The city never truly slept, but some corners of it remembered how to dream—and in those dreams, things moved that should have stayed still.
Elior sat on the roof of the dormitory, the night wind tugging at his coat. He hadn't slept in days.
The rift, the voice, the Third Ring… and now this.
A letter.
No stamp, no sender. Slid under his door sometime between midnight and dawn. The seal: a spiral glyph he didn't recognize.
He opened it.
"The fire in you isn't from them.
They fear what you'll become.
Come to the Edge. Come alone."
—K
Elior's hands trembled.
K.
Only one person had signed notes like that.
But Kade was dead. Or worse.
The Edge
It wasn't marked on official maps, but every trainee heard rumors.
The Edge.
A forgotten industrial sector, where failed Ring experiments were once buried beneath steel and ash. Now sealed off. Forbidden.
Elior went anyway.
He didn't tell Mira.
Didn't even take a comm.
He only brought a single Ring-tuned blade and the fire pulsing in his chest.
The city lights faded behind him.
Ahead: ruin, rust, and something humming quietly under the ground.
The Hollow Warehouse
The place looked dead.
Except it wasn't.
A single hanging light buzzed above the entrance. Motion-triggered. Meaning someone had come before him.
He stepped inside.
A figure stood waiting. Cloaked, hooded.
Elior tensed. Hand on his weapon.
"Kade?"
The figure didn't move.
"You're supposed to be—"
"Gone?" The voice was gravel and smoke. "I was. Until it brought me back."
The hood slipped down.
It was Kade.
But not the Kade Elior remembered.
His eyes burned faint red. A glyph coiled on his neck like a parasite.
And he was smiling.
"You don't understand the Ring, Elior."
Kade spoke slowly. Deliberately.
"They tell you the Third Ring is a test.
But it's not a wall. It's a door."
"And behind it... are answers."
He tossed a shard to Elior.
A data crystal. Unmarked.
"Play that. You'll see what they did to me.
What they'll do to you, too."
Elior caught it.
"Why now?"
Kade looked up. His gaze flicked to the warehouse's rusted ceiling.
"Because I'm running out of time.
And because it's starting again.
The glyphs are waking."
A pause.
"When you see fire in the sky—don't run.
Let it burn you. Then you'll understand."
He turned. Walked into the dark.
Gone.
Return and Recoil
Elior didn't sleep that night.
He sat alone, staring at the shard.
And finally, he played it.
A video flickered to life on the wall.
It was… the Veiled labs.
Mira.
Juno.
And Kade—restrained. Screaming. Glyphs on his body growing, not carved.
"It's consuming him!" someone shouted.
"No—it's choosing him," Mira replied.
Then the feed went black.
The Fire Rises
That morning, the sky turned red over the eastern sector.
Glyphs burned in midair. Thousands of them.
People screamed. Others knelt.
Elior just stood and watched.
He remembered Kade's words.
"Don't run."