The cliffs above the Caelum were still burning
Varrion did not glance back. His boots thundered down the stair of stone, each step crashing into blackness. Two crewmen followed behind him, Alex's close-to-breathing form, his shirt draped in purple blood, the Mark on his chest pounding as if it were alive. Livia was bringing up the rear, in shock.
The Starlight Serpent slid alongside them, coils glinting tight with tension. It hissed softly, a warning.
"Close enough," Varrion growled to himself.
They arrived.
An obsidian gate was carved into the cave wall. Dead symbols carved into its face. Dust layered the floor. No footprints. No wind. Only that, heavy silence, ancient silence.
"The Emergency Gate," a crew member wheezed. "I knew it was locked."
"It was," Varrion said. He pulled a narrow brass rod from his belt and slammed it into the control socket. The glyphs flared—gold, then sickly violet. "It still is. But he's dying."
"You'll get us sanctioned. Exiled." livia spoke with tension on her face.
Varrion didn't blink. "If he dies, it's all for nothing."
The arch began to hum. Reality rippled.
The glyphs curled, twirling. Light flooded in, as though the arch swallowed the cavern. The serpent writhed, eyes burning, but did not move.
Alex stirred. His head lolled. His lips twitched, but no noise issued.
Then—voices.
Not the crew's.
"Another fracture. it's early."
".wound still open."
"He hears us."
Varrion's jaw tightened. The air was off now—heavy, charged, thick with tension. Like taking a leap into deep water without breathing.
He turned back once more, standing with the serpent's glare.
"Forgive me, I'm sorry....Let's go now."
And he went on.
The light surrounded them. The gate groaned behind, glyphs folding inward upon themselves like glass breaking in reverse.
The room was quiet.
There was only the hum of the serpent, far away, its form coiled on the edge of the ruins—staring into the vacant arch, waiting.
They flowed out of the Gate like scattered glass in sunlight.
A moment of nothing. Then the world slammed shut around them—polished floors, glowing quarantine runes, a warded room humming with sterile power. The Emergency Gate flashed once behind them, and died to silence.
The alarms began to chime. Not sirens—chimes. Controlled, melodic, but urgent.
Varrion hadn't even regained his balance before a dozen troopers burst into the room, armor reflecting solar plate, weapons filled with whitefire. The serpent growled low, its coils curling spasmodically between Varrion and Alex, whose body stretched limp between two medics.
"Stop!" a soldier bellowed.
He noticed the override seal still flashing in Varrion's hand.
Recognition.
"Get the medics—now," the soldier snarled.
A hover-stretcher emerged from the side. Alex was carefully placed upon it, his Mark still trembling in violet and gold oscillations. A medic extended to place a hand on his wrist and then recoiled slightly.
"His resonance is…unstable."
The snake tightened its coils more angrily around Alex's leg, refusing to release its grip. Another medic came up with a vial of shining balm and said a gentle word in an ancient tongue. Gradually, unwillingly, the snake uncoiled.
They hurried henceforth.
Varrion accompanied them into the elevator that traveled up, into the center of Velis Solara. The glass and light walls opened views of a city carved out by pride and precision. Sky-domes that dissolved sunlight into streams of pale color.
The city sprawled below—a carcass of crystal and hubris. Sunlight fractured through domes of warped glass, staining the streets in sickly gold. The air itself hummed with the weight of unseen eyes. Even the air tasted surveilled.
Something in the air was amiss.
Tension.
Unspoken terror.
The lift stuck against the medical spire. Doors slid open. Alex was rolled in. The serpent paused at the door, twitching tail, unreadable eyes.
Varrion stayed for an instant, eyes tracing up the banners streaming over the gate of the spire. Sunbursts of gold, emblazoned with sigils of vigilance and truth.
A banner had been torn away.
It billowed in silence.
"Too quick," he growled. "Too quick."
He stepped to the spot where he was summoned....
He was on edge regarding what transpired in the caelum and the News he received from the Senior Inspector.
