked, and barely beating.
Kaelen stared at it.
"This… this was once the core of a First World Weaver. One of the originals. One who failed."
"Failed what?"
"To bind reality," he said. "Or to resist unmaking."
He reached forward, touching it—
The world collapsed.
Vision.
Fire without heat. Stars being born and then consumed.
A tower of infinite height collapsing inward, crushed by the weight of possibility.
A voice:
"Kaelen… you are late."
He turned.
There was no speaker. Only a shadow wearing a face almost like his own—but older. Wiser. Broken.
"What are you?" Kaelen asked.
"I was your end. Now I am your beginning."
The shadow grinned.
"Do not reject what you are. Or you will become me again."
Kaelen's scream echoed in the chamber as he snapped back into his body.
The heart was gone.
The chamber had changed.
It was weeping—walls slick with shadow, the runes now twisted and active.
Aelira stood beside him, pale and shaking.
"I saw… you," she whispered.
"In the vision?"
"No. After. You weren't breathing. And then—something in the ash smiled."
Kaelen stood.
"I have the memory now," he said. "Of who sealed this Weaver. Of why."
He turned to leave.
"We can't stay here. Not now."
Aelira followed quickly. "What did you learn?"
"That the Weave is breaking—not because of damage," Kaelen said, walking faster. "But because something inside it is waking up. Something that remembers what it was before existence had rules."
They climbed out.
The sky above the basin was darker now—less from clouds, and more as if the light itself feared what they had stirred.
Kaelen stared at the horizon.
He could feel it.
Eyes watching. Threads tightening.
Aelira stood beside him again.
"What's next?"
Kaelen answered without hesitation.
"We find the next ruin. The ones that shouldn't exist."
"And after that?"
Kaelen's silver-purple eyes narrowed.
"We stop asking what reality is."
"We start asking who's writing it."