The ember-eyes did not charge.
The Shadowborn Hounds tracked them through the gray fog with the patience of predators that knew their prey had nowhere to run.
Pale green light flared from cracks. The fog thinned, but the air grew dense with metal and ozone. Claws scraped the broken stone. The smell reminded Kael of Chicago before a lightning storm. Their eyes burned hungry orange.
A deep thrum vibrated through his boots. It was less a sound than a grinding force beneath the floor.
Kael's investigator instincts treated the hall as a crime scene. The vibration spread in slow, steady waves from its center. He traced the cracks where orange light shone brightest and marked the danger zones in his mind.
He adjusted his steps, placing each foot where the vibrations canceled. Safe patches emerged from the chaos. Detective logic let him read the Spire's living architecture.
"They're herding us," he muttered, fingers hovering near his belt. Orange light rolled across the floor, matching his heartbeat. "They want us moving in a specific direction."
Lysara walked to his left with her staff angled forward. Taryn kept to his right, one hand near her bandolier of volatile vials. Together they formed a defensive triangle around him.
"They're not closing the gap," Taryn said. She glanced aside and fidgeted with her shirt hem.
"No." Lysara tipped her staff toward the cracks. "The floor has a purpose. The Hounds are its tools."
"Where does this path lead?" Kael asked, watching the cracks converge.
"Deeper into the Threshold's inner sanctum. The path ends at the central altar, the primary rift-node." Lysara fixed her gaze on him. "You would have known that. The altar's energy grid recognizes a Shattering-Sigil. They could take your mind, but they could not strip it away."
"New information," Kael replied, filing the detail with everything else they had withheld.
Lysara tapped the stone twice. "The altar draws rift-spawn like moths to flame. This time will be worse. The energy grid is violently disrupted." Her attention dropped to Kael's palm, where the blue sigil burned out of rhythm with the floor.
They continued through a graveyard of smooth-faced statues. Kael let the silence linger as he sorted the facts. His presence as a transmigrant was a glitch, and the altered environment seemed to recognize it. The air had grown heavy and orange.
"What are the lumivines?" he asked.
Taryn's weathered features softened with sorrow. "Bioluminescent vines. They grow across Aetheris's floating crystal islands and channel raw energy. They power everything. For three years they have been decaying. When an island loses its lumivines, it loses its anchor to the sky and falls into the void."
"And the summit's wish?" Kael asked. His sister's face surfaced without warning, along with the last morning he'd seen her: the argument they had left unfinished. He needed the answer because his sister still waited in the life he had lost.
"We have to believe it can mend that kind of damage," Taryn whispered, pressing a hand to her sternum.
Kael looked at the star-skinned woman beside him. "And Ecliptis?"
"Ecliptis is gone." Lysara watched some point beyond the black columns. "Our world collapsed thirty years ago. The survivors spread through the Spire's lower floors, living like rats in the walls. I climb because there is no home to return to if I stop."
Kael held their confessions like evidence he was not ready to file. Both women had lost everything and still climbed. He had not earned the right to tell them the summit offered only a way home, not a cause. He kept that thought to himself and climbed anyway.
The ruins widened as they descended. Black columns replaced the broken statues, tall and featureless as they reached into the dark. The mist thickened with deliberate intent. The Hounds fell back. Their eyes faded into distant gray before vanishing into the suffocating orange haze.
The inner sanctum was close. Kael sensed it before he saw it: vibrating pressure gathering behind the blue sigil in his palm.
"The node is active," Lysara warned.
Kael's heartbeat matched the pressure in his hand. Whatever calm the walk had given him was gone. The quiet held itself taut.
The floor groaned. The thrum tore open into violence. Cracks in the black stone widened, and orange light burst through them like geysers.
Kael kept his head. The safe zones held. He pulled Taryn back as a geyser erupted where her foot had been.
Tentacles burst from the stone in clusters, each as thick as an oak and coated in dark ichor that smoked beneath the orange glare. A low, haunting sound rose from the shattered archways. Too many voices joined it, the mournful song of the Nameless Choir.
The tentacles gathered into one shape of liquid shadow and sharp crystal spikes. Mismatched eyes flickered across it.
"Rift-spawn!" Lysara shouted. Violet light blazed from her staff.
Taryn entered a combat stance and broke the seals on two vials.
Kael drew his twin runic daggers in one fluid motion. His mind raced while muscle memory took over. He found solid ground, squared his stance, and led with his left shoulder.
Every shifting eye fixed on the blue sigil in his palm. Driven by hunger, the entity tilted toward him. Kael met its gaze, tightened his grip, and refused to retreat.