The Western Branch of Sunspire towered over Velis Solara as a reminder of abandoned commandments. The higher floors of the building were ringed by wards of goldlight, but down here, where the lower floors were, sunlight was muffled. Thicker. Like it had traversed too much glass and scrutiny to be clean.
Varrion strode through the armored doors, his footsteps ringing on gleaming stone. The sigil on his shoulder — temporary override, black-ringed — pulsed softly in the fields of mana surrounding him. Guards at the inner pass gave him brief, nervous looks but did not attempt to halt him. They knew the seal. More, they knew the look in his eyes.
Ash had stuck to the cuffs of his coat, and dried blood smattered against his left sleeve. He had not changed since Caelum.
The inspection hall itself was long, cold, and almost quiet. No hushed secrets. No idle chatter. Only the hum of containment fields embedded in the walls.
Senior Inspector Aelren's private office lay at the far end of the corridor.
It swung open before Varrion could hammer on the door.
Enter," the voice inside said.
Outside of this area lay one that was vaulted and long, edged with sun-weathered obsidian etched with sunlight script. Remnants of orders past — some no longer applicable to any existing registry — lay set out in detailed accuracy against the walls. A rotating chronolens rotated over a white ironwood, casting rotating shadows with meticulous regularity.
Aelren stood by the distant window, his shoulders back but his shoulders pulled in tight. His uniform was half open, and his eyes had the yellowed look of one who'd not slept for at least a day.
"I was summoned for you the instant we were summoned with news of the Caelum breach," he stated without moving. "You're late."
Varrion came in. "The boy was dying. I put his life ahead of red tape."
Aelren spun around. "That red tape holds the perimeter in place."
Varrion met his gaze. "Not today."
Aelren looked at him for a moment, then took a step forward towards the desk. With no more words, he took out a sealed scroll from the drawer — ancient parchment, edges charred as if they'd been left to burn.
He placed it on the desk between them.
"This came two hours before the void breach at Caelum," Aelren had stated. "It was slipped under my chamber door. No magical trigger. No signature on the door wards. No trace."
Varrion frowned at it, his brow furrowed.
He extended a hand and carefully unrolled the scroll.
There was no greeting. No sender name. Not even a header. The message itself had been partially burned, the upper lines smudged beyond recognition. But at the very bottom, in wet, ink-scrawled haste, was a single symbol.
A circle. Inside it — not flames. Not stars. But eyes. Dozens of them. Open. Watching. And all of them weeping.
Varrion's mouth went dry.
"I've seen that mark," he murmured.
Aelren nodded, softly. "I did, too. Once. Years ago. A piece of doctrine held within redacted scripture. We were instructed to disregard it. Instructed it was old, forbidden. Didn't signify anything."
"It signifies something," Varrion told him.
"Yes," Aelren breathed. "But not technically."
The chronolens ticked above. Its somber shadow fell across the tears of the weeping eyes, creating the illusion that they blinked.
This. isn't rogue," Aelren went on. "It's not the act of a rebel faction or an exiled House. It's internal. Ancient. Purposeful."
Varrion slowly opened his eyes to him. "Then who?"
Aelren's face grew harder.
"They don't have names. No sigils in our records. No lines of order. They function without records. Speak without quotation. They were built into the walls themselves of Sunspire itself — and they were never intended to be seen.
He drew nearer, voice dropping.".
"They are the ones who erase the ink before it's ever spilled. Who kill variables before they're even born. When things need to happen, but can never be certain that they've happened… they move."
The air was cut sharply.
Varrion's hand lay across the scroll, but did not clench around it. "Are they watching now?"
Aelren said nothing. Which, in some way, conveyed more than words ever could.
"Why send it to you?" Varrion insisted. "Why show to you a mark that is intended to be hidden?"
"I don't know," Aelren replied. "But I think they wanted me to see it. I think they wanted us."
"To what purpose?"
"To bring you to Caelum."
The breath was sucked from Varrion's throat.
