INTERLUDE: The Eyes That Watch l

  In the flickering candlelight of the hidden sanctum beneath the crumbling chapel, Baldric knelt before a circle of black stone, whispering prayers in a language older than any temple hymns. He did not know if the words reached anything real. He only knew he had to keep speaking.

  Two figures stood behind him, their shadows stretching like claws along the cracked walls. One was tall and wiry, his hooked nose casting a sharp silhouette beneath his hood. The other—a silent acolyte—watched with downcast eyes. But it was the tall man who spoke.

  “You should have killed the boy the moment he touched the sigil,” he hissed, voice low but razor-edged.

  Baldric flinched. “He was red mana. Unawakened. We needed empty vessels, and he fit the criteria.”

  “You saw the pulse!” the man snapped. “The glyph resonated with him. That shouldn’t have been possible. Only Soul Touched can survive contact with those signs.”

  “Then explain how he is unawakened,” Baldric replied. “You know that all Soul Touched—even reds—awaken an Aspect. The boy didn't awaken an aspect at the ceremony. He’s just another failure from Hollowrest.”

  The tall man’s fist slammed into the stone wall. Cracks splintered across the surface.

  “You gambled with the ritual, Baldric. If he’s Soul Touched, he can’t serve as a sacrifice. The offerings must be hollow. The threshold will know.”

  Baldric looked away. “We confirm it tonight. He’ll be taken during the night—quietly, without witnesses. If he’s empty, he will be sacrificed. If not, well I know a man looking for soul touched to experiment on.”

  “If he’s not,” the tall man growled, “it will be too late. The threshold does not suffer arrogance.”

  He turned away, his cloak sweeping behind him like smoke. “Gather the others. Prepare the circle. Take the boy. And if he resists, silence him before the breach reacts.”

  Baldric stood alone for a long while.

  He stared at the glyphs glowing faintly beneath the black stone floor. He had once believed in law, in divine order, in the protection of structure. But that had withered in the years after the gods died. In their place rose chaos and power, and Baldric—ever practical, ever disillusioned—chose the side that promised results. He didn’t care who he believed in, just as long as something answered.

  He didn’t care about the boy. But the cult could not afford a mistake—not now, not this close. The ritual had taken years to prepare. Thousands of bodies. Hundreds of vanished children. They had calculated every risk.

  The cult had long required all potential sacrifices—especially red mana children—to be tested for the spark, the rare mark of a Soul Touched. Most didn’t have it. Most were scanned, discarded, and bled dry beneath the chapel without ever knowing why. Those who were soul touched would ruin the ritual. There souls to strange to count as a sacrifice. If Shay had slipped through then he had messed up.

  Shay didn’t sleep.

  He lay on his cot, arms crossed behind his head, staring at the cracked ceiling. Kara returned late, her steps heavy. She dropped her bow beside her bunk and sat near the window without a word.

  Her silence said more than questions. She had seen something. Maybe in the temple. Maybe in someone’s eyes.

  Eventually, she asked, “Did you talked to Baldric?”

  Shay nodded. "I went to retake the ceremony but something came up."

  Kara frowned at him. "What do you mean something came up?" Shay told he about the statue about the strange voice that had spoke to him, about the storage rune he had seen even the, even the uncommon skill he had gained.

  Kara stared at him for a second before her expression twisted. “I cant believe he believed you enough to follow you into the ruin?” She shook her head. “That man doesn’t believe in anything except keeping Hollowrest from tearing itself apart. If he followed you out there, it’s because he was afraid.”

  Shay didn’t answer. There had been something off about Baldric actions—a fear deeper than anything the priest had shown before. Not fear of Shay. Fear of what Shay had touched.

  Kara rubbed at her eyes. “Get some rest. We’ll figure things out tomorrow.”

  But sleep didn’t come.

  Long after Kara’s breathing deepened into sleep, Shay slipped out of the apartment barefoot immediately making a beeline for the statue.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for—only that the glyph had not left his mind. It lingered behind his eyes when he blinked. It pulsed at the edge of thought like an itch beneath the skin. He had to see it again.

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  Maybe it was foolish. Maybe it was dangerous. But something inside him whispered that it wasn’t finished.

  He crept through the alleyways, cutting back streets and worn paths, careful to avoid the better-lit corridors where patrolling wardens or suspicious eyes might notice him. His feet moved with purpose, even if his mind hadn’t fully caught up.

  The closer he got to the old ruins, the stranger the air became—thick, weighty, pressing in around him like the hush before a scream. Hollowrest always felt forgotten. But this… this felt watched.

  He passed the broken fountain, the old market square. His steps slowed as he neared the bend in the road that would lead him back to the glyph’s resting place.

  He turned the corner—

  And something was there.

  A figure cloaked in a black robe whose back face him. Then suddenly he heard a whisper—barely a breath— and then something flashed across his vision before a sharp pulse slammed into his chest. His limbs locked. Darkness swept over him like a cloak soaked in ice.

  He never saw a face. Only a blur. Robes. Gloves. Magic.

