Taryn's relief was a fragile shield, and Marcus was not about to break it by telling her what he had realized. The riddle calibrated them for the Spire's next soul-trap stage.
"You should sleep." Taryn pushed herself upright. The red sigil at her neck caught the weak light. "We have survived the first inner trial. That has to mean something."
"It means the tower knows how to keep us alive," Marcus said. "The tower's survival instinct was no mercy."
Lysara lowered her light-green staff, its violet glow dimming to a quiet halo. Her gaze moved from Marcus to the dark rift-gate and back again. "Then rest while it allows us to."
Marcus wanted to argue, but the ache in his ribs and the heavy warmth of the blue Shattering-Sigil made the decision for him. He settled with his back against a leaning dark column and let his head rest against the stone. Taryn returned to the base of the fallen statue. Lysara remained standing watch, the staff angled toward the fog.
For several minutes, nothing moved except the mist.
Then a low-frequency vibration rippled through the brutalist pillar, pressing against his spine. The vibration was neither Floor One's hum nor a Hound's stride. A sharp tremor struck Marcus, bypassing Kael's logic and touching the core of him. The physical vessel went rigid. His muscles locked; blood hammered at his throat. His body recalled that frequency immediately. It had shaken his bones during Aetheris's fall, when crystal foundations cracked and cities dropped into the abyss.
The physical whiplash of the memory dragged his consciousness under.
He closed his eyes. The darkness behind them had texture and depth. A pale radiance stirred within it, layered like gauze over a lamp. The layers peeled back one at a time, revealing an age older and gentler than the Spire's hunting structures.
The Spire fell away. Beyond the veil, a second voice spoke in Marcus's own cadence.
Sentinels of Stone
The Choir welcomed him as the Sigil-Bearer. The ascent remained sealed.
The memory released him without warning. Marcus woke on the dark floor with Taryn shouting his name and Lysara's staff already raised. The Void-Kin Scout stood at the crater's center, its broken form unraveling into strands of dark light. It tried to force one final signal through the air, sending a message toward something above, then dissolved before Marcus could reach it. He rose and rejoined the others at the crater's edge, carrying the vision of proto-Aetheris with him.
Jaundiced light seeped from cracks in the floor, illuminating the brutalist Gothic pillars. The plaza showed no evidence of battle. No staircase appeared. No portal opened. Lysara had already confirmed it: the frequency had not reset. The Spire excluded the Scout's death from the trial's completion conditions because the Scout had not been part of the trial.
Marcus stood at the crater's edge and considered the evidence with an investigator's focus.
The Scout had come from above, searching for something. When it failed, it had tried to send a message before it died. That alone was strange. Now the floor refused to close. The only thing that had attacked them since they entered the Shattered Threshold was gone.
Two anomalies marked the floor's refusal to close.
"I'm low on catalysts," Taryn muttered, fumbling with her bandolier. Stone dust and starpetal sap tangled in her wild auburn hair. Her lean frame shivered from the fight, exhaustion settling deep in her bones. She checked the remaining vials. "If more of those things show up, I won't have enough Star-Mercury to stabilize the reaction. Without it, everything could spiral out of control."
"Save your dregs." Marcus glanced toward the shifting shadows. "For the moment, the air held no threat."
He watched Taryn check and recheck her vials. Her frantic movements stood out against his stillness.
Lysara ignored her supplies. She studied the walls of the ruined plaza and the shadows cast by the leaning columns. The shadows shifted against the direction of the light. She had not spoken since the Scout dissolved. In the deep green gloom, she listened to a frequency the others could not hear.
A violent spike of heat seared through Marcus's left palm, and he gasped. The shadows danced. Without warning, the world around him erupted into chaos.
He kept his eyes open. The nightmare yanked at his mind, plunging him into a blinding rush of sensation. The dark plain vanished.
A vivid image of proto-Aetheris emerged, whole and untouched by the decay that consumed it.
Proto-Aetheris replaced the Spire's ruined version in his vision. He stood on a vast floating island of glowing green that stretched toward an endless horizon. Violet and gold auroras shimmered overhead, casting warm light over crystal cities.
Thick, healthy lumivines glowed with bright blue channels of lifeblood. They formed part of the buildings' structure and carried energy through large sigil-tethers. The tethers held the floating islands in a perfect geometric grid. Crystal spires shot thousands of feet upward, brimming with life. The air was sweet, rich with blooming starpetals and honey, free from the Spire's choking ozone. This was Aetheris before the Shattering, a vibrant masterpiece filled with ancient energy. The Aetheris trapped within the Floor One ruins had become a vacant grave.
As he savored the vision, it snapped shut like a steel trap and pulled his soul back into his borrowed shell.
Marcus blinked at the floor's sudden jaundiced glow. His chest heaved beneath the Spire's heavy atmosphere. Proto-Aetheris filled his mind and reminded him what Aetheris had lost during the Shattering.
The Nameless Choir, once a mournful dissonance through the plaza, transformed. Chaotic chords became a powerful, resonant tone. A deep vibration moved through Marcus's teeth and bones, bypassing his ears. The transformed song guided rather than mourned.
"Light fractures, stars fall," the Choir intoned, but the words no longer described beams of light. They formed a physical thread leading toward the plaza's depths.
Marcus let the body's practiced lead side set his posture. His hand closed around the warmth of his blue Shattering-Sigil. The Choir's song and the residue from the Scout's death pointed in the same direction.
"They're giving us directions," he said.
"I don't hear direction." Taryn's fingers tightened around her bandolier. "I hear those ghosts taunting us, waiting to consume us."
"It's not in the air. It's on the floor."
Lysara slammed her light-green staff against the stone. Its violet glow flared across her forearm sigil, which erupted in royal violet. The shockwave flowed through the dark green gloom. For a moment, the Choir's song took shape. Shimmering geometric lines appeared, revealing themselves before fading again.
"He's right." Lysara watched the frequency. "The Choir is anchoring a path. The Scout's death created a seam. Now the Choir is exploiting it."
The jaundiced glow shifted toward statues whose blank faces stared into the lightless ceiling. The mist thinned around them. An invisible hand peeled back a heavy curtain.
The path led deeper into the brutalist maze. Ahead, a jagged rift cracked the ground and emitted a soft blue glow. It mirrored the swirling rune on his palm.
The rift pointed beneath the statues, where the floor had begun to open.