The summons came before dawn.
Not from Cyrus. Not from Kess. But from a veiled Archivist dressed in dust-silk robes, their face obscured by a lattice of glyphplate. They spoke no words. Just extended a scroll, bound in wax with a symbol Rayon had never seen: a circle with no center, surrounded by thorns.
When he touched it, the wax hissed, and the message opened not on parchment—but within his mind.
A gate. Not theoretical. Not metaphorical. An actual rupture—a Seed Gate—had bloomed at the far edge of Sector Theta, near the Drowned Reaches. Its structure was unstable. Its signature wrong. It pulsed with inverted glyphs, the kind not taught, not archived.
They called it a False Seed.
By midmorning, he stood at the edge of the deployment deck. Wind tore through the stone corridor. Airships, sleek and narrow, awaited. The Academy did not send hunters alone to a Seed Gate—not even Rayon's kind. A team formed around him: Mirae, red-eyed but composed; Bilden, chewing dried root as if it were armor; Talia, half-armored and half-distant. And Kess, silent but present, her tunic layered with still-living runes.
They flew in silence.
Rayon stood near the prow, watching as the clouds fractured beneath them. The eastern lands below looked sick. Trees too still. Rivers that shimmered black instead of silver. The Glyphline infrastructure—normally humming like veins—was cracked, flickering, wrong.
"This isn't a bloom," Mirae said behind him. "It's a breach."
Rayon nodded. "It's echoing something older."
Talia approached, holding a device that resembled a folded map, layered with blue light.
"The Seed opened forty hours ago. Four hunters from another district entered. None reported back. No distress glyphs. No remains."
"No signals at all?" Kess asked.
"None," Talia replied.
The airship dropped through another current. A sharp wind rose. Below, the breach came into view.
Not a gate.
A wound.
The landscape had folded inward—a canyon carved by something that didn't move, but devoured. Trees were uprooted in geometric spirals. Soil was scorched not by fire, but by syntax—lines of inverse glyph patterns etched into the land itself.
The Seed pulsed at its center. Not like a heart. Like a recursion. Each beat tried to rewrite the last.
They disembarked.
Kess led. The area crackled with static aether. Even her living glyphs dimmed slightly as they drew closer.
"The glyphs here don't breathe," she said. "They listen. But to what, I can't tell."
Rayon knelt beside a line etched in stone. It wasn't carved—it had grown there. The inverse glyph spiraled toward the Seed, shifting under his gaze. It refused stillness.
"We go in," he said.
They crossed the boundary together.
Instant distortion.
Sound fractured. Sight blurred. The air smelled of rust and forgotten voices. Rayon's vision rippled. The sky became a dome of glyphs—unwritten and flickering. A noise pulsed beneath the soil: not mechanical, not alive. Just... intention.
Inside the Seed's perimeter, reality warped. Structures formed and un-formed—familiar shapes gone uncanny. A tower rose, identical to the Academy's west spire, but mirrored and hollow. Rooms appeared from Rayon's memory—twisted, rearranged. The Trial Chamber. The Archive Vault. His own dormitory—its door half-open, glyphs leaking out like breath.
"It's feeding from us," Mirae whispered. "From memory. From meaning."
Talia unsheathed her blade, though it looked dulled.
"Form a circle," she said. "Eyes wide. Glyphs ready."
Bilden grunted. "And if the glyphs don't answer?"
"Then we die with intention," she said.
Kess closed her eyes. Her tunic rippled. A spiral glyph rose from her shoulder, burning with internal pulse. She cast it forward—into the Seed.
Everything stopped.
Then, everything screamed.
Not sound. Not pain. Just awareness unraveling.
Rayon fell to his knees.
His glyph flared without command. Vel suun—the wound that listens—rose from his palm like frost. It shimmered, pulsed once, and then split. Not broke. Split—like it wanted to multiply.
The Seed reacted.
A form coalesced.
Not a creature. A reflection. A being shaped from Rayon's outline, but inverted. Its face bore no eyes. Just the idea of where eyes had once been. Its glyph burned black-blue. Not written. Born.
It stepped forward.
Rayon did not move.
The others couldn't. Mirae was locked mid-breath. Talia frozen in a partial swing. Kess—eyes wide, lips moving, but no sound escaping. Bilden shaking, hands dripping blood from nowhere.
Rayon stared at the figure.
"I am not you," he whispered.
It tilted its head.
"But I am," it replied. "I am the version written when you chose silence."
Rayon stepped forward. His glyph flickered.
"You're a seed," he said. "But not mine."
The figure didn't blink. "Yet I grew from you."
Rayon raised his palm.
The glyph split again.
Two symbols formed—opposing each other. One mirrored. One true. The Seed shook.
"You'll die if you reject me," the echo said.
"I'll die if I become you," Rayon replied.
He pressed the glyphs together.
A flash.
The Seed buckled. The recursive pulse snapped. The structure caved inward—retracting its illusions. The sky went blank. The tower melted. The soil hissed.
Rayon collapsed.
When he awoke, he was outside the Seed zone. Kess sat beside him, cloak wrapped around both of them like a ward.
The others stood—shaken but whole. The Seed had closed. No breach remained.
He tried to speak.
"You didn't die," Kess said. "But something did."
Rayon looked at his hand. The glyph was gone.
No—not gone.
Asleep.
Behind his eyes, the false self still hovered—not banished, but waiting.
Later, on the flight back, no one spoke.
Not because there was nothing to say.
But because meaning was still settling.
And Rayon, staring into the sky that no longer shimmered, thought:
Seeds lie. But echoes never do.