Chapter 54

  The summons came at night.

  No horns, no formal announcement—just a ripple of quiet orders passed from tent to tent. By the time Soraya’s pavilion lanterns flared to life, a dozen key members of the Order were already gathering beneath its shadowed canopy. Ren and Leo weren’t among them.

  Ren had noticed, of course. He’d been tuning the temporary replacement arm the researchers had given him—slightly slower, a little less precise than the original. He’d wrecked the first one pretty badly during the fight in Redvine— watching familiar faces slip into the dark with tight jaws and wary glances. No one looked at him directly, which told him everything.

  Inside the pavilion, the atmosphere was suffocating. Soraya stood at the head of the table, the carved Obsidian crest behind her dimly catching the firelight. Sinclair was at her right, silent, arms crossed. Around them sat veterans—scouts, ward-binders, and mid-ranking tacticians. All wore the same haunted expression.

  “You’ve all seen the aftermath,” Soraya began. Her voice was low, but sharp. “You’ve all seen what tore through Redvine. What we faced there wasn’t just another corrupted anomaly. It was not a beast, nor a natural calamity. It was something more.”

  A ripple of unease traveled the room. Someone shifted in their seat.

  “The Divine,” Sinclair said, picking up the thread. “But not the Church’s Divine. Not a saint. Not a god in the sense they’ve preached.” Sinclair continued, his voice carrying the weight of something too old and too heavy to be spoken lightly. “What we saw in Redvine was not a blessing from the heavens. It was a weapon. A force with intent. And it has no interest in being worshipped.”

  Soraya’s gaze swept the table, her voice steady but grim.

  “She is real. Older than the Church’s lies, older than the walls of any kingdom standing today. The Divine is not salvation—she is conquest. A tyrant from the age before the Shardlands were even named. Atreus—an outsider, like many of us—fought against her. He was the one who bound her, who sealed her reign of terror when no one else could stand against her.”

  The room went silent. The rain outside tapped against the pavilion’s canvas, but no one dared break the stillness. A ward-binder at the far end finally spoke, voice trembling slightly.

  “You’re saying an outsider… sealed this Divine?”

  “Yes,” Soraya said, and her tone left no room for doubt. “Atreus came from beyond our world, just as we did. But he rose higher than any mortal. His weapons weren’t forged by magic alone but by creation—by cooking, alchemy, and strange arts we’ve barely begun to understand. He defied her tyranny once. And it cost him everything.”

  Sinclair shifted, his arms uncrossing as his voice cut through the murmurs.

  “We saw her at Redvine. We saw what her corruption can do—those things weren’t just monsters. They were wrong. Twisted flesh, eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes, mouths that didn’t stop screaming even after we’d cut them down.”

  His gaze swept the room, steady despite the tension tightening his jaw.

  “They were hers. This wasn’t an accident. She’s awake, and she’s looking at us.”

  A scout who had been silent until now slammed his fist onto the table.

  “Then what are we supposed to do? If even that so-called godlike outsider couldn’t stop her, how in the abyss are we supposed to stand a chance? Are we just meant to sit here while she burns every town to the ground?”

  Soraya raised a hand, silencing them. “We don’t have the luxury of panic. The Church’s false teachings have blinded the world to the danger she represents. The people will worship her even as she crushes them underfoot. If we stand, we stand alone—and that is why the Order exists. To serve as the shadowed shield between injustice and the innocent. To act where others turn away. Whether that means pulling outsiders from the fire or holding the line against odds no sane person would face, we do it—because no one else will.”

  Another voice—a younger trainee—spoke up, hesitant but sharp.

  “And what of Ren? There are too many coincidences to ignore.”

  “Ren has nothing to do with this,” Sinclair said coldly, his voice like steel.

  The young man looked like he wanted to say more but he didn’t push further. His jaw tightened, and he sank back into silence.

  Soraya leaned forward slightly, her hands flat against the table.

  “Ren’s survival is an outlier, yes. But we don’t have the full picture. If Atreus’s legacy is awakening in ways we don’t yet understand, it could be the one advantage we have left. Do not waste it on fear and suspicion. He is under my protection—and that’s the end of this discussion.”

  No one dared argue after that.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

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  The morning air was sharp with damp pine and the faint sting of burned sigils. Ren blinked awake to the sound of movement—measured, brisk, not the usual half-awake shuffling of camp routine. He sat up slowly, his back protesting, and peered through the flap of his tent.

  The camp wasn’t rushing, not quite, but there was a current running through it. Ward-runners with sealed scrolls moved between tents. Two scouts were whispering urgently near a cart. A third carried a heavy crate toward the central spire tent—a place Ren had always assumed was just storage. Something was happening.

  He stood, brushed down his tunic, and moved to intercept one of the runners. “What’s going on?”

  The runner hesitated. “Don’t know, exactly. Soraya called for full lattice crew muster. First time I’ve seen it happen since I joined.”

