The silence returned like a scream held too long.
It was Mira who found the trapdoor beneath the pulpit—nearly sealed shut with prayer-scrolls affixed in a star pattern, each one charred at the edges as if they'd tried and failed to contain something. Lyra crouched, examined the markings, and gave a grim nod.
"Open it."
Vellon and Leon stepped forward, prying the iron ring until the hatch groaned. It released with a gust of stale air and something fouler—burned hair, wet ash, and copper.
They descended slowly into the dark.
The stairs spiraled, narrow and hewn of black stone. At the bottom, they found a long corridor of reinforced doors and air seals—an underground shelter, likely built when Veyruun first began its terror campaigns along the borderlands.
But the seals weren't closed from within.
They were bolted from the outside.
"That's not evacuation protocol," Nico said, his voice brittle. "This… this is a prison."
Lyra nodded, her jaw set. "Open it."
The locks screeched, mechanisms grinding after years of disuse.
Inside the first chamber, the walls had melted into themselves. Charred husks—human shapes blackened to the bone—were fused into the stone. A woman's face half-turned toward the door, her scream preserved in bubbled ash. Hands stretched toward the entrance in eternal desperation.
No signs of struggle. No blood.
Only blackened reverence.
Cael stepped forward, knees tight, one hand clutching his notebook like a ward. His head tilted.
"Do you hear that?" he whispered.
There were whispers.
Echoing faintly—not from anyone speaking.
Mira's eyes shimmered violet as she focused on the room. Threads of fate twisted around her hands like smoke, reacting to her will. She reached out into the air, reading the invisible shapes.
"These weren't deaths," she said at last, voice distant. "These were offerings."
Cael staggered, grabbing the wall for support as the world tilted.
His eyes widened.
He was seeing it—not echoes of the past, but memories from lives he had lived before. Other versions of himself walking these same streets. Other choices, other endings. Alwenreach as it could have been: whole, vibrant, spared. A town that once had survivors. Hope. Escape.
But those threads had been cut, overwritten by something far darker. Something deliberate.
He barely had time to voice the thought when Arven's head snapped upward.
"Do you feel that?"
Above them, a pressure gathered. Not like thunder—like breath held in a vast, unseen chest. Like expectation.
Tamsin's eyes flared as she reached toward the surface with a sensing spell—then she screamed.
"INCOMING—!"
Then everything shattered.
The world above them caved in, not piece by piece but all at once—smoke, fire, and screaming air tearing through the tunnels. Stone cracked, steel screamed, the hauler was tossed like a toy. Heat rolled through the wreckage. The light was gone. The ground no longer knew its shape.
Suddenly it was all destruction.
And then bleach-dark.
Rain poured like ink from a torn sky. Where once was the cathedral now stood a crater, charred and steaming. Buildings had collapsed inward like petals folding shut. Fire flickered through ruined alleyways.
The team coughed and rose from the fractured ground, dazed.
Figures emerged from the smoke.
Soldiers in black and rust-colored armor, their faces hidden behind obsidian masks etched with runes. They moved with eerie precision, boots silent, weapons humming with stolen magic.
And at the center—
A woman stepped forward.
Or rather, a thing wearing a woman's shape.
Her skin shimmered like polished glass, catching the burning light of the ruined square. Her eyes were perfect mirrors, and in them—reflected not the world, but your worst self: the fear you buried, the guilt you never voiced. Her voice came in two tones—one soft and disturbingly human, the other a low, mechanical echo that spoke over itself.
"You arrived," she said, tilting her head. "As planned."
Her mirrored eyes caught the broken flames around them, and in those reflections: doubt, fear, guilt—the worst truths each soldier carried. Her voice rang twice, overlapping—a soft, almost amused whisper and a deep, synthetic rumble that vibrated through the stone.
Leon narrowed his eyes. "What the hell are you?"
The thing smiled—cruelly, distantly.
"Witness."
Then the trap closed.
The ruined square exploded in movement. From the drifting smoke, armored soldiers surged forward—dozens, no warning glyphs, no footsteps. Just the cold, brutal sound of reinforced boots on shattered stone. Their armor shimmered with crimson rune-scripts that pulsed as they moved.
Mira reacted first. "Shields up!" she shouted, flinging out a pulse of kinetic force that slammed into the nearest line, sending two flying. "We're compromised!"
But before she could charge a second wave, bright-blue binding glyphs sprang from the ground, crawling like hungry vines around her limbs. "What—dammit—!"
She fought them, every muscle tensed, but they dragged her down, twisting her midair with cruel, mechanical precision. She hit the ground hard.
"Flank them!" Leon barked, forming a shield of crackling arc-light. "Fall back—get to cover!"
A shaped detonator burst against his barrier with a shrieking hum—implosive. The shield buckled, then shattered like glass. Leon reeled back, blood streaking his brow. "Son of a—!"
Jinn blurred into motion, daggers flashing from his sleeves. "We're not that easy to catch—" He spun into the smoke, summoning a cloud of writhing shadows.
But they saw through it.
A concussive blast hit him mid-step, flinging him into a collapsed pillar. He crumpled to the ground with a gasp, barely conscious.
Rett roared. "You want a fight?!" He grabbed the nearest attacker and drove his head into the soldier's faceplate with a sickening crunch. The soldier dropped—but two more came in from behind, tackling Rett. A third slammed a stun rod into his back. He went down growling, dragging one of them with him.
Nico flared to life, magic rippling off his shoulders in waves of flame. "Get away from them!" he shouted, launching a stream of fire upward, lighting the sky in molten arcs.
But something whistled through the air—fast, silent. A null-barb. It struck him in the shoulder and bloomed with runes. His magic snuffed instantly.
Nico collapsed with a strangled grunt, fire dying around him.
And still, they came.
Even Lyra fought—moving like a whirlwind of precision, twin arcblades singing through the air. She cut down two, ducked a blast, and severed a binding spell mid-cast. "Hold position!" she commanded, breathing hard. "We regroup on my signal—"
Then the mirrored woman stepped forward.
She raised a hand, touched her temple with one finger, and spoke a single word:
"Yield."
Lyra staggered. Her body locked. Eyes wide, she let out a sharp, raw scream as golden glyphs bloomed across her skin. The spell detonated inside her mind—not to kill, but to break. She collapsed to her knees, gasping, eyes unfocused.
"No—!" Mira shrieked from where she was pinned. "Commander!"
The battlefield fell silent.
One by one, Gloamspear 9 was bound, restrained, dragged into a ring of spell-light as the mirrored woman turned away, uninterested in the wounded. The soldiers began tagging the team with locator brands, silent and efficient.
From a shattered overlook above, hidden behind a splintered stone beam and a mess of scorched debris, Cael watched—frozen.
Breath shallow. Muscles locked.
Beside him, Arven crouched low, blood running down her temple. Her hand was tight on Cael's sleeve.
"They got everyone," she whispered, horror dull in her throat.
Cael didn't answer. He couldn't.
Below, the mirror-eyed woman turned her gaze toward the ruins.
And for a moment—just a flicker—Cael thought she saw him.