The Sanctum bells did not sound to announce the morning. Their vibrations took a detour through his auditory cortex to shudder the marrow of his bones. It was a tectonic clamor, a jarring frequency that skipped the ears entirely to resonate against the base of his spine. It felt less like a summons to devotion and more like the catastrophic breakdown of a massive industrial piston, amplified by stone acoustics and a thousand decibels of divine reprimand.

  Aerich did not wake. He rebooted.

  Consciousness returned in jagged and pixelated fragments. First came the pain. It was a rhythmic and hydraulic throb centered on the bridge of his nose, which served as a souvenir from his face-first acceleration into the basalt floors of Valthorne the previous night. Then came the tactile data. He felt the cold and unforgiving grit of a pallet that felt less like a bed and more like fossilized misery wrapped in coarse burlap.

  He reached out. His hand twitched in a phantom muscle memory while his fingers sought the smooth and chemically treated glass of a smartphone. He found only damp and weeping stone. The shock of the texture sent a jolt through his nervous system. It was slime-slick and colder than a crypt. His eyes finally forced themselves open.

  The darkness of the cell was not empty. It was populated by data.

  “Initializing Neural Handshake,” a voice echoed. It did not come from the room but from the wet grey matter of his temporal lobe. It possessed the sterile and terrifying clarity of a digitized god. “Cycle 002. Mood: Sub-optimal... Physical Integrity: 92%. Note: Facial trauma detected. Shall I render the hematoma in high-definition?”

  Aerich pushed himself upright. He drew a sharp breath when his surroundings failed to simply materialize. They compiled, instead.

  A throbbing tension ignited behind his eyes… piercing, digital, full of the flavor of copper wires and static discharge. His sight splintered; for a moment, the world shuddered. A lattice of translucent, electric turquoise light locked into place across his vision. This interface didn't hover before him. It scorched, as though branded directly onto the back of his eyeballs.

  [ SYSTEM: BOOT SEQUENCE COMPLETE ]

  [ LOCATION: ACOLYTE CLOISTER // CELL BLOCK D ]

  [ STATUS: IMPRISONED (Security Level: Medieval Low) ]

  The damp stain in the corner festered with mold. It was suddenly framed in a harsh red box. Text spooled out from it and suspended in the air like dust motes caught in a sunbeam.

  [ OBJECT: ORGANIC SLURRY ]

  [ PROPERTIES: TOXIC SPORES (Trace) / SLIP HAZARD ]

  [ DECAY RATE: 14% ]

  "Cidi, dim the HUD," Aerich rasped.

  He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. The pressure did nothing to banish the glowing text. It merely superimposed the phosphenes of his own biology over the arcane UI. "I feel like I'm hallucinating inside a spreadsheet…"

  “I am not a hallucination, Admin... I am a Symbiotic Arcane Interface,” Cidi replied. Her voice vibrated against his skull with a haptic hum that made his teeth ache. “And I advise you to lower your vocal output. Acoustic triangulation suggests a patrol vector approaching. Based on your erratic behavior last night, specifically three hours spent whispering 'sudo logout' at a masonry wall, the guards have classified you as Erratic… 'Aether-Touched’, Another system fault, and their operational protocol may escalate from ‘Neutralize’ to ‘Kinetic Correction’.”

  Aerich dropped his hands and exhaled a breath that misted in the frigid air. The cell was a grim oubliette of hewn black stone illuminated only by a sliver of sickly grey light bleeding through a slit heavy with iron bars. He looked down at his frame. The acolyte robes that he had somehow arrived in were rough against his skin. It was a heavy weave of wool that smelled of ancient incense, unwashed bodies, and the lingering metallic tang of fear.

  "Where are we, really?" he whispered. The question tasted like ash.

  “Geolocation is fragmented,” Cidi noted coolly. A navigational compass materialized in the upper right of his peripheral vision... It spun wildly before settling on a bank of impenetrable fog... “Atmospheric pressure suggests high altitude. Ambient mana density is off the charts... We are either in a subterranean fortress dedicated to a darker pantheon… or stuck in a particularly aggressive LARP session in New Jersey... Probability favors the former.”

  The grinding screech of the iron door bolts sliding back killed any retort he might have had. It was the sound of metal screaming against rust, echoing like a dying animal.

  Aerich scrambled backward until his back hit the cold stone wall. He tried to compose himself. He wanted to wipe the look of a terrified Computer Science major from his face and adopt the mask of an obedient mystic, but his heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

  Two guards filled the doorway.

