The ruin rejected gods. Yet here she stood.
Cressa, clad in robes of crimson and void-black silk, stepped into the glyph-lit chamber with the grace of a queen and the weight of a wildfire. Her feet did not touch the ground; fire carried her. The world should have fought to expel her—but the glyphs around her flickered, then bent, as if cowed by her mere existence.
Even Seren's breath caught.
"This is impossible," she whispered.
Kael didn't answer.
Because it wasn't just the ruin that was struggling to hold her back—it was the world's logic. Everything Kael had studied, every encoded law of glyphic resistance, every suppression field designed to repulse Talent signatures… none of it worked.
Because Cressa wasn't just a Talent.
She was a convergence.
"Kael," she said softly, almost kindly. "You shouldn't have come here."
He stood protectively in front of the First Scholar's Journal, the ancient book still glowing under his hand.
"You shouldn't be able to," he replied.
Cressa smiled faintly. "That's what makes me dangerous."
---
Heat and Memory
The chamber trembled with pressure as she stepped forward, her hands empty but her presence aflame. Lia instinctively raised a glyph shield—Seren stepped in front of her, sword half-drawn.
Kael's mind raced. He had maybe ten seconds before the temperature surpassed survivable thresholds. Fire rolled in waves from Cressa, not simply destroying oxygen—but rewriting the room's elemental balance.
"Why?" Kael said, voice steady despite the sweat on his brow. "Why are you here, Cressa? To burn the past?"
"No," she said. "To keep it buried."
She raised a single finger.
The fire answered—not from her, but from the very glyph-stones themselves, igniting like ancient kindling.
Kael acted.
---
Scholar's Gambit
"Down!" he yelled.
He slammed his hand against the journal—and activated a glyph he'd prepared in secret: a Memory Shell.
The room exploded in light—but not heat. For three seconds, time fractured, repeating the moment just before Cressa's ignition. It gave Kael just enough time to yell:
"Seren! Now!"
Seren's blade flashed—a holy cut traced not by Talent, but by glyphic inversion, borrowed from Kael's early designs. It struck Cressa's barrier—not piercing, but staggering her.
That gave Lia time to grab the book.
Cressa snarled, eyes blazing, and the fire twisted mid-air like a serpent—but Kael threw down a mirror glyph, redirecting the attack toward the wall of failed statues.
The ruin groaned.
The statues woke.
---
The Hollow Witnesses
From the side walls, the eyeless forms shuddered. Dust fell. Limbs twitched.
One by one, the failed entrants—those who had once tried to dominate the ruin with their divine gifts—rose with blank faces and hollow cores. Not alive. Not dead.
And most terrifying of all: they remembered their last enemies.
They turned toward Cressa.
Her flame flickered.
"No," she whispered. "They shouldn't move…"
But they did.
With a hiss like crumbling paper, the first statue leapt—fast as thought—toward her.
Cressa screamed, and her body erupted in a column of flame, melting the statue mid-air. But five more followed. Ten.
Kael grabbed Lia's hand. "We run."
Seren nodded grimly, eyes never leaving her sister's silhouette in the blaze.
"Will she survive?" Lia asked as they ran.
"I hope not," Seren said coldly. "But she always does."
---
Echoes of Fire
They barely made it out of the vault as the ground collapsed behind them, the air saturated with smoke and memories that weren't theirs. The glyph-circuits flickered violently. The ruin was rejecting everyone now—even Kael.
At the surface, the stars greeted them with icy clarity.
They had the Journal.
But as they caught their breath, Kael looked down at the page still open in his hand.
A new glyph had appeared there—burned into the margin by divine fire, even though it hadn't touched the book.
It wasn't one Kael had written.
It wasn't one the First Scholar had encoded.
It was Cressa's.
And underneath it, a message in script none of them recognized, but which Kael somehow understood:
> "If you finish what he started, you will unmake everything."