After the Escape
Night clung to the ruins like a second skin. We had escaped the battlefield, though the echoes of war still burned on the horizon. Wind led me through the shattered forest paths, her movements silent, almost spectral, as if the chaos behind us had never touched her.
I followed, lungs still raw from smoke and exhaustion. My mind spun with fragments of fear and questions. Why had she returned? Why save me now, when every faction wanted me either captured or dead?
Wind said little, only that we needed to reach the old sanctum before the next Gate collapsed. Her voice carried no explanation, no comfort. Just urgency.
The Awakening Ritual
When we reached the sanctum—a cracked dome beneath a mountain cliff—she finally stopped. The walls were carved with symbols I could not read, shapes like spirals folding in on themselves. The air felt older here, thicker, as though time itself lingered in the dust.
Wind turned to me.
“You’ve carried something far longer than you realize,” she said. “It’s time you heard it speak.”
Before I could ask, she traced a pattern across the floor. The symbols flared to life, lines of pale light threading outward like veins. A low hum vibrated through the air, crawling into my bones.
I felt it then—a stirring inside my mind, like doors unlocking one by one.
The Voice of the Primordial Guardian
The first words rose like whispers through water. A thousand voices overlapped, neither male nor female, neither near nor far.
“You carry what was never lost… the seed of beginnings… the map of endings.”
I froze. The voices were not speaking to my ears. They bloomed inside my thoughts, threading through memories I didn’t know I carried. Images spilled across my mind: collapsing Gates, oceans of light, a single Window at the center of a storm.
The Primordial Window.
“It was the first door,” the voices said. “It will be the last.”
A Fragment of Power
Light coiled before me, taking shape not as a weapon, but as a single, burning symbol—a spiral of lines folding inward, pulsing with slow rhythm like a heartbeat.
“This is not power,” the voices murmured, “but memory. When the time comes, it will show you the path back to the source.”
The symbol sank into my chest like a falling star. I gasped, but there was no pain—only the sense of something ancient settling inside me, waiting.
Shadows Beyond the Gift
Before I could ask what it meant, the voices faded. The sanctum fell silent again. Only Wind watched me, her expression unreadable.
“Why me?” I asked.
She turned toward the darkness beyond the gates. “Because every faction will come for you now. Even the ones you trust.”
Outside, another Gate collapsed in the distance, shaking the earth beneath our feet. The sky lit with fire as if the world itself were cracking open.
And for the first time, I felt the weight of what I carried—something greater than war, greater than survival.
Something that had begun to wake.
