I. The Market That Blinked
The first sign appeared in the oldest market of Lowridge—the one built where a chapel once stood, long before the fall.
It was subtle at first.
A vendor's mirror, once inert and cloudy, began reflecting the wrong people. Children walked past, and it showed their older selves. An elder walked past, and it reflected no one at all.
By midmorning, three relics had activated in the eastern alley without input:
A cracked prayer bowl began humming in perfect thirds
A broken pendant glowed with the mark of an ancient, unnamed deity
And a wall-sigil hidden behind centuries of paint and dust began to pulse through the stone
Most civilians chalked it up to "weather anomalies" or "old magic gone twitchy."
But the priestesses of the Flickering Temple disagreed.
They called it a soft awakening—an echo that meant something forgotten was remembering itself.
They didn't say it aloud.
But one of them whispered to another:
"Kalai."
II. A Murmur in the Academy District
In the richer districts closer to the Academy of Echoes, scholars began arguing in libraries and low-lit taverns.
They discussed how anchor-based seals—long thought buried in theory—were showing up in glyph scans.
A junior archivist claimed one of the glyphs moved when he tried to replicate it.
Another swore they heard a name spoken back when they wrote it in mirror script.
The head librarian of the Third Record Hall silenced the conversations with one declaration:
"Stop writing it down."
"It's not a word anymore."
"It's a doorway."
III. The First Disappearance
Then came the disappearance.
A relic handler named Therren Veil, known for collecting fragments of pre-fall artifacts, vanished in broad daylight.
Witnesses said he was walking through the city square, stopped mid-step, and looked toward the bell tower near the mountain trail.
Then?
He was gone.
No sound.
No magic signature.
Only a faint spiral burned into the ground where he stood.
His wife, a former archivist herself, fell into silence for days.
When she spoke again, she repeated only one thing:
"He heard something we couldn't."
IV. The Cult Beneath the Bellforge
Under the city, far beneath the Bellforge ruins, the cult watched and waited.
Not the masked ones from Savant's Hollow—but a smaller cell, still loyal to the spiral, but working in quieter ways.
Their leader—a pale woman with glass-threaded veins and a red stone embedded into her wrist—stood before a shrine built of fractured glyph-sheets and bone.
"The world is leaning again," she whispered.
"It's tilting toward the edge it once fell from."
Her followers bowed.
"Do we awaken the Hand?"
"No. Not yet."
"We are still waiting for the seventh."
She pressed her palm against a cracked mural, etched with a spiral cradling a burning city.
"But he's already dreaming."
"And soon…"
She smiled.
"…he'll walk toward the sound."
V. Whispers Among the Faithful
Back on the surface, temple-goers began having strange dreams.
One young acolyte claimed she saw a boy wearing a spiral across his chest, standing at the edge of a burning field.
Another swore she heard a phrase repeated in her prayer trance:
"The anchor has loosened."
"Prepare for the echo."
The temples tried to downplay the panic.
But inside the walls, their scribes were drawing new sigils.
Protective ones.
Because what stirred now was older than divinity and deeper than heresy.
VI. And in the Mountains…
Farther up the ridge, a hunter returning from the fogwood trail claimed to have seen a light in the rocks.
Not fire.
Not lamplight.
Something within the mountain.
A pulsing.
Like a heartbeat.
The Academy ignored the report.
But one instructor—gray-robed, one eye clouded—took the note and walked it to the deepest wing of the vault records.
There, he pulled out a sealed scroll marked Kalai in forgotten script.
And whispered:
"So it begins."
VII. Back at the Orphanage
Kai sat quietly beneath the fig tree, sharpening a stick against stone.
The shard pulsed.
The same rhythm as before.
Only now… it wasn't the only thing.
Something far away was matching it.
Echoing it.
Calling back.
Lina found him like that—quiet, brow furrowed, eyes searching a sky that didn't hold the answers.
"They say someone vanished in the city," she said.
"Relic stuff. Strange symbols."
"I know," Kai whispered.
"How?"
He didn't answer.
But the shard glowed faintly.
And far below them, in the city's carved bones, the world continued to shift.