“We know Korenth is planning something. The timeline is less than a week. We have the warnings, but the instructions are locked in this text.”
“I tried to read it,” Riven said, stepping closer to the table. “I can see the calculations, but the logic is locked. I don’t have the key.”
I looked at her, pleading and demanding all at once.
“You knew Liora. You know this history. Help us translate it. Tell us how to stop what’s coming.”
Aelira ranher hand over the cover ofThe Echoes of Shattered Dawn. Her touch was reverent, fingers tracing the embossed silver title. Then, she opened the leather-bound ledger.
She compared the two—the poetry of the history book and the frantic mathematics of the ledger.
“The Eclipse is a celestial alignment, Selene,” Aelira said softly, looking up from the text. “A window.”
“A window to what?” I asked.
“To the source of the distortions.” She pointed to a diagram in the ledger—two overlapping circles drawn in fading ink. “Once a year,the orbit of this world aligns perfectly with the echo of another. The Eclipse marks the apex, the moment of absolute contact, but the aftershock lasts for days. During this transit, the Veil is naturally at its thinnest. For centuries, I have felt it—magic seeping in like water through a cracked dam. Just a trickle.”
Riven leaned forward, his hands bracing on the stone table. “Korenth is targeting the apex. He is building a floodgate to capture the full force of the alignment.”
He gestured to the canvas-wrapped box sitting solidly nearby.
“This must be what he was planning over two decades ago. The first murders, the extraction, the experiment on me… he was trying to pry that window open. The explosion stopped him then. But looking at Highspire now, the pattern is identical. He has rebuilt the infrastructure. He has the machine, and this time, he has sourced the power.”
“So now, with the door,” Dane said, his voice tight with suspicion. “If he opens it, what comes through?”
“That is the question,” Aelira said gravely.
She looked at me, her luminous eyes sorrowful.
“The place Korenth is trying to access is the Old World, Selene. Vaelor.”
The name hung in the damp air of the chamber, strange and sharp.
“It was our home,” Aelira said. “It was destroyed millennia ago by a war that broke the very physics of the planet. We—Liora, Eamon, myself, even Korenth and Varessia—are the descendants of those who fled the destruction. We are the Exiles. Our numbers were once great, but time has taken most of us.”
"If it was destroyed," I said, looking at the diagram, "then why does Korenth want to open a door to a graveyard?"
Aelira kept her focus on the open ledger. "Korenth believes a fraction of that world survived the cataclysm. He expects to find life."
"And he intends to prove it," she whispered. "By bringing whatever remains of it here."
"But what is it?" Dane asked. "People? Monsters?"
“We don’t know,” Riven admitted. “But Korenth is preparing for something specific.”
He looked up at me, a dark realisation crossing his face.
“The sub-basement,” he said. “Quinn Tower in Highspire. I’ve never been down there, but I’ve heard Varessia talking. She oversees the maintenance of ‘vessels’ kept in stasis.”
He looked at Aelira.
“They’ve been taking Calysteri and Umbrakynn, mixing their powers together to balance the physiology, and then hollowing them out. Draining them until they are just breathing husks. I thought it was just cruelty. But if he believes something is coming through that tear…”
Riven trailed off, the implication settling in the room like ice.
“The augmented guards we’ve met are strong, but unstable,” he said darkly. “But maybe whatever Korenth thinks is on the other side of that door is too strong for a normal body.”
“He believes they need containers,” I realised, the horror of it cold in my stomach. “That whatever is on the other side can’t survive in our world without a shell.”
