Chapter 5: The Threshold's Beckoning
They came for Aria in the dark.
Not with sound, not with light but with a silence that scraped against the weave like claws on glass. The Enclave didn't need doors. They slid between moments, wrapped in veils of static that bent time and space like wet paper.
Aria spun as the air shifted. A ripple. A wrongness.
She had a second maybe less to respond before three forms bled out of the gloom, their outlines flickering like dying signals. They weren't fully there. They never were. Their faces what passed for them were blank voids of glitching code.
"Back off," she hissed, drawing a glyph in the air.
No answer.
They advanced.
She released the sigil.
The blast of kinetic force hurled one into the wall, but it didn't stop moving. Smoke and shadow reformed midair, drifting back toward her like the strike had only made it hungrier.
She turned and ran.
Not out of fear. Out of urgency.
They weren't here for her.
They were tracking something far more dangerous.
Kellan.
She followed the Anchor's pull like a beacon. The further she ran, the more the walls changed geometry folding, space fracturing. The architecture grew less like Technopolis and more like a wound in the world. A place where time forgot how to behave.
She felt it before she saw it.
The Anchor's call. It throbbed against the weave like a heartbeat made of memory.
Her pulse quickened.
Then she heard voices faint, then sharper.
Dex yelling. And something else. A sound like rising light.
She pushed through the final veil of distortion and burst into the chamber.
And saw him.
Kellan. Standing before the Anchor, hand raised, eyes wide and empty like he wasn't there anymore. Like something had peeled him open.
"No! Don't!"
Her voice cracked as her hand lifted.
She didn't think.
She reacted.
Magic exploded from her palm a wild, unfocused arc of force meant to push, not harm. But she was too late.
His fingers brushed the surface.
Light engulfed him.
He didn't scream but the Anchor did.
A flare of energy shot out like a pulse from a dying star, throwing Dex backward and nearly knocking Aria off her feet.
Kellan collapsed, smoke trailing from his hands.
She was at his side instantly, checking his pulse, his breath. Shallow. Weak. But alive.
Dex scrambled over. "What the hell was that?! What did you?! what did he do?!"
Aria stared at the artifact, still glowing but subdued. The room felt like it was watching them.
"It's an Anchor," she said. "It draws in anything that sees it. Lures them in. Traps them."
Dex blinked. "Then why didn't it affect me?"
That stopped her.
It should have. Anyone not attuned to the weave anyone normal should've felt that pull. The craving to touch. To merge.
But Dex hadn't even blinked.
"I don't know," she said slowly. "It didn't affect me because I'm trained to resist it. Weavers learn to shield our minds. But you…?, That's besides the point we need to help Kellan"
Dex looked down at Kellan. "He barely touched it."
"He shouldn't have survived even that much contact. Most people lose their minds. Start seeing things that don't belong in this world and it drives them crazy."
She brushed Kellan's hair back. He twitched under her hand.
"I didn't stop him in time."
Dex looked like he wanted to scream, or cry, or punch the artifact in the face if it had one. "Is he gonna wake up?"
Aria didn't answer right away.
Because deep down, she wasn't sure she wanted him to.
Not if it meant seeing what was on the other side.
Dex crouched beside Kellan, eyes wide. "He's breathing, right? Please tell me he's breathing."
"He is," Aria said. "But it's not stable."
"What the hell was that thing?"
"The Anchor," she replied, barely glancing up. Her attention stayed on Kellan, checking his pulse again. "An Arcane security construct meant to ward off intruders. Or at least that's what we think it is."
"Well, it just nuked his brain!"
She didn't argue. Couldn't. He wasn't wrong.
She looked at the artifact, still suspended above the pedestal like nothing had happened. But something had. The weave was distorted. Tangles of magic still drifted in the air like smoke, and the Echo Gate beyond it pulsed faintly like a heartbeat syncing with Kellan's.
He had touched it.
Even for just a second.
He should be either be or raving mad.
But he was alive. Silent. His mind… somewhere else.
She turned toward Dex. "Help me lift him."
"What? We're taking him with us? Where? How?"
"We don't have a choice. They're close."
Almost on cue, the static returned.
Low. Creeping.
Her skin crawled.
Dex heard it too. His jaw tightened. "How do you people live like this?"
"We don't," she said. "We survive. Now move."
Together, they hauled Kellan to his feet. His weight slumped between them, limp, but he murmured something a fragment of a word.
A name?
She leaned closer. "Kellan?"
