The silence followed them like a shadow.
After the last ash had settled, and their bodies had remembered how to breathe without resistance, Lucan and Lyra descended into the bones of what had once been great.
The Spiral Bastion.
Its name echoed in Lucan's head, but not as something spoken aloud. It rang more like a memory—one he had no right to have. And yet… each step felt familiar. Not comfortable, but known. Like his dreams had been walking these ruins long before he had.
Stone groaned beneath their feet, not from their weight but from age—like the land itself was holding its breath. The slope they walked was jagged, carved by time and something else—force, maybe. War. The copper-colored sands that had clung to the Verge now thinned into broken tile paths and fractured bridges, some wide enough for cities to march across, others no wider than a cart's axle. Some floated midair, suspended by forces unseen, linking towers that bent sideways or spiraled downward into the rock.
Lucan stopped.
His eyes scanned the broken expanse before them—half-sunken towers jutting from the land like snapped spines, others tipped at strange angles, locked in mid-collapse. One building had folded in on itself, its upper floors blooming out like metallic petals. Wind curled through the ruins, carrying not just dust, but tone—a faint hum, like a melody too low to hear but too steady to ignore.
Lyra moved beside him, tense and silent.
Then Lucan turned.
"This way." he said, more to himself than her.
Lyra blinked. "You've been here?"
He didn't answer. He couldn't.
His feet moved on instinct, tracing a zigzag trail over cracked causeways and half-sunken stones. The path was oddly clean—as if something had preserved it. Moss bloomed in spirals. Vines crawled across walls, but never onto the central walkway. A stone arc lay collapsed to one side, shattered—but the carvings along its inner rim caught his eye. They weren't decorative.
They were maps. Star paths. Histories.
Languages that Lucan didn't know, but still made his skin prickle with recognition.
They reached an intersection. Ahead, the ground dipped into a sunken forum, where three massive pillars had once held up a dome, now shattered into splinters that floated faintly above the dust. The air was warmer here. Not hot—active. A steady hum vibrated beneath his boots, like something was stirring below.
Lucan stepped off the path. Lyra followed.
The heart of the Spiral Bastion loomed in fragments, but it had not fallen into silence.
Not completely.
And Lucan was starting to wonder if it had been waiting.
For him.
Lucan slowed as they entered the sunken forum. Time felt wrong again—but not like in the Verge. This wasn't distortion. This was pressure. Like something was watching him through time.
His eyes caught on a pedestal half-buried in the dust. Something rested atop it—a device, or maybe an artifact. No wires. No clear mechanism. Just a polished, elliptical surface nested inside an ancient frame of black stone and silver veins. The material shimmered like wet obsidian.
He stepped closer.
"Lucan." Lyra said, voice cautious.
He didn't answer. His hand moved toward the object. His fingers brushed its side—
And the world broke.
The pain hit first.
Not in his body, but in his mind—a sharp, splitting agony behind his eyes, like someone had driven a blade between thought and memory. He dropped to his knees, gasping, clutching his head as the artifact flared with a sudden pulse of light.
Then came the vision.
Not a dream. Not a memory.
It wasn't complete. Just glimpses. Impressions.
The sky—not theirs—was gone, replaced by a swirling, devouring spiral. A vortex of voidlight, coiling through the cosmos like a scar. It wasn't just pulling in matter—it was dismantling existence itself. Stars flickered out, not from distance—but annihilation. Whole planets folded inward, crushed without resistance. Armies stood at its edge—millions of voices raised across the void—only to vanish before they could scream again.
No end. No beginning. Just consumption.
Then the image shattered, like glass struck from within.
A new scene slammed into Lucan's mind.
The Bastion. Alive. Towering. Radiant.
Its halls buzzed with life—beings of immense size and shape, cloaked in armor made of starlight and bone. They were in motion—defensive lines, energy arcing between monoliths, symbols glowing bright enough to rival the twin moons overhead.
Then they came.
Not the vortex, he saw earlier.
But those that fled from it.
Ancient creatures—gods by scale, monsters by form—descended on the Bastion. Some crawled through the skies like serpents of atmosphere, others burst from cracks, wrapped in cloaks of madness. The Bastion fought.
And lost.
Lucan saw the towers fall—one by one—until only the central core remained, pulsing with desperate light.
A tremor ran through the vision.
The last survivors triggered something deep beneath the surface—light spiraled out, folding everything into itself. Not a weapon. Not a victory. A burial.
The Bastion vanished beneath copper sands.
Silence.
And then… black.
Lucan's eyes snapped open with a choking gasp.
The pain was gone—but the echo remained. His limbs felt weightless, his chest burning as if he'd been drowning in air.
"Lucan!"
Lyra's voice broke as she grabbed his shoulders. Her eyes were red, tear-streaked, and filled with panic.
He blinked, still caught between the vision and reality. "What…?"
"You were floating." she said breathlessly. "You touched that thing and then—you just started seizing. Light came from your body, spiraling around you, pushing me back. I couldn't get near you. I—" Her voice cracked, and she pulled him into a half-embrace. "I thought you were gone."
Lucan sat upright slowly, his hands trembling. The artifact now lay dark and inert, its glow extinguished.
"I saw… something." he muttered. "The Bastion. Before it fell. And… something worse. Something coming."
Before Lyra could respond, the ground nearby rumbled with a low groan—then a sharp crack. Just beyond the pedestal, the ancient stone split in a clean, triangular pattern. Sand and dust hissed down the sides as something rose from beneath.
