Noa woke to ink-stained fingers and a splitting headache.
The desk lamp flickered weakly, casting long shadows across her makeshift workstation in the ruins. Her notebooks lay scattered, pages filled with jagged, frantic scrawls—glyphs she didn't remember writing. The symbols bled together, forming recursive loops that made her vision swim.
*"Serrin..."*
The whisper slithered from the walls.
Noa froze. It wasn't the first time she'd heard it—just the first time it had used her name.
She pressed her palms to her temples, willing the voice to be exhaustion, a hallucination. But the air in the chamber was too still, too *expectant*. The glyphs watched her.
A boot scuffed against stone.
Malvek stood in the doorway, arms crossed, his expression unreadable. "You slept down here?"
Noa straightened, wiping her hands on her trousers. The ink didn't smudge. "I must have dozed off."
Malvek's gaze flicked to the notebooks, then back to her. "You were talking in your sleep."
A chill prickled her neck. "What did I say?"
"Nothing human."
The new chamber was hidden behind a rusted iron door, its hinges long sealed with corrosion. Malvek hadn't wanted to show her. But Noa had seen the way his hands shook when he thought she wasn't looking. He was afraid—not of the ruins, but of what she might find.
The door groaned open.
Inside, the walls were covered in a sprawling mural—not just glyphs, but figures. People with mouths open in silent screams, symbols pouring from their lips like smoke. At the center, a city—*Eira*—its streets choked with darkness, its sky peeled back to reveal a void.
Noa's breath caught. The mural wasn't a warning.
It was a memory.
Malvek shifted beside her. "They sealed this room for a reason."
Noa barely heard him. Her fingers traced the largest glyph, a spiraling mark that pulsed in her vision like a living thing. The moment she touched it—
*—she was falling—*
*—not through space, but through time, through layers of forgotten centuries—*
*—she saw the city before it was ruins, saw the moment the sky split open and the whispers poured in—*
*—saw herself standing in the ruins, smiling, her eyes black with glyphs—*
Noa gasped, stumbling back. The vision shattered.
Malvek grabbed her arm. "What the hell was that?"
Noa's voice was raw. "It's not a language. It's a *key*."
The whispers grew louder.
They coiled through the tunnels, threading into Noa's thoughts until she couldn't tell where the ruins ended and her mind began. She caught herself mouthing the words under her breath, her tongue shaping sounds that shouldn't exist.
Malvek watched her like a man waiting for a bomb to detonate.
"You need to stop," he said finally, cornering her in the lab. "You're not sleeping. You're not eating. You're *chanting*."
Noa barely looked up from her notes. "I'm close."
"To what? Losing your damn mind?" He slammed a hand on the desk. "The last guy—"
"—wasn't me," Noa snapped.
Silence.
Malvek exhaled. "You're right. He didn't have whatever the hell you've got." A pause. "That's what scares me."
Noa met his gaze. "They're not just words, Malvek. They're *waiting*."
That night, Noa dreamed of the black cathedral again.
This time, the robed figures were clearer. They stood in a circle, chanting, their voices weaving into a single word—
*—her name—*
Noa woke with the word on her lips.
The ruins answered.
From the walls, the floor, the very air—a chorus of whispers, rising, overlapping, until the sound was a physical weight pressing against her skin.
*"Serrin. Serrin. Serrin."*
Noa clapped her hands over her ears. It didn't help. The voices weren't outside her.
They were *in*.
And they were getting louder.