Chapter One: The Room We Don't Enter
Part One – When the Glyph Doesn't Wait
Location: Legato Unit Stronghold – Veilmark Chamber
The chamber pulsed before anyone stepped in.
No trigger. No cast. No voice.
Just a slow, deliberate thrum beneath the walls—as if something within the stone remembered how to breathe before the rest of the world did.
Zephryn stood at the threshold, one foot in shadow, one foot just barely catching the edge of the glyphlight spill. Bubbalor hovered behind him, wings folded tighter than usual. Not scared—watchful. Waiting.
It was the kind of room you didn't name out loud.
A room Doctrine didn't sanction, but didn't forbid.
A room they let exist so they wouldn't have to explain it.
—
The glyph on the floor wasn't circular.
It was recursive.
A pulse looped in on itself again and again until the pattern blurred, forming an ∞ shape—but sharper. Etched not by hand, but by something older. Something with memory.
Zephryn stepped forward. The moment his foot crossed the center ring, the pulse jumped.
No glyphmark activated.
No command formed.
Still—something flared.
—
Selka entered next.
She didn't speak. Just walked until she was beside him. The hum behind the walls softened. The sharpness dulled—but didn't vanish.
Kaelen hesitated near the door.
Yolti blinked once, then stepped in without fear. The light caught her hair—her Veilmark shimmered slightly even though she hadn't summoned it.
"Do you feel that?" Kaelen asked.
"No," Zephryn said.
But he did.
It wasn't just energy.
It was recognition.
The chamber was remembering them. One by one.
—
Buta's voice echoed in from the upper corridor.
Sharp. Level.
"This is the Veilmark Chamber. It doesn't respond to strength. It responds to presence."
He stepped into the room, arms crossed, coat slightly dusted from the trail.
"Every one of you carries a mark. But the mark isn't your weapon. It's your mirror. And this—" He pointed to the recursive glyph. "—is what happens when a mirror doesn't break. It remembers."
Zephryn looked down.
The glyph shimmered. His reflection wasn't just light.
It was his hum.
Subtle.
Out of rhythm.
Trying to sync.
Selka's eyes narrowed. "This is where it begins, isn't it?"
Buta didn't answer.
He just turned, paused at the doorway, and said one final thing:
"You're not here to control the Veil. You're here to find the part of you it never forgot."
Then he was gone.
The door didn't close.
But the silence felt sealed anyway.