The crystal-thread shard burned in Kael's palm—flickering, unstable, like the last heartbeat of a dying star. The Construct had vanished in a flash of white-gold static, leaving only silence and the quake of what was coming.
Lightning split the sky.
The airship loomed above them now—its form jagged, organic. Not forged, but grown. Its wings were black membranes of translucent aetherglass, pulsing with alien geometry. No crew stood visible. Only glyphs along its hull—symbols Kael recognized from the Archive. Symbols not of this world.
"Formation!" Sera barked. "That's no syndicate vessel."
"It's not even flying on physics," Dren muttered, unsheathing his blade. "What in the hells are we dealing with?"
Kael's eyes glowed faintly, rune-light pulsing through his irises. "Not from here. Not from Exarune."
The shard in his hand chimed—a resonance, not a sound. Kael understood it instantly.
A warning.
A beacon.
A door.
Tessia stepped beside him. "If you have a plan, speak fast. That thing's descending."
Kael turned to Zarith, whose eyes were wide and unfocused—still caught between this realm and the next.
"What do you hear?"
Zarith's lips trembled. Then he whispered, "They're not after us. They're after the shard. They call it a Seed of Collapse. They're trying to collect them all."
Sera cursed. "Then we keep it from them."
"No," Kael said.
He raised the shard above his head.
The air warped. The cliff trembled. The shard flared in response to his will.
"We use it."
"Use it how?" Dren snapped.
Kael pointed toward the canyon wall—just as a glyph ignited across the stone. Ancient, spherical. A portal gate.
"The Obsidian Axis is waking. This ruin isn't finished testing us—it's only repositioned."
Tessia scowled. "You want to jump into another ruin while we're being chased by a void-faction?"
"They won't follow," Kael said coldly. "They can't. Not until the Axis stabilizes. But if we delay…"
Zarith screamed.
The airship had opened. A dozen dark figures dropped from it—drifting, not falling. No wings. No noise. Just black robes and faceless masks of shimmering, mirror-like material.
Kael didn't hesitate.
"Go through. I'll hold the gate."
Sera glared. "That's suicide."
"It's bait."
Thorne, silent until now, stepped forward. "We stay. Together."
Kael didn't argue. Instead, he flung the shard into the gateway.
It pulsed once.
The portal opened.
A new ruin revealed itself—rising in the air like a shattered fortress suspended between memory and void. The Axis.
The birthplace of collapse.
The team charged through, one by one—Tessia covering the rear, Zarith cradled between Thorne and Dren. Sera lingered by Kael's side.
"You've drawn the attention of things that should be dead or dreaming," she said grimly.
Kael met her eyes. "Let them dream longer."
Then they stepped through.
The portal snapped shut behind them just as the first of the faceless figures landed. Too late.
But their voices—mechanical, overlapping—echoed in the air like fractured radios.
"Candidate Soul detected."
"Axis Gate breached."
"Threadline Divergence confirmed."
They did not follow.
But they did watch.
And far away, beneath the deeper folds of ruined time, something responded to the shard's call.
A slumbering mechanism stirred.
A throne long buried beneath Exarune's foundations began to hum with purpose once more.
[ END OF CHAPTER 20 ]