The cavern rumbled beneath her feet.
Lynchie turned sharply, her braid catching on the sudden wind now curling around her boots. The ring still pulsed in her palm—no longer burning, but humming with an alien rhythm, like a heartbeat not her own. Behind her, the fissure from earlier had not sealed shut. In fact… it was widening.
A single voice cut through the silence like a blade.
"She's resonating."
It wasn't the tone that unsettled her—it was the way the shadows froze in response. As though that voice held authority not over stone or space, but meaning itself. A tall figure in bronze robes emerged from the cavern wall, as if stepping out of the rock rather than around it. His face was concealed beneath a mask of obsidian lacquered in the spiral emblem of the Academy's senior inquisitors.
Lynchie narrowed her eyes. "You're not faculty."
The figure tilted his head.
"No. I'm an observer. Nothing more."
Her grip on the ring tightened.
"But you know what this is, don't you?"
The man said nothing. But behind him, a row of translucent projections flickered to life—constellations not drawn from the skies above but charted in alien script, each glyph pulsing to the rhythm of her glyph-ring.
She saw it then: the same pattern on her ring etched into the oldest constellation among them. One that hadn't been visible from the surface of their world in centuries. One that, according to legend, marked the arrival of something that could neither be named nor cataloged—only endured.
The Omen Star.
And it had chosen her.
"I didn't ask for this," she whispered.
"I'm not sure it matters," the figure replied, turning his head slightly, as if listening to some distant signal. "It already chose you the moment you broke the seal."
The ground quaked again. Lynchie looked down. Veins of silver light were now spreading out from the fracture beneath her boots—lines threading outward like roots, connecting to other glyphs hidden beneath the surface of the stone. Not dormant. Not waiting. Awakening.
The man raised a hand, and from his sleeve slipped an orb—smooth, glassy, carved with micro-etchings that spiraled inward like a black hole.
"This," he said, "is a recorder orb. It captured your activation. Which means—"
But his sentence never finished.
A roar shattered the air like splintered glass.
Not a tremor, not a quake—but something tearing through the chamber above them. Lynchie turned instinctively, eyes wide as something vast and serpentine slipped through the split stone above them. She couldn't see it fully—only wings, scales, and molten eyes like stoked embers flickering with intelligence far older than anything from her classes.
The glyph-ring flared in response.
The masked observer vanished in a blink.
And Lynchie, alone now beneath the dreaming stone, stood face to face with a creature she had only ever read about in footnotes too obscure to quote aloud.
A Dream Dragon.
Awakened from its tomb not by blood… but by her breath.
Its voice entered her mind directly, not spoken, not even psychic—more like a memory intruding from a future she had not yet lived.
"You are not prepared."
Then, without warning, the chamber cracked apart—stone and starlight exploding upward as if the world above were shattering under the weight of an idea no longer buried.
And Lynchie fell into the light, not knowing what waited at the bottom of the dream.