The ruins of Delta-9 lay behind them, distant now—a vanishing point swallowed by wind and dust.
Kael led the group into the hollow basin of a forgotten nomad site, veiled by cliffshade and guarded by terrain so unstable even the beasts avoided it. There, they made camp. Not to rest—but to assess.
Tessia crouched beside a jagged stone, cleaning her blade.
"Whatever that thing was… it wasn't meant to be killed. It was meant to delay."
"Delay who?" Dren asked, voice hoarse.
Kael didn't answer. He stood away from the firelight, watching the skies as if waiting for a crack to form.
Sera sat against a rock, fingers brushing a long scar near her collarbone.
"You're thinking again."
"No," Kael replied quietly. "I'm listening."
Zarith had begun muttering again. Not to himself—Kael realized—but to something only he could hear.
"They're panicking," the channeler whispered. "Other ruins are waking too. But not cleanly. Someone's tainting the threads."
Sera stiffened.
"How?"
Zarith looked up, eyes milky.
"Forcefully. They're breaking the Interlace from the outside."
Kael's gaze darkened. He drew a line in the dirt using a sharpened piece of rune shard.
"There are only three groups capable of doing that."
He marked each one with a symbol:
A spiral: Veinhold, with its blood-seers and prophetic towers.
A sword split by a chain: Runeblade Academy, who now hunted anomalies in secret.
A jagged flame: Skarvek's Scorchbringers, who didn't seek ruins—they burned them.
Tessia murmured,
"I've heard whispers from the wilds. Runeblade has begun sealing certain ruin zones completely. Claiming they're too dangerous to leave open."
"Lies," Dren muttered. "They're scared of what the ruins are evolving into."
Kael looked at the map he was carving in the earth—threads, pathways, activated zones.
"We need to reach the next node. Before they do."
Zarith blinked.
"You want to race the ones rewriting reality?"
Kael turned, eyes like twin lenses absorbing light and logic.
"No. I want to expose them."
Ruins Gone Silent
By morning, they moved west—toward a place Kael had only glimpsed once through a flicker in the Interlace:
The Glass Echo Cradle.
It was once a shrine to the lost sound of thought—a place where ruin-minds could sing into the sky. But Kael had seen a new pattern when he accessed Delta-9's threadline. The Cradle had gone dark.
Not asleep.
Corrupted.
As they approached the ridgeline, the air thickened. Not with mana—but with residue. A foul, jagged memory, like someone had carved into the ruin's song and forced it to hum a new, broken tune.
They found the first bodies at the perimeter.
Skarvek's men. Charred from within.
Tessia stepped back, whispering,
"What did that to them?"
Kael knelt. Touched the ash.
"They were trying to bind the ruin's consciousness. Twist it into a weapon."
He stood, eyes hard.
"And the Cradle rejected them."
The Ruin Speaks Again
As they crossed into the Cradle's core, sound vanished.
No wind. No voices. No heartbeat.
Only a rising pitch—ultrasonic. Like tension building across an invisible wire.
Then, without warning, the ground pulsed.
A figure rose from the center of the shattered ruin.
Not a beast. Not an aberration.
A Construct Warden—a humanoid relic formed entirely of frozen voice lines and interwoven thread-glyphs, wrapped in glass ribbons that shimmered as it moved.
"Halt," it spoke, but the word did not come from its mouth. It emerged from inside each of their skulls.
"You tread upon fractured memory."
Kael stepped forward.
"We came to learn what was taken."
The Construct turned toward him.
"You are the Karmic Divergence. The Instrument."
"I am," Kael confirmed. "But I didn't fracture this place. They did."
The Construct shimmered—processing.
"Rogue external edits detected. Splicing integrity: 34%. Catastrophic threshold near."
Zarith spoke aloud.
"It's collapsing."
Kael stepped inside the Cradle's inner field and placed his palm on the fractured glyph pillar.
He didn't resist.
And for a brief moment, Kael's vision flickered—
—he saw a skiff captain screaming as his crew burned alive.
—Runeblade mages casting seal-runes on a shrine, trapping its logic in a loop.
—Veinhold priests feeding memories into a ruin until it forgot itself.
He pulled back, gasping.
"They're not just corrupting ruins. They're killing the world's memory."
Sera looked stunned.
"Why?"
Kael closed his eyes.
"Because they don't want anyone else to control the Interlace."
The Construct, now flickering and unstable, reached toward Kael with a burning shard of crystal-thread.
"Take this. It will lead you to the Obsidian Axis. The ruin that started the fold."
Kael accepted it. The shard pulsed in his hand like a dying star.
Zarith staggered, whispering in tongues.
The land around them began to quake.
"Time's running short," Kael said quietly. "We head for the Axis next."
Then the air shifted.
A deep, resonant pressure descended—not from the ruin, not from the ground—but from above.
They turned their eyes upward.
The clouds didn't part.
They peeled.
From the seam in the heavens, a silhouette emerged—massive, black-winged, descending slowly like a judgment passed from a forgotten god. A ship—if it could be called that—dripping with veils of aetherlight and layered in spiraling, glyph-choked bone metal.
It made no sound.
Its presence alone muted the storm around it.
Dren's breath caught. "That's not Crimson Vulture. That's not Veinhold."
Tessia's hand twitched toward her blades. "That's not even… alive."
Kael's eyes narrowed.
"Another faction," he said. "One we haven't met yet."
"And this one… isn't mortal."
The shard in his hand burned brighter—screaming silently toward the sky.
And above them, the black-winged vessel opened its gates.
[ END OF CHAPTER 19 ]