The sky broke.
Wings split the clouds—sleek and black, gliding on soundless currents. The air-sled, pulled by two scaled serpents, descended like judgment. Every pair of eyes in the camp lifted toward the heavens. Some stared in awe. Others fell to their knees.
Kael did neither.
He ran.
The sled bore the mark of a burning crown inside a ring of broken chains—the symbol of the Dominors' First Tower. The presence of that sigil in a place like this meant only one thing.
Mindflensers had been dispatched.
And they weren't here to ask questions.
Beneath the shaft, inside the hidden sanctum, Kael paced in tight circles. Mira and Renn sat near the fire-pit, quiet. Brenn leaned against the wall, his arms folded, his brow furrowed as if the stone itself had wronged him.
"They landed on the east platform," Kael said. "Four masked. One with a staff."
Mira's voice was low. "A Judicator."
Kael turned to her. "You've seen one before?"
She nodded slowly. "When I was five. They visited our village after a boy lit a candle with his eyes. He was gone by sunset."
The silence that followed said enough.
Outside, the camp was quiet. But not the kind of quiet that soothed. It was the silence of held breath. Of watchers.
The slaves were pulled from labor and lined up. Grath's voice was absent. His presence—replaced.
The Mindflensers didn't speak often. They moved like ghosts in robes of layered black and gray, their faces hidden behind white bone-like masks carved with a single slit across the eyes. They didn't shout. They didn't strike.
They listened.
And wherever they passed, fear puddled like water in their wake.
"Did we leave a trail?" Renn asked, sharpening a shard of iron on stone. "When we saved that kid, did we screw up somewhere?"
"No," Kael said. "But that doesn't matter now. They aren't here because we were loud. They're here because someone heard the glyphs sing."
Mira touched the memory stone Ashra had given them. "Then what do we do?"
Kael looked at the wall, at the glyphs he had traced so many times now that they almost felt like parts of his own body.
"We vanish."
Brenn stirred. "You want to run?"
"I want us alive."
But running wouldn't be easy.
That night, patrols tripled. Glyph-seekers moved through the outer ring. They carried relics—long rods capped with obsidian rings that hummed when near active magic. Kael recognized the way they scanned walls, inspected hands.
They weren't looking for tools.
They were looking for memory scars.
He pulled up his sleeve.
His arms were covered in them now—traces of glyphs he'd burned into skin and soul. Some faded. Some permanent.
"Too late to hide them," Renn muttered, inspecting his forearm. "If they look close, we're done."
"We use the mines," Kael said. "Past the sinkhole shaft. Ashra said there's a pocket in the basalt wall they don't know about."
"That was years ago," Mira warned.
"Then let's pray the stone still remembers."
They slipped into the mines the next morning under the veil of shift change. Mira whispered Lun'Serra's Thread across their path. Her voice softened the air, made footsteps seem further away than they were. Brenn carried tools, mimicking the laborers. Renn hid glyph paper in his shoe. Kael carried the scroll.
They passed within feet of two Mindflensers. The rods in their hands glowed faintly.
Kael's heart stopped.
One of them turned—slowly, head cocked.
For a full five seconds, Kael met the gaze of a white mask with no mouth.
Then the figure turned away.
Kael exhaled.
They found the basalt wall by midday.
It took two hours of silent, desperate carving with Brenn's pick and Renn's chisels to find the hollow behind it.
Inside—air.
Cool, still air. Unbreathed in decades.
They broke through into a pocket barely ten feet wide. Just enough for four people, a lantern, and hope.
Mira wept when they sealed the hole again.
Not from fear.
But from how close it had been.
They stayed hidden for two days.
Water from the wall drips. Dried root and rat meat from their stash.
No sound from above.
No sign.
Kael traced the glyphs in dust with shaking fingers. His mind itched. Glyphs whispered in circles now, not straight lines.
"You're not running from them," he whispered to himself.
"You're running toward something worse."
On the third day, they heard tapping.
Rhythmic. Not random.
A code.
Kael pressed his ear to the wall. Mira tapped in return, gently. Brenn cleared dust with his sleeve. A message had been etched onto the inside wall in old charcoal.
"They took Ashra."
"She spoke your name."
Kael didn't speak for a long time.
Then he rose.
"We go back."
Renn stared. "Are you mad?"
"She saved us. Gave us the memory stone. Taught us what to look for."
"She also told us to hide."
"Would you hide if it were one of us?"
Silence.
Then Brenn stood.
"I'll go."
Mira rose too, her voice quiet. "You already knew I would."
Kael looked at Renn.
Renn cursed under his breath and picked up the dagger.
"Fine. But if we die, I'm haunting you."
That night, as they prepared to move, Kael burned a new glyph into the cave's floor.
It wasn't one he'd learned.
It was one he'd seen in a dream.
⟁✶⧬⚝ — Writ of the Eye
The memory stone pulsed in his pack.
He looked up at the others.
And then back toward the path they'd sealed.
There was no more hiding.
Only witnessing.