Chapter 84 – The Ashfall Accord

The days in Hollow Sky passed like dreams, slow and slippery, filled with echoes of voices not fully formed. The monastery existed out of time. At dawn, the bell did not toll. At dusk, the sun did not set in the same hue twice. The sky above the bluff shimmered with veils of magic, thin as mist, and Sera often found herself staring into it for hours, wondering if it stared back.

Lucian and Daen trained with the Concord's physical order—the Bladed Ascetics—monks who fought like ink across paper, their movements fluid, impenetrable. The Order taught through silence, through repetition. Daen hated it.

"This place is nothing but riddles," he muttered one night, hurling a practice staff across the courtyard. "I don't want wisdom. I want something I can strike."

Lucian caught the staff mid-spin and handed it back. "You can't strike what's already inside you."

Daen stared at him. "Gods, you sound like them now."

Lucian smiled faintly but said nothing more.

Sera, meanwhile, studied with the Weaveseers—those who could sense the tension in the magic that flowed like rivers beneath the skin of the world. Their leader, a woman with burn-scarred arms named Ollen, told Sera on the second day: "You are not merely a vessel. You are a map. And maps must be read."

"What if I don't like what's written?" Sera asked.

"Then redraw it."

But learning to read herself was harder than anything she had done before.

Each night, when the moon slid behind the clouds, she could feel it: something vast and cold and ancient pulling at the space between her ribs. Sometimes she thought she heard whispers in her blood—memories that were not her own.

On the seventh day of their stay, the Concord called them again.

This time, they were led into a chamber beneath the monastery, a vault carved from black obsidian and etched with sigils that shifted when you tried to read them. The Elders waited by a massive door that looked less built than birthed—organic and pulsing slightly, as if it had veins beneath the stone.

Evarra stood beside them, arms folded. Her face was tighter than usual. Concern lived behind her composed eyes.

"We have received a message," she said. "From the Ashfall Accord."

Lucian stepped forward. "They're still alive?"

"Barely. But yes."

The Ashfall Accord had been a rebel collective of scholars and mystics, once aligned with the old royal house before it fell to the serpent's influence. Their leader, Veilcarin, had vanished during the Cataclysm. Many assumed he was dead.

"They have found something," Evarra continued. "In the ruins of Marrowdeep. A key. Not metaphorical. A true one—crafted in the Old Weave, before the Sundering."

Sera's breath caught. "A key to what?"

"To the Gate of the Twinned Worlds."

Even Daen went still.

"You're saying it's real?" he asked. "The Gate's not a myth?"

"No myth," Evarra replied. "It is the last lock that separates this world from the Reverie."

A long silence followed.

Lucian asked, "What do they want?"

"They want you. All three of you."

Sera frowned. "Why us?"

"Because they believe the Gate is waking. And only a bonded locus like Sera, guarded by the twin echoes of war and mercy—" She nodded toward Lucian and Daen, "—can face what waits beyond."

Lucian met Sera's gaze. "We knew this was coming."

She nodded, eyes hard now. "Tell us where."

✦

They left at dawn, flying through the high currents aboard a Concord skysloop—a vessel shaped like an arrowhead with wings of levitating crystal and no crew but one. The pilot, a mute spiritbound monk named Verro, communicated only in gestures. Daen trusted him immediately.

The journey took three days over jagged peaks and dead seas. The world below showed the slow corrosion of reality: glass plains that hummed when clouds passed over them, forests where trees grew in spirals instead of upward, entire towns caught in a moment of time and never moving again.

"Something is leeching the pattern," Lucian said one night, watching one of those towns as they hovered above it.

Sera stood beside him. "Or something is rewriting it."

They landed outside the ruins of Marrowdeep under the shadow of what had once been a colossal tower—now little more than a half-melted fang of stone rising from ash.

Veilcarin met them at the threshold.

He had aged.

Where once there had been a firebrand—a man of vision and defiance—now stood a gaunt figure wrapped in a ragged cloak, his left arm missing from the elbow down. His eyes still burned, but it was a tired flame.

"You came," he said simply. "I didn't expect you would."

Lucian clasped his hand. "We didn't have a choice."

Veilcarin chuckled, a dry, grim sound. "None of us do anymore."

He led them into the depths of the ruin. Beneath the tower, beyond collapsed chambers and relic halls, lay the Gate.

It did not glow. It did not speak.

It was a circle of obsidian twelve feet high, framed in weavesilver, covered in runes that pulsed with a faint heartbeat rhythm. As Sera stepped closer, the runes shifted—aligning with the marks on her arms.

"She's attuned," Veilcarin whispered. "Just like the prophecy said."

Lucian stiffened. "What prophecy?"

The old man's voice dropped. "One written by the last Oracle of Hollow Sky, before she was taken. She spoke of a girl born under fracture, with a serpent's scream in her blood. She would be the key and the lock, the storm and the eye within it."

Sera didn't step back.

Instead, she reached forward.

The moment her fingers brushed the Gate, it exhaled.

A soundless surge of pressure rippled through the chamber, bending stone and wind alike. The runes flared, and for a breathless moment, all of them saw what lay beyond—

A city of mirrors, towers upside down in a sky of screaming stars. Creatures that walked like men but wore faces stitched from memory. And at the center, a throne of bone and silence.

Then the vision vanished.

The Gate dimmed.

Sera turned around, pale but steady.

"I saw it," she said. "I saw the Reverie. And it saw me."

Veilcarin was trembling. "Then it's begun."

Lucian stepped beside her. "We need to seal it. Destroy the key."

"No," Sera said, her voice calm. "We need to go through."

Daen's voice was sharp. "You can't mean that."

"I do," she said. "Because whatever's coming—it's not waiting for us. It's already here."

Behind them, the Gate pulsed once more.

And the echoes of the Reverie whispered across the veil.