The Whorled Court wasn't built for panic, yet the moment Wenrel stepped inside, the air felt stretched thin. The circular chamber — usually calm, humming with the low resonance of Sunspire's civic lattice — now carried a faint tremor, as if the threads themselves were shivering under a pressure no one could name.
Lysara was already at the center dais with two senior Wardens. She didn't look at Wenrel as he arrived; she looked past him, toward the threads floating in the upper dome. They flickered like distant fireflies caught in a storm.
"You felt it too," Wenrel said quietly.
Her answer was a slow nod. "Half the city felt it."
Tavren and Elaris slipped in behind him, carrying that same rattled energy. The Court doors sealed with a low tone — the kind that suggested not caution, but containment.
A Warden stepped forward. He was older, his hair silvered by decades of reading the threads. "We isolated the pulse that struck the Court. It wasn't an attack. It was a… signal."
Elaris lifted her head sharply. "Directed?"
"More like a confirmation." The Warden's gaze locked onto Wenrel with uncomfortable precision. "Directed at him."
Wenrel felt the weight land on his shoulders before the words even settled. He stepped closer to the central dais where a scry-field shimmered like thin glass. Within it hung a pattern — faint, delicate, impossible.
A ring.
A spiral.
Then another ring nested inside the first.
Kael Veyn's sigil.
But this one was older. Cleaner. Not a tag or a taunt.
A signature.
Lysara's voice was quiet. "This isn't from Kael or his apprentice."
"It predates them," the Warden said. "Possibly by centuries."
The pattern shifted, threads bending into an elegant weave none of them recognized. The Court lights dimmed, and something like a breath moved through the chamber. Wenrel felt it brush him — not hostile, not curious anymore, but familiar in a way that unsettled him deeper than fear.
"What does it want?" Tavren muttered.
The Warden hesitated. "Not want. Recognize."
Elaris stepped closer to Wenrel. "This is the same presence that examined you earlier."
The threads above them trembled, then snapped into clear alignment. A pulse moved through the dome — softer than before, but directed. It fell over Wenrel like a cloak and dissolved into him before he could brace.
The world tilted.
Not physically — the threads tilted. For a heartbeat he saw Sunspire from within its weave: towers glowing like lanterns, ropeways twisting like veins, every whisper of thought passing between strangers like sparks. And deeper than the city, beneath its foundations, beneath even its oldest roots, something vast exhaled — not alive, not dead, but aware.
He staggered. Lysara caught his arm just before he fell.
"Wenrel," she said. "Stay with us."
The Court lights steadied. The scry-field flickered, then dimmed to black.
Wenrel breathed hard, forcing the vision back. "It wasn't showing me a place. It was showing me a viewpoint. Something beneath the city sees us through the threads."
Elaris went pale. "Beneath? As in underground?"
"No," Wenrel said. "Beneath our understanding."
Silence fell over the Court. Even the threads hovering overhead stopped their shiver, hanging in a slow, deliberate drift.
Lysara finally broke the stillness. "This isn't Kael's doing. He stumbled into something he couldn't comprehend. Something old. Something that uses resonance the way we use language."
Tavren whispered, "Does it threaten us?"
Wenrel shook his head, though he didn't feel sure. "Not yet. It's only watching. Measuring. It wants to understand what changed when I anchored that echo."
"Then it sees you as the variable," Elaris said.
The idea sent a cold ripple down his spine.
Another pulse traveled through the Court — light, harmless, but unmistakable. A message. Not intrusive. Not demanding.
A marker.
A promise that whatever lay beneath the threads would be paying attention now.
Lysara exhaled. "We end Volume One here."
She didn't say the words, but the meaning was the same:
Sunspire had crossed a threshold it couldn't uncross.
Kael Veyn was no longer the only player.
Someone — or something — else had joined the weave.
Wenrel lifted his eyes to the trembling dome, and for the first time he didn't feel like a novice or a mistake or an echo barely held.
He felt like a piece on a board he couldn't yet see.
And the next move wouldn't be Sunspire's to make.