CHAPTER FIVE: THE GLYPH BENEATH THE GATE (Part seven)
Zephryn stood beneath the gate, alone.
The others were gone.
Bubbalor's hum had vanished into the corridor.
Even the light in the chamber had shifted—muted, greyed, like the room no longer wished to be perceived.
Only the glyph beneath his feet remained.
Dormant.
But not silent.
Not anymore.
He closed his eyes.
There was no reason.
No conscious command.
Just something inside him reaching.
And the glyph responded.
Not with light.
Not with pulse.
With feeling.
A pressure slipped beneath his skin.
Not pain. Not sharp.
Weight.
Like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing the ground you trusted was never real to begin with.
And in that weight—
A flash.
A hand.
A blue sky breaking.
Water turning black.
A voice—far away, fading:
"Don't let go—"
Zephryn gasped.
Eyes flying open.
The chamber was quiet again.
But something had been taken.
Or maybe… returned.
High above, Liraen Vosk stepped back into shadow.
She didn't speak again.
But the Thren Scroll floating behind her—silent and sealed since her appointment—glowed faintly for the first time in years.
It shimmered with a word it hadn't written.
"Caelus."
Zephryn turned from the glyph.
His hand brushed the pendant at his chest.
This time,
it hummed.
Only once.
But it was enough.
And far beneath the Lyceum—beneath the floor, beneath the stone, beneath the gate the world had forgotten—
a second glyph awoke.
Not in light.
But in pulse.
It waited.
Not for him.
For all of them.