Echoes in the Stone

The forest beyond Vel'Thara Academy didn't whisper. It waited.

Raka led the group along the narrow path, boots pressing into moss so damp it sagged like soaked parchment. Mist clung low to the roots, curling around their ankles like pale hands. The trees leaned inward, bark twisted into faint spiral patterns, their limbs clawing at the overcast sky. Even the wind seemed to avoid the place, passing high above them in silence.

"Anyone else feel like this place is... watching us?" Jace muttered, his hand resting nervously on the latch of his satchel. The vials inside clinked together like teeth chattering.

"It's just quiet," Sylva said. But her voice lacked its usual iron. Her fingers stayed locked around her greatsword's grip. "Too quiet."

Kael snorted. "You'd think someone raised in a battlefield would like the calm."

Sylva didn't take the bait. Her eyes never left the path ahead.

The morning after the siege—a memory surfaced like old blood beneath skin. She'd been ten, walking the rubble-strewn hallways of her father's keep. The sky was still red, stained by the firestorm. No birds. No shouts. Just the slow, delicate clinking of scavengers prying swords from the hands of the dead.

Sylva swallowed. "Calm isn't the same as peace."

They broke into a clearing ten minutes later, and the ruin rose like a broken tooth from the earth. A half-circle of black stone pillars jutted from moss and tangled roots, framing a jagged arch. Etched into the stones were spiraling symbols that shimmered faintly in the gloom—like they breathed.

Coren stepped forward, brows furrowed. "Spiral script," he muttered. "This place shouldn't still be standing."

"No one said it was academy-built," Kael replied, watching the glyphs.

"I'm saying it's wrong," Coren said. "It doesn't age. Nothing like this ever crumbles. Spiral sites don't rot. They remember."

Jace crouched near the arch, pulling out his magnifying lens. "Runes are directional... not suppression. They weren't holding something in."

Raka tilted his head slightly. "Then what?"

"They were guiding something out," Jace whispered.

A cold draft slid past them, carrying the faint scent of charred wood and wet iron.

Sylva unsheathed her blade with a slow rasp.

Raka stepped forward. His hand brushed a glyph near the base of the arch. Warm. Alive. Beneath the pulse, he felt... pressure. Like standing on a battlefield before the first horn sounded.

A memory stirred: ash swirling over a stone map, voices shouting over firelight, a wall collapsing in the distance. He smelled burnt leather. He blinked, and it was gone.

"Left," he said.

"Why left?" Coren asked.

"The right path collapses."

"You check it?"

"No."

They followed anyway.

---

Inside the ruin, the corridor pressed around them like a sealed throat. The walls pulsed faintly with pale veins of light, moving like something under skin. As they walked, runes glimmered on the ceiling—some cracked, some flickering, others intact and shifting slowly in shape.

Somewhere behind them, a soft crack echoed then a hollow thoom. Dust rolled out from the right passage, now sealed by rubble.

"Charming," Kael muttered.

"Thirty-eight seconds," Raka said under his breath.

The others exchanged glances.

They entered a wide chamber, half-lit by Jace's flame crystal. Pillars lined the perimeter, each inscribed with spiraling glyphs that shimmered in black-blue hues. Chains dangled from the ceiling, snapped and rusted at the ends.

At the chamber's center, a pedestal rose from the ground, and atop it sat a cube, smooth, obsidian, swirling with etched spirals that didn't reflect the light. They seemed to move inward, like the stone was swallowing itself.

"That thing is cursed," Jace said flatly.

"Don't touch it," Sylva ordered, stepping forward.

Raka didn't reply. He walked around the pedestal, eyes locked on the cube. His footsteps made no sound.

The cube hummed, not noise, but something deeper. A vibration behind his teeth. A song with no melody. A call. His fingers twitched, reaching instinctively.

"You feel that too?" Coren asked softly.

Raka said nothing.

"It's a soul anchor," Jace muttered. "Bound to something. Maybe this place. Maybe... someone."

Raka's hand hovered above the cube. Beneath the surface, something flickered.

A throne. A black helm. Fire in the sky.

He recoiled, stepping back too fast, like burned.

"Did you see?" Kael started.

"No," Raka cut in. Too quickly.

They camped in the ruin's antechamber, surrounded by faintly glowing runes. Jace's flame crystal floated near the ceiling, casting pale orange light over the group. The air was thick with the smell of old stone and faint ozone.

Sylva sat sharpening her sword. Kael paced, restlessly flipping a dagger between his fingers. Raka sat at the edge of the light, half in shadow, unmoving.

Coren settled across from him, dropping his blanket onto a mossy stone.

"You get strange when it's quiet," Coren said.

"I've always been strange," Raka replied.

Coren studied him. "You move like someone who already lived this day once."

Raka didn't answer. His hand rested on his knee, fingers twitching in patterns he didn't recognize but his muscles did. A soldier's rhythm.

"My family used to believe being remembered by power made you immortal," Coren said, voice low. "Turns out, it just makes you a better target."

Raka looked away. "I'm not trying to be remembered."

"Too late for that."

Later that night, Sylva woke with a jolt. She hadn't meant to fall asleep. Her sword lay across her lap, untouched.

The air had changed.

Raka was standing at the entrance to the hallway, half-lit by the flame crystal.

"Something's coming," he said, barely a whisper.

Jace stirred, already reaching for his vials.

Kael moved with smooth urgency, blades in hand. "What kind of something?"

From the deeper corridor, stone shifted. Pillars realigned with a grinding groan. The pedestal chamber lit with blue fire.

The cube hummed a deep, low sound, like a drum echoing in bone.

And from the far side of the room, something stepped out of the wall.

Not a creature. Not exactly.

A shape. A figure made of mist and shadow, wearing the suggestion of armor. It had no face only a hollow spiral carved where a head should be.

Raka stepped forward, barely breathing. His hand moved toward the hilt at his side, though he couldn't remember drawing it.

Kael hissed, "What the hell is that?"

Jace's goggles glowed faintly. "A memory. Anchored. Given form."

Coren backed up slowly. "Spiral-bound guardian?"

"Or worse," Sylva muttered.

The figure took another step.

Its body shimmered, fractured like glass filled with smoke. Its hands weren't hands. They were blades.

Raka felt his Ki stir, and with it. Something else.

A voice in the back of his mind whispered: "You've seen this before. You bled here."

He didn't blink.

"It's waking up," he said.

And the light died.