The first thing Daelen noticed when he woke was the silence.
Not the peaceful kind that came with early morning mist or snowfall. This silence felt wrong. Like a breath held too long. Like the world itself was listening.
He sat up in his bed, heart already racing, unsure why. The shadows in the corners of his room clung too tightly to the walls, and the soft creak of wood beneath his feet sounded like it echoed longer than it should have.
Something had changed.
He stared at the corner desk where his talismans lay, but they were… different. The warding sigils had shifted. Ever so slightly. It wasn't something anyone else would have noticed, but Daelen had drawn them by hand. He knew their curves. The ink hadn't smudged, yet the shapes were off—as if something had rewritten them in the night.
He stood slowly and crossed the room.
The mirror on the wall—a simple thing he rarely used—was cracked.
No sound. No fall. Just cracked, as if something had split from the inside.
Daelen's reflection stared back. But it didn't breathe with him. Didn't move when he tilted his head.
He blinked.
It blinked a second later.
He didn't scream. He just… turned away.
His robes felt heavier that morning, the threads scratchier. When he stepped outside, the cold had teeth. The path to the eastern observatory felt longer, the incline sharper. And all around him, disciples carried on like normal. Laughing, sparring, meditating.
But not once did anyone look at him.
---
The ruins were sealed.
Elder Wun had ordered it personally—no entry until the sect had finished their investigation. No spiritual resonance had been found. No trace of the entity that spoke. No answers.
But the ward meant to keep people out… it pulsed when Daelen approached. As though recognizing him. Wanting him back.
He didn't return.
---
That night, he dreamed again.
The cracked mirror. The bleeding sigil. The faint sound of gears turning. Of mechanisms clicking.
And then—a door.
A door he'd never seen before, etched with a spiral.
It opened.
And he stepped through.
Into a room that felt like it had been waiting for him.
Shelves of broken tomes and hovering fragments of memory swirled around him. Portraits blinked. A clock ticked in reverse. And in the center—
A figure.
Cloaked in silver and shadow, face hidden behind a half-mask of glass and bone.
"Do you remember now?" it asked.
Daelen opened his mouth, but no sound came.
The figure raised its hand.
"You were never meant to wake up here."
The world spun. The spiral turned. And Daelen fell upward into the stars.