No response. His eyes fluttered but didn't open.
Then the Gate pulsed again.
Not just light sound. A low resonance that echoed through the chamber like the groan of a sleeping god.
Dex shivered. "That's not comforting."
"It's reacting to him. To what he touched."
"So it's awake too."
"No," Aria said. " But It's listening."
The static grew louder. Closer.
Shadow seeped along the edges of the corridor glitching like corrupted code, curling like smoke through cracks in the air.
"They're coming," Dex whispered.
Aria clenched her jaw, looking around the chamber. There was only one other path a narrow tunnel that branched behind the Gate's platform, partially collapsed but still navigable.
"This way," she said.
"What about the Gate?"
"It's not ready. Not without him."
Dex didn't argue.
He just followed.
They slipped into the passage, dragging Kellan with them, the sound of the Enclave bleeding into the chamber they left behind.
Just before the tunnel bent out of view, Aria glanced back.
The Echo Gate stood silent.
Watching.
Waiting.
The tunnel narrowed the deeper they went, walls closing in with damp stone and tangled roots. The last of the chamber's blue light faded behind them, swallowed by the curve of rock. Dex flicked on a portable lumen, its cone of light cutting through the darkness ahead. Kellan groaned faintly, still slumped between them.
"This is ridiculous," Dex muttered. "We're dragging a half dead chosen one through a haunted underground subway with techno demons on our heels. I hate this."
"Keep your voice down," Aria hissed.
"You keep magic blasting people!"
"I was trying to stop him."
Dex grunted. "I bet you vaporized everything you come across cause it doesn't look like stopping's really your style."
She ignored him, pushing forward.
Up ahead, the tunnel split a fork, one path descending deeper, the other rising slightly with broken stone steps. Aria paused, squinting into the dark.
Her fingertips brushed the air and sparked.
Not visible to Dex, but to her the weave rippled here. Subtle, buried under centuries of dust, but present.
A ward.
Old magic, set to alert. Possibly more.
She reached into her coat, pulled a glyph etched shard of bone, and whispered to it.
The magic parted.
The wall shimmered faintly for just a second, revealing faded sigils and a hidden pattern across the tunnel entrance like veins of light spiderwebbed across stone.
Dex saw none of it.
"What are you doing?"
"Disarming a threshold snare," she replied. "You'd have triggered it."
Dex blinked. "So… thanks?"
Aria muttered something unintelligible and stepped through. Dex followed.
A few meters beyond, the tunnel opened into a small side chamber likely a maintenance hollow from before the Collapse. Old cots were rusted into place, and a shattered terminal still blinked a single red light. They laid Kellan on the least-decayed surface, and Dex immediately sank to the floor beside him.
Aria sat opposite, back against the wall. She rubbed her hands over her face and stared at the Anchor pendant now slumped cold on Kellan's chest.
"Back there," Dex said quietly, "you said it was a security system. The Anchor. That it was meant to stop intruders."
She nodded. "The Echo Gates were never meant to stay open. When the Arcane collapsed, the Weavers sealed them with these anchors. Anyone who tries to activate one gets drawn into the defense weave lost in the construct's memory loop."
"But Kellan wasn't lost."
"No," she said, still watching his face. "He should be. But the Anchor reacted differently to him. Almost like it recognized him."
"And the rest of us?"
"We either go mad," she said, "or don't survive long enough to."
Dex went pale.
"Why didn't you just destroy it?"
"Because it was better than any alarm. Nothing gets close to the Gate without being tested. And Weavers we don't get called by the Anchor. We can resist it. Mostly."
She trailed off, eyes narrowing.
"Kellan shouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds," she whispered. "But the Anchor let him in."
Dex leaned forward. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know yet. But I intend to find out."
Kellan stirred.
Barely.
A flicker of his eyelids. A twitch of his fingers.
Aria was immediately beside him. "Kellan? Can you hear me?"
No response.
But his skin shimmered briefly with a thread of gold.
Aria recoiled slightly. "That's… not supposed to happen."
Dex frowned. "What?"
She didn't answer.
Because in the distance
The sound came again.
Clinking metal. Shuffling steps. Whispering static.
They'd found the chamber.
And the trail.
Aria stood, glyphs flickering across her palms. "They're close."
Dex got to his feet. "We can't run again."
"No," she said. "We hold here. Long enough for him to wake up or for me to figure out what the hell he's becoming."
The darkness beyond the hollow rippled.
Something was coming.