The wards continued to hum long after the tremor faded, not loud enough to trigger alarms, but persistent, like a held breath that refused to release.
Selene did not move for several seconds. Her eyes tracked the sigils embedded in the walls as they recalibrated, threads of light tightening and loosening in patterns meant to isolate disturbances. When none of them flared red, when no emergency seals descended from the ceiling, her unease deepened rather than eased.
"That wasn't one of ours," Selene said finally, voice low.
The girl nodded. Her senses were still stretched outward, awareness brushing against something distant and immense, not pressing or invading, simply… present. It had felt different from the nameless one beneath the city, different from the sealed convergences, and even different from the whisper that lingered at the edges of her mind like a half-remembered thought.
This presence had no weight of imprisonment.
"It didn't feel curious," the girl said slowly. "It felt deliberate. I am starting to feel as though there is someone or more behind this."
Selene swore under her breath, a rare crack in her composure. She turned sharply and moved toward the far end of the hall, where a circular table lay dormant beneath a veil of suppression fields. With a flick of her wrist, she dispelled them, and the surface came alive with layered projections of the city, its districts rendered in light and shadow, lines of containment and authority webbing outward like veins.
"Tell me exactly what you felt," Selene said, already adjusting parameters. "Not what you think it was. What it felt like, I need to make sure of something."
The girl closed her eyes, forcing herself to focus past the residual burn of the limiter, past the pulse of her core. "Distance," she said after a moment. "Not far, but… removed. Like it was standing on higher ground, watching a flood rather than being in it. And it noticed me because I moved, not because I connected."
Selene's hand stilled and her brows furrowed, she knew the ones in the prisons, their presence could only reach so far.
"That rules out the sealed entities," she said. "They react to alignment, not motion."
She brought up another layer, older and far less refined, filled with fragmented symbols and incomplete records. Names appeared briefly and then vanished, crossed out, burned away, overwritten by warnings rather than descriptions.
The girl opened her eyes. "You knew there was something else."
Selene did not answer immediately. When she did, her voice was carefully neutral. "I knew there were gaps. Blind spots in the old records. Authority doesn't like to admit when it doesn't have a name for a threat and this city has a lot of secrets."
"That thing isn't bound," the girl said. It wasn't a question, she knew deep down, because she had that feeling before.
"No," Selene admitted. "And if it's paying attention now, it means tonight changed more than just internal balances. it simply means we are missing something."
The room felt smaller suddenly, the wards less like protection and more like walls.
A faint ache bloomed behind the girl's eyes, not pain exactly, but pressure, as if something were testing the edges of her perception. Images flickered unbidden, not visions this time, but impressions, wide skies she had never seen, structures not built atop prisons but around open nexuses, and people moving freely through currents of power instead of fearing them.
She inhaled sharply.
Selene noticed instantly. "What did you see?"
"Not the priestess," the girl said. "Not the city. Somewhere else. Somewhere that isn't afraid of what I am."
That made Selene's expression harden in a way the girl hadn't seen before.
"Do not trust that," Selene said. "Anything that presents itself as freedom without cost is lying, especially now."
The girl laughed quietly, though there was no humor in it. "That's rich, coming from an authority built on prisons and secrets."
The words hung between them, sharp but honest.
Selene did not bristle. Instead, she looked… tired. "You're right," she said. "And that's exactly why this is dangerous. Whatever noticed you isn't reacting to the past. It's reacting to potential."
The girl straightened and her eyes narrowed with a determination she did not know she had. "Then tell me what you're not saying."
Selene hesitated, then reached into her coat and withdrew a thin, crystalline shard etched with shifting runes. The limiter responded immediately, heat flaring along the girl's spine before settling into a tense equilibrium.
"This is a registry key," Selene said. "Not for the city. For something older. Something the council swore they dismantled."
She placed it on the table, where it projected a single symbol, incomplete, its edges blurred as if reality itself resisted defining it.
"The Outer Concord," Selene continued. "A coalition that predates centralized authority. They believed convergences shouldn't be sealed or controlled but… guided. Integrated. They vanished after the near-destruction of the city, officially disbanded, their philosophies declared heretical."
The girl felt a chill. "You don't erase an entire ideology just because it loses an argument."
"No," Selene said quietly. "You erase it because it threatens the system that keeps everyone alive."
The symbol pulsed once, reacting not to Selene's words but to the girl's presence.
"That thing you felt," Selene said, watching the projection with narrowed eyes, "may belong to what's left of them. Or to something that grew in the vacuum they left behind or maybe their records and idelogy can help us figure out what this is."
The pressure behind the girl's eyes intensified, and this time a voice brushed her awareness, not a whisper, nor was it invasive, just close enough to be unmistakable.
"You are late, a time will come when you will learn a truth and you will have to choose." It seemed to say, without words.
Her breath caught and Selene noticed immediately. "You heard something."
"Yes," the girl admitted. "But it said to me that a point will come in which I will have to choose."
That was what finally unsettled Selene completely.
Before she could respond, a sharp knock echoed through the hall, cutting through the wards with practiced authority. The sound was precise, coded, urgent.
Selene turned toward the door. "We're not to be disturbed."
"Then you'll want to hear this anyway," came a voice from beyond, controlled but strained. "We just lost contact with the lower containment ring."
The girl felt it at the same moment Selene did, a distant ripple from beneath the city, old seals groaning under pressure that wasn't trying to break them, only… adjust.
Selene's hand went instinctively to her blade. "Which ring?"
A pause, too long.
"The nameless one," the voice said.
The girl's core flared, not in pain this time, but in recognition.
Somewhere far above, beyond the city's wards and authority, something smiled, not because the prison stirred, but because the board was finally filling with pieces that could move.