  Ren frowned. “Lattice?”

  But the runner was already gone.

  Ren followed the movement, staying near the edges. It didn’t take long to spot the shift in the air—everyone in the center of camp moved with tightly wound urgency. The structures here weren’t the same. They were made with stone. Reinforced with embedded metal threading and built around shallow mounds of earth that pulsed with old sigils—ones Ren didn’t recognize.

  By the time he reached the edge of the clearing, a circle had gathered around the largest of these tents. Soraya and Sinclair stood at the head, speaking quietly to a woman in a layered robe of etched obsidian thread—someone Ren didn’t recognize. Her face was stern, her fingers already tracing diagrams in the air as she spoke.

  “I didn’t even know we had something like this,” Ren muttered under his breath.

  “Most don’t,” Leo said, appearing beside him with a grim look. “It’s a restricted channel. Direct-order use only. You’re not supposed to even know this part of the camp exists.”

  Ren raised a brow. “Then how do you know?”

  Leo glanced at him sidelong. “Because I break the rules.”

  Ren gave a weak smile, then turned back to the scene unfolding before them.

  They were bringing out a machine. No gears, no glowing crystal array. Instead, a wide stone platform—circular, with concentric runic bands—was being slowly uncovered by a dozen warders. It had clearly been buried beneath a false floor all this time. In its center stood a spire of black iron-veined stone, curved like a tuning fork split down the middle. Mana crackled faintly along the grooves etched into its surface. Runes older than anything Ren had ever studied lined the outer ring. And all of it radiated a quiet weight.

  Like the earth itself had been holding its breath.

  “What is that?” Ren asked softly.

  Leo’s voice was quieter than usual. “It’s called a Lattice Beacon. One of the last few stable links the Obsidian Order has to the Lords back at the Shard Hall.”

  “And it was buried here this whole time?”

  “Only gets used in full-scale emergencies. That’s how bad things have gotten.”

  The circle quieted as the lattice engineers—the ones with the etched robes and burn-scarred gloves—began placing tokens at four corners of the platform. One placed a sigil-bracelet against her throat and began humming—a tone so low it vibrated the teeth. Another poured liquid silver into one of the runic channels. Sparks rose.

  Soraya stepped forward, her voice sharp. “Begin charge sequence.”

  The center spire lit.

  First faintly. Then with a deep pulse—like a heartbeat echoing through stone. The ground vibrated.

  Another tone. Higher, sharper.

  One of the warders called out, “Level One lattice resonance stabilized.”

  The spire shifted color—dark red to violet, then toward white.

  “Sending primary glyph set,” another said. “Encoded and stripped. No headers.”

  Then—silence.

  Long, hanging silence.

  The beacon pulsed once. Then again.

  Nothing.

  “Relay’s dead,” someone whispered.

  “No, the beacon’s still active,” another answered. “It should’ve pinged.”

  They waited. A third pulse. Then nothing.

  The woman in the obsidian robes stepped forward, tapping a different set of runes. “Attempting fallback channel.”

  The beacon pulsed a fourth time.

  Then the light twisted.

  Violet became black. The runes flickered. A sound like tearing silk echoed outward. Everyone around the platform flinched.

  Then came the smell—burnt ozone and blood.

  The beacon sparked violently—sigils cracking at the edges. One of the outer ring plates shattered, flinging a strip of iron across the platform. A warder screamed.

  Ren instinctively reached for his Threads, but the golden light beneath his skin stayed quiet.

  “Kill the charge! Now!” Soraya barked.

  Ward-binders scrambled to release the cranks. Raven yanked the energy feeds away from the copper channels, but the machine was already failing. The orb shattered with a violent burst, shards scattering like falling stars. A shockwave rolled through the clearing, knocking Ren and a few others to their knees.

  For a moment, no one spoke. The smell of ozone and scorched copper hung in the air.

  Raven was the first to break the silence. She crouched by the base of the engine, examining the blackened runes. Her voice was tight. “It’s gone. The lattice isn’t just blocked—it’s… broken. There’s Divine residue all over the ley lines past Redvine. Like something burned the message paths clean out of the ground.”

  The crowd of Order members shifted uneasily.

  “We’re cut off?” someone asked from the edge of the gathering.

  Raven’s jaw tightened. “Completely.”

  Ren felt his stomach drop. The main Obsidian base wasn’t just far away—it was impossibly far away without this network. No reinforcements. No updates. No safety net.

  Soraya’s hands clenched on the table. “We’ll try again with the auxiliary runes tomorrow, but… don’t expect miracles.”

  Sinclair turned to the crowd. “Get some rest. Everyone. This changes nothing. We keep watch, we keep our blades sharp. If the Divine moves again, we’ll meet it on our feet, not our knees.”

  No one cheered. They just dispersed, grim and silent.

  Ren stayed behind, staring at the broken machine. For the first time since coming here, the Obsidian Order didn’t feel unshakable. It felt… fragile.