  INTERLUDE: The Eyes That Watch ll

  Somewhere between the alley and this place, they had dragged his body down into the stone bowels of the earth, past the cracks in the world where old things slept. the boy hadn’t stirred. His breath shallow, his limbs slack. And still, they were careful. Setting the boy down the cloaked cultist reachesd into his robe pulling out a smooth bronze ring strung with twin crystal nodes and a hollow at its center. These rings came from a time long past used to check for a soul spark they were beyond rare.

  One cultist held it above Shay’s chest while the others formed a chalk circle, chanting low. The relic pulsed once in the gloom. A scan passed through shay's body like a ripple of cold water.

  Then silence. No flare. No glyphic reaction. No spark.

  They tried again. Adjusted the angle. Waited.

  Nothing.

  “He’s hollow,” one of them said. The other nodded in agreement. However they never noticed the faint, almost imperceptible light blooming inside Shays pocket. The amulet he’d found in the ruins—dormant for days—had stirred the instant the soul-scanner came near. It pulsed once, cloaking him. Obscuring him. Shielding whatever lay dormant inside from detection.

  Shay awoke to pain.

  Not sharp, not immediate—deeper. Like his nerves had been soaked in ice and threaded through with fire. A throb behind his eyes, a pressure in his skull that pulsed with every heartbeat. His limbs refused to move. They weren’t bound, not physically, but something held him down—a force humming just beneath his skin, like nails made of lightning. Fortunately he still had most of his clothes on. The familiar press of the amulet still was secured in his pocket.

  The floor beneath him was cold, uneven, and damp. Stone, but ancient. Fissured. Slick with something he didn’t want to identify. Blood, maybe. Or rot. The air was thick with it—blood and mold and incense and something else, something older, metallic and wrong, like rust scraped from the edge of a god’s blade.

  He blinked. Once. Twice. His eyelids felt heavy, weighted. But eventually, sight returned.

  And he wished it hadn’t.

  The chamber stretched far wider than any basement or cellar he’d ever seen. The walls were carved from black stone, smoothed and scorched, the cracks between each slab filled with a pulsing red-gold light that beat like a heartbeat. The glyphs—dozens of them—ran across every surface. Ceiling. Floor. Even the air shimmered with arcane residue, as if reality itself had grown thin in this place.

  A pit yawned in the center. It wasn’t just absence—it devoured light. Shadows bent toward it. The warmth in the air dropped off around its edges. Something breathed beneath that pit. Not with lungs—but with hunger. Endless and ancient.

  Just beside it stood an altar.

  It was a crude thing—rough obsidian soaked with blood that hadn’t dried, a slab barely large enough for a body. Upon it lay a black tablet etched with writhing symbols. They crawled and twisted when Shay looked too closely, as though they squirmed beneath the surface, aware of being seen.

  Figures moved around the room. Cloaked. Hooded. Their faces hidden in shadow. Their hands gloved. Their movements careful, practiced, reverent. No one spoke to one another. They didn’t need to. Every motion was part of a ritual far older than any one of them. Each step, each gesture, was inherited from blood and death and silence.

  He turned his head just enough to see the edges of the room. And then he froze.

  Bodies.

  Children.

  Dozens of them.

  Some lay still, too still. Limbs twisted or faces slack with the glassy stillness of death. Others still bled—thin streams running from wrists, eyes, mouths, soaking into etched channels in the floor that fed the pulsing glyphs.

  He recognized one—a boy from the alleys of Hollowrest who used to trade salvaged buttons and thread for fruit peels. Another was clutching a battered toy fox, its once-yellow fur now matted dark with blood.

  Shay’s chest seized. His breath caught. His stomach lurched.

  He tried to scream, but the moment the cry rose to his throat, a glyph flared beneath him—brilliant blue-white—and crushed the sound before it left his lungs. His mouth opened, but no voice followed. Only a strangled rasp, lost to the hum of magic and the soft chant echoing through the space.

  Tears burned his eyes. This was not a nightmare.

  This was happening.

  The chanting grew louder. Words bent at the edges of sound. They scraped against his mind. Not language. Not anything meant for mortal ears. They were shapes, concepts forced into syllables—things that crawled beneath sanity and hooked into memory. A language not spoken but invoked.

  A cultist stepped forward.

  Tall. Broad-shouldered. His robe was darker than the rest—lined with crimson thread. He held a jagged crystal the size of a skull, thrumming with dark violet energy. Another figure—smaller, gaunt—approached with a ceremonial dagger of bone. Their face was wrapped in blood-stained cloth, and their hands moved with trembling precision as they began tracing a spiral in the air over Shay’s chest.

  The air thickened. Magic layered itself in the room like oil, pressing down on Shay’s ribs. The glyphs glowed hotter. The floor beneath him trembled.

  And something… shifted inside him.

  A flicker. A spark. No, not heat—awareness. Behind his ribs. At the base of his spine. A presence he had never felt before, curling like smoke, unfurling like wings.

  The pain changed. Deepened. Became structured. Like something was reading him—scanning every memory, every bone, every breath. Not cruel, not kind—just exacting.

  The room pulsed. The symbols on the black tablet rippled. The pit inhaled.

  Shay’s vision tunneled, every edge curling in black. His pulse quickened, then slowed. The presence inside him pushed upward, forcing his eyes open even as his muscles convulsed.

  And somewhere—far beyond this place.

  Something opened its eyes.

  And it knew his name.