The first crack didn't come with thunder.
It came with ink.
Vahn Romanoff noticed it in the margins of a third-century Source treatise—one he'd read a dozen times before. The text hadn't changed, not truly, but the negative space between the glyphs had. Where once there was absence, now there was implication. A faint afterimage of meaning, like lightning scars burned into the air after a storm.
He closed the book slowly.
The Sanctum of Resonance was silent save for the soft hum of crystalline veins. Since the confrontation at the North Spire, the Academy had given him what it claimed was freedom. No curfews. No oversight. No questions asked too loudly.
That silence was intentional.
They were watching to see what he would do with it.
Vahn exhaled and stood, rolling tension from his shoulders. The Weaveborn mark beneath his skin stirred faintly, responding to something he could not yet name. Not danger. Not power.
Attention.
He reached for the pendant at his chest. Since the storm answered him atop the spire, it had changed—not in shape, but in weight. It felt heavier with meaning, like a word about to be spoken.
"Leslie," he murmured, "what did you see that I still haven't?"
The chamber lights flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then stabilized.
Vahn froze.
The Sanctum was warded against fluctuation. Even the Source Stream itself had trouble bleeding through its defenses unless invited.
He was not inviting anything.
A new presence unfolded—not entering, not intruding, but revealing itself where it had always been. The shadows along the far wall deepened, stretching into impossible angles, until they resolved into a silhouette that refused to settle into a single shape.
Not Elias.
Not Lira.
Not the Custodian.
This presence felt… older. Not ancient in years, but in decisions.
"You're listening now," the voice said—not aloud, but directly into the space behind his thoughts. "That's new."
Vahn didn't reach for lightning. He didn't reach for anything.
"I've always listened," he said quietly. "I just didn't know what to listen for."
A sound like amusement rippled through the air.
"Spoken like someone already halfway broken," the presence replied. "Good. Intact minds make poor bridges."
Vahn's jaw tightened. "You're not the Eleventh Seat."
"No," it agreed. "I am what remains when it exhales."
The shadows shifted, briefly forming a symbol Vahn recognized instantly—the eye within the triskelion. But incomplete. Fractured.
"A shard," Vahn said. "An echo."
"A consequence," the voice corrected. "Left behind when the Circle failed to kill an idea."
Vahn's pulse quickened. "You were there."
"Yes."
"When the Eleventh was made?"
"When it was misunderstood."
The chamber's temperature dropped—not cold, but thin, like the air before a storm breaks.
"The Seat was never meant to rule," the presence continued. "Nor judge. It was meant to listen. To absorb the dissonance created when mortals tried to turn the Source into hierarchy."
"And the Circle," Vahn said slowly, "turned it into a weapon."
"Into a lock," the shard replied. "And locks invite keys."
The Weaveborn mark flared sharply.
Vahn staggered, gripping the edge of the worktable as a flood of impressions surged through him—failed Weaves collapsing into screams of light, early Unmarked burned hollow by forced convergence, a figure standing alone at an eleven-seated table, refusing to sit.
Leslie.
He gasped.
"She found you," Vahn said hoarsely.
"Yes."
"And you showed her the truth."
The shard dimmed. "I warned her."
Anger surged—not explosive, but dense and heavy. "Then why is she dead?"
Silence stretched.
Then, quietly: "Because she chose to become a question the Circle couldn't erase."
Vahn bowed his head, breathing through the ache that bloomed behind his eyes. When he looked up again, his voice was steadier.
"What do you want from me?"
The presence receded slightly, shadows thinning.
"Want?" it echoed. "Nothing. I exist to observe. But the Seat is waking. And it will look for a voice."
Vahn's eyes hardened. "Not a throne."
"Exactly."
The shard drifted backward, dissolving into the wall like ink into water.
"When the fracture widens," it said, fading, "you will have a choice, Weaveborn. Let the storm decide… or teach it a new shape."
The chamber fell silent once more.
Long moments passed.
Vahn straightened slowly.
Outside the Sanctum, Mystara slept—unaware that its oldest secret was no longer dormant, merely undecided.
He turned back to his notes, hands steady, mind alight.
"Alright," he said softly, lightning dancing between his fingers like punctuation. "Then let's rewrite the question."
Far above, clouds began to gather again.
Not summoned.
Not answered.
Aligned.