Kael stirred.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been on the ground. Time was distorted here—warped by whatever presence lay beyond silence.

The shard he'd dropped still rested at the base of the altar. Unmoving. Waiting.

He forced his arms beneath him, trembling, breath catching in his throat like a thread tangled in stone. When he reached out to retrieve the shard, his fingers trembled—not from fear, but from something deeper. A slow unraveling inside his bones.

As soon as his palm closed around the shard again, he felt it throb once.

A second pulse answered it.

Kael blinked.

There—just beside the altar, resting in the unmoving hand of a nearby statue—another shard. Smaller. Duller. But unmistakably the same shape.

His own shard gave a violent twitch.

For a heartbeat, he hesitated. He remembered what happened last time—how a pulse had nearly ripped something from him.

And yet, something about the second shard… called. Not with urgency. With familiarity. Like a half-remembered echo that belonged to him.

He reached out.

The stone fingers crumbled at his touch, releasing the object with a brittle snap. Kael caught the shard before it could fall.

The moment both fragments touched his skin—

A sudden heat surged up his arms.

His knees buckled again, but this time he stayed upright, gritting his teeth. The pain wasn’t physical. It was… inherited.

Visions flickered behind his eyes—shadows kneeling, light breaking, names forgotten before they could be spoken.

Each carried a shard.
Each fell before they could become what I am meant to be.
Or… what I was never meant to be.

The voice wasn’t his.
It wasn’t even a voice.
More like a feeling
—a pressure deep within the marrow of memory.

Kael turned toward the altar. The creature still hadn’t moved. Its many eyes remained shut. But the silence was no longer passive. It watched.

He took a step forward, both shards in hand.

The ground beneath his feet seemed to ripple, the bones of the temple groaning with some buried response. Above him, the ribs of the chamber curved tighter, as if bracing.

He stopped just before the altar’s base.

The two shards in his hands pulsed in tandem—an irregular rhythm, like two hearts out of sync, trying to become one.

He didn’t understand what they wanted from him.

No. Not “they.”
They were the same.
Split once. Reunited now.

His breathing quickened. Every part of him urged restraint, but something—some instinct that didn’t feel entirely his own—raised his hand.

He brought the two shards together.

They didn’t fuse.
They didn’t shatter.

They hummed.

A note without sound.
A vibration in the teeth.
A pressure in the skull.

And something… deeper.

From above, one of the creature’s many arms shifted.

Just slightly.

Barely a breath’s worth of motion—but enough.

Kael froze.

The eyes remained closed. But the air was different now. It bent toward him, the way grass leans toward the storm.

His mind flashed back to the carving in the previous chamber—the figures kneeling, the shard etched in stone. That one had been part of the wall. Symbolic.

This one was real.

This one… was meant to be found.

And now there were two.

"You are not the first..."
"...but your ending may be written across them all."

Kael’s breath hitched.
That voice again.

The same that had whispered from the carving.
Now clearer.
Closer.

Not echoing from the walls—but from the shards themselves.

They weren’t tools.

They were memory.

He stepped back from the altar. Slowly. Cautiously. Like someone moving away from a sleeping god.

The chamber pulsed again.

Not light.
Not heat.
But expectation.

Something was beginning.

Or something had resumed.

Kael didn’t know what had changed—only that it had.

And whatever this place had been waiting for…
…it now saw him.