He recalled the gate. The attack. The serpent's warning scream. The void-beasts pouring out as if they'd known he'd be there. The way the boy's soul glowed — broken, impossible thick, as if it hovered waiting to be taken by some outside force.
None of this was random.
"They brought us in," Varrion murmured. "They knew the breach would happen. Knew Alex would be there."
Aelren did not argue.
Varrion gazed down once more at the mark — those eyes. Sobbing. Sobbing forever.
"They see everything," he breathed.
And Aelren received the news from one of his aides, "Sir, we have the reports of the boy named ALEX."
Varrion and Aelren visited the hospital in order to get news about the status of the Alex, a single survivor of the tragedy.
The hospital wing was eerily silent as Varrion and Aelren entered. Stunning wards of light-spiked sun streamed through tall windows, leaving soft halos on the spotlessly white floors. Guards who stood at every corner regarded them blankly but did nothing to stop them. They were not to be questioned.
Alex lay on a low bed, his legs and arms bound in soft, radiating medical threads. His skin was a feeble pale hue, but the weakest throb of life thrummed beneath it — like a ember trying to catch fire. The soft murmur of healing equipment quietly hummed in the distance, but it did little more than stifle the weight of the air.
A medic in the vanguard came into sight, his brow creased with concern. "He's stable, at least for now. His body is reacting to treatment, but."
"But?" Varrion's voice constricted.
The medic hesitated, obviously at a loss for how to explain it in lay terms. He pointed towards the intricate machine sitting on the side of the bed, which tracked Alex's varying levels of energy. "It's his resonance. His soul — it's. split. Polymorphic soul-channeling. Never seen anything like it."
Varrion's brow furrowed. "Tell me."
The medic swallowed. "As if. He's connected to a whole bunch of himself, simultaneously." Like a chorus that needs a conductor. Not broken—but if the proper stimulus is yanked, they'll crash as a unit. And so that we can't control."
Varrion spun his head around, but he was too stunned to ask what else. The strained silence in the room disintegrated on a hiss of sound. He turned in time to see the Starlight Serpent slide just beyond the door, its ethereal scales buzzing. It hung there, hissing softly against the door frame. It did not come through.
Alex struggled in his bed, fingers shuddering.
Something was agitating within him, as well.
Ink seeped through his brain like darkness spread through water.
Alex's eyes opened, but there was no ground beneath him—nothing but unlimited sky, crumpled like shattered glass. Somewhere familiar, very far away. The Eclipse Paradox. He had been here once—when death had been closer than breath.
But the thrones were farther away now.
Five dark figures sat in quiet, too far away to see, yet too near to turn away from. Flickering like shadow flames across a shattered horizon. Quiet. Waiting.
A voice bridged the void, deep and heavy, as if it reverberated back through the bone of time.
"You are now one of the Holders of the Eclipse Paradox," it told him, not without gravity. "But you are still just you."
Alex spun around, but there was nothing. The voice was everywhere and nowhere. It knew him. Knew what he was afraid of.
Power.
The thrones seemed to stir to life. A thread of light and darkness emerged from each to him, shivering in position—giving nothing, taking everything.
He grasped one—and recoiled.
A blaze of fire lanced behind his eyes. Pain. Anger. Memory. Things that did not belong to him flooded his veins like fire. He recoiled into blankness, panting.
The voice spoke again, colder but.
"They can't help you yet. Release them slowly. Learn their pain. Bear their rage. Earn their knowledge."
He gazed once more. The people did not stir, but something inside them changed—so that they seemed to hear. So that they recalled.
His Mark burned on his chest, flaring to the beat of a second heartbeat. Not just power. A key—and he the lock. But too quickly, and he would shatter.
Outside the hospital….
Varrion's eyes lingered on thinking about the Alex's unconscious form. The serpent coiled tighter, its hiss echoing the hum of distant engines.
'They're coming, to our headquarter'Livia whispered.
"The Senior Inspectors are coming."