By the time the sun lifted fully above the treeline, Evelyn had already sifted through most of the ruin's main hall.
Torren still slept in the scriptorium, his face buried in an old cloak, blade close, boots on. He never slept deeply anymore.
But Evelyn... she hadn't truly slept in days.
Not since the firefield.
Not since she'd consumed the core.
The fractured shard now pulsed against her ribs like a second heart—warm, irregular, occasionally whispering things she didn't know how to interpret. Not with words. But feelings. Pulls. Urges.
This morning, it urged her toward the hearth.
The glyph was still faintly alive. That shouldn't have been possible.
Wards without corelight died within days unless bound. This one had lasted years—and even now, it shivered when her fingers hovered near.
It wasn't just a protective rune. It was a lock.
The same symbol had appeared in her fever dreams. Not always clear—but there, flickering behind the silver-eyed woman, drawn into the air in threads of fire.
And beneath it, always the same sound:
A song without melody. Just breath and rhythm and... sorrow.
She moved the broken hearthstones gently aside.
Ash—black, dry, untouched by recent use—rose in soft clouds. But beneath it, another layer revealed itself.
Carved into the baseplate was a sigil more elaborate than the first: a starburst encircling an open eye, surrounded by text in a script she couldn't read but almost recognized.
Her hand trembled.
It knows you, the shard whispered.
She flinched. That had been clearer. A thought, not hers, pushing forward from within.
She should stop. She didn't.
Instead, she scraped away more ash. Dozens more glyphs ringed the central seal—each different, each older than the one before.
And one of them...
One was carved in her mother's hand.
She stared at it for a long time.
Thin. Deliberate. A single line in the margin beneath a triple-etched warding spiral.
A mother's flourish she remembered from grocery notes and tea-brew labels.
"Ma?" she whispered.
Why would her mother—why would she know of this place?
A memory came unbidden: waking in the middle of the night to faint humming, her mother whispering over old books by candlelight, her face tight with exhaustion and fear. Evelyn had asked what she was reading.
Her mother had only said: "Something I hoped you'd never need."
Behind her, the stones creaked.
She turned.
No one.
But the hearth glowed slightly brighter.
Later, when Torren woke and found her still kneeling, covered in soot and whispering to old sigils, he crouched beside her.
"You're doing that thing again."
"What thing?"
"The not-breathing, not-blinking, glowing-eyes thing."
She blinked. Her throat was dry. "There's something under this station."
Torren glanced at the circle. "Like... under the hearth?"
"Under the ground."
He grunted. "That's never good."
Evelyn's eyes stayed on the center seal. "I think someone left it for me."
Torren didn't ask how she knew. He just drew his knife and started checking the exits.
That night, Evelyn dreamt again.
This time, the silver-eyed woman stood beside a vast pit, singing to the bones within.
She turned to Evelyn and whispered:
"You've found the door. But not the key."