An altar—perfectly triangular and impossibly smooth—jutted from the earth like it had always been there, simply waiting to be seen. Its surface shimmered with a subtle sheen, not metallic, not stone—something in between, as if carved from the cooled bones of a star. Across its edges, thin lines of light pulsed slowly, like veins under translucent skin, weaving in symmetrical patterns that seemed more biological than mechanical.
The carved paths on the altar's face weren't merely etched—they were engraved with purpose, deep and layered, forming a network of interlocking glyphs, spirals, and angular paths. Each line twisted into another with eerie precision, impossible geometry that looked like it could shift if you blinked. The longer Lucan stared, the more the designs seemed to hint at something alive beneath the surface, as if the altar were breathing in silence.
At the center of one of its sloped faces, a shallow recess glimmered—not randomly placed, but clearly shaped to cradle something specific, a key, a device, or perhaps… a piece of the past.
Above it, high in the ceiling of the chamber, rays of faint white light bled through a lattice of geometric carvings.
Lucan stood, slowly, his gaze rising to the ceiling.
The carvings were massive. The relief spanned the entire dome, a spiraling web of ridges, grooves, and symbols.
At its center, it was the same spiraling force he saw in his vision—but felt omnipotent. Its lines didn't just twist—they overlapped, layered like time folding over itself. Runes circled its center, angular and fractured. The spiral drew the eye in, hypnotic. Unnatural. Unstoppable.
Surrounding, it was chaos.
Hundreds—maybe thousands—of figures etched into the stone. Ancient beings of all shapes and scales. Towering godforms wrapped in flame and armor. Serpents with wings and spines and star-filled eyes. Cities walking on the backs of beasts. Entities look like made of crystal, wind, and shadow.
All converging toward the spiral. All in motion. Reaching, attacking, or collapsing.
But none succeeded.
Their forms, once mighty, were shown unraveling mid-charge. Some faded halfway through their assault, limbs disintegrating. Others shattered outright—caught in arcs of destruction that fractured their bodies into scattered lines. Entire civilizations engraved in the act of failing.
Lucan stared, his pulse slowing.
The spiral at the center wasn't victorious.
It wasn't resisting.
It simply… was.
Unaffected. Untouched.
Like it didn't need to fight back—because nothing had ever mattered enough to challenge it.
He felt a chill in his chest.
Lyra stepped beside him, just as shaken. "What is this place?"
Lucan didn't answer right away. His voice, when it came, was low. "A warning."
He looked at the altar, then at the mural again.
"No." he whispered. "Maybe a history."
Lucan stepped toward the altar, his footsteps silent against the dust-caked floor.
Up close, the thing looked nothing like any altar he'd ever seen—no religious markings, no flat offering plate, no familiar geometry. It was triangular in shape but layered, as if someone had sliced through multiple planes of space and stitched them into one. Its surface shimmered slightly in the dim light, not quite metal, not quite stone. The grooves along its edges seemed to shift subtly, as if reacting to his presence.
Lyra walked beside him, still glancing warily at the ceiling above. "It's… beautiful." she murmured. "But strange."
Lucan nodded slowly. "Feels more like a machine than a shrine."
"Do you think this is what brought us here?" she asked, circling the far edge. "Or maybe… maybe it opens something?"
They paced around the structure, studying every angle. Nothing revealed itself. No buttons. No slots. No inscriptions. Just faint carvings—paths spiraling inward toward a central dip along one edge, like something was meant to be placed there.
"I mean, sure." Lucan said after a minute, frowning. "Maybe there's a hidden switch or puzzle or some ancient passphrase…"
He paused dramatically, raised a hand, and said in a theatrical whisper, "Open sesame."
Lyra rolled her eyes—but smiled. "Yeah, try knocking twice while you're at it."
He grinned, but the moment passed quickly, replaced by the same uneasy curiosity that had brought them this far.
They both stared at the altar again, still as cryptic as before.
"If only we had a key for this." Lyra muttered.
Lucan blinked.
Then turned sharply.
The device.
He sprinted back toward the artifact he'd touched before—the same one that had triggered the seizure, the vision, all of it. It was still resting where he dropped it, faintly glowing now with a soft, pulsing light along its edges.
Lyra hurried over. "Wait, you're not going to touch it again, are you?"
As he lifted it, it almost hummed in his hand.
"Not me." he said. "It."
He turned back toward the altar, stepping to the side where the grooves met at a shallow recess.
It fit.
The moment the device slid into place, a dull thrum vibrated through the ground. Lines carved into the altar flared to life—not with light, but with something thicker, almost fluid. A strange, iridescent liquid poured silently from the device, tracing the spiral paths and ridges as if being drawn by invisible gravity.
The entire altar began to hover, lifting slowly off the ground.
Lucan backed up instinctively, placing himself in front of Lyra. "Stay behind me."
She didn't argue.
The liquid twisted upward like smoke made of mercury, weaving itself into the air above the floating altar. It moved deliberately—shaping itself, curling, folding in on its own structure. Almost like it was building something.
A form began to emerge.
Not a solid object. Not quite. It was still fluid, shifting, caught in between.
Lucan narrowed his eyes, heart pounding.
He had no idea what was coming.
But he had a feeling—deep, instinctual—that whatever it was… it was meant to stay asleep.
And they might've just woken it up.
[End of Chapter 16]