The corridor's torches dimmed, as if some greater presence siphoned their light. The heartbeat below didn't quicken. It remained patient. Unmoved. As if it had been pulsing like this since before the academy was built—before stars were named.
Professor Mein's shoulders squared, but his eyes gave away the tension tightening at his jaw. He raised his palm toward the vaulted iron doors at the end of the passage. They were engraved with more of the forgotten zodiacs, forming a circle around a hollow center.
The Spiral.
The Thirteenth Sign.
Lynchie's mark pulsed. Warm. Thrumming now in time with the sound below. Her steps slowed without meaning to, her feet pulled forward by resonance, not will.
"Only those with a constellation key can enter," Mein said without turning.
"I don't have a key," Lynchie replied, voice distant. "Only… this."
She raised her hand.
The Spiral glowed. Once, then again—then expanded outward in a sudden flare. Light shot into the air like a star erupting inside the corridor. The symbols on the gate spun. Stone ground on stone as the twelve known zodiacs shifted, rearranging to orbit the Spiral like moons around a hidden sun.
The thrum beneath them grew louder. It was no longer just sound.
It was presence.
The iron doors groaned open, their inner workings releasing after who knew how many centuries. A sudden wash of cold air hit her—a sharp scent of old paper, crystalline minerals, and something… metallic. Not blood.
Something older than blood.
As the doors parted, Mein stepped aside, allowing Lynchie to move ahead. But she didn't. Not yet.
"Tell me what's in there," she said, her voice trembling only slightly.
"A record," Mein replied. "And… a reckoning."
She turned to him. "What did I awaken?"
He didn't lie.
"You didn't awaken anything. Not alone."
She stared. "Then what—"
"You called it. And it heard you."
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was listening.
Inside the chamber, vast shelves of starlit tablets and constellary tomes spiraled down into darkness. But at the heart of the archive—where the vault floor dipped into a crater-like basin—something pulsed in steady rhythm. A cocoon? No, not quite.
It was a womb of celestial stone, wrapped in vein-like chains of silver and dream-ink script. And inside, faintly, glowed a shape not quite formed—something shifting between light and shadow. Not angel. Not demon.
Not yet.
Lynchie stepped forward.
Her hand lifted to her chest, where the Spiral still burned. The glyph pulsed brighter.
And the thing within the cocoon stirred.
Its glow blinked.
Then it looked at her.
No eyes.
But it saw her.
And then, just for a moment—
It smiled.
The vault lights exploded. The heartbeat stopped.
A shadow rushed up the spiral stairs behind them.
A voice thundered from the entrance to the corridor above:
"Step away from the girl! Under Divine Writ 37-B, she is hereby detained by order of the Celestial Tribunal for Unauthorized Soul Convergence!"
Dozens of Seekers poured down the stairwell, their armor etched with starlight, blades drawn, their eyes blindfolded—justice unseeing, but ruthless.
Professor Mein raised a barrier. "Too soon," he whispered to himself. "It's all happening too soon."
Lynchie turned, her thoughts racing, heart hammering. Was she a prisoner now?
No—she was something worse.
A variable.
An anomaly.
The Tribunal didn't come to question her.
They came to erase her.
And behind her, deep in the womb of forgotten stars, the thing that had smiled began to wake.