  They were more than mere armored men. Their plates possessed the fluid, oil-slick gleam of obsidian, and silver masks completely erased their features. They were statues animated into terrible motion, emanating a crushing sense of containment. One leveled a spear at Aerich’s chest. Its tip didn’t shine... Instead, it throbbed and resonated with a violet, localized gravity field.

  [ SYSTEM: THREAT ASSESSMENT ]

  [ ENTITY: TEMPLE WARDEN ]

  [ CLASS: MELEE / DIVINE ENFORCER ]

  [ WEAPON: MANA-CHARGED PARTISAN ]

  [ LETHALITY: EXTREME ]

  [ NOTE: Tip contains pressurized Aether capable of flashing blood to steam in 3.4 seconds. ]

  “Recommendation,” Cidi whispered. Her voice was devoid of empathy. “Be a good little code-monkey, Admin... Walk.”

  Aerich moved into the passageway. His limbs seemed fashioned from unspooled cabling and grim resolve. The air shifted abruptly. The cell’s mildewed decay surrendered to a dense, suffusing haze. It was ponderous and left a residue on his palate, a flavor both syrupy and buzzing with current.

  “Atmospheric Analysis,” Cidi supplied while scrolling text down the side of his vision. “Particulates detecting Myrrh, burning bone, and Ozone. Alert: Soporific Agent detected at 0.02% concentration. They are drugging the air to keep the acolytes pliant. Keep your breathing shallow.”

  The march through the Sanctum was a blur of gothic brutality. It was an architectural nightmare that resembled a cathedral designed by a torturer. They passed vast open archways that looked down into joyous abyssal darkness where gears the size of houses turned with agonizing slowness to grind the very foundation of the mountain. The sound was a constant sub-bass thrum that Aerich felt in his teeth.

  Eventually, they arrived at a set of double doors carved from wood so dark it seemed to absorb the torchlight. They depicted faces caught in a silent and eternal scream. The Wardens shoved him forward.

  "The Training Hall," one grunted. The voice was hollow and damp like wind rushing through a tomb. "Let the First Light judge your worthiness."

  Aerich stumbled through the threshold as the doors slammed shut behind him. The boom echoed like a thunderclap.

  The change in location was absolute. The Training Hall was a cavernous amphitheater and a vast blister inside the mountain, far removed from the cell block. The ceiling was lost in shadows high above, where unseen things chittered and rustled. Stained glass windows, begrimed with centuries of soot, filtered the morning light into pools of bruised purple and coagulated red.

  Rows of wooden benches warped by time and sweat curved around a raised dais in the center. It looked like a lecture hall.

  A dozen novices were already there, huddled in terrified cliques. Most were human. They clutched basic runewood staves like lifelines while their eyes remained wide and darting. But it was the figure in the back row that drew Aerich’s gaze like a runtime error in a pristine script.

  [ SYSTEM: ENTITY RECOGNITION ]

  [ TARGET: KAEL]

  [ RACE: BEASTKIN (Earth-Aspect) ]

  [ CLASS: TANK / BERSERKER ]

  [ STATUS: BORED / HOSTILE ]

  Kael was monumental. He sat, or rather he sprawled, across space meant for three men. He was a creature of copper fur and granite muscle. He wore a vest of boiled leather that strained against a chest built like a siege engine. What terrified Aerich wasn't the size but the texture. Patches of Kael’s greying skin looked rough and craggy as if the biology was slowly surrendering to geology.

  Aerich watched as the beastkin extended a single claw. It was thick and sharp as a dagger. Kael carved into the dark wood of the bench. Scritch. Scritch. Snap. The sound was visceral as wood fibers parted under immense and casual pressure.

  Aerich reasoned that survival meant aligning with the entity most capable of violence... He adjusted his scratchy robes and ascended the tiered seating.

  "Nice handywork," Aerich said. His voice cracked with a dry rasp that betrayed his terror. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Is that a local artistic tradition, or is it just a zero-star review of the accommodations?"

  Kael didn’t look up from his work. His ears were long and tufted like a lynx’s. They swiveled independently toward Aerich and tracked him like radar dishes. A low sound emanated from his chest. It was a rumbling growl that vibrated through the wooden bench and into Aerich’s thighs.

  “Audio Analysis: Growl,” Cidi whispered as she overlaid a waveform on the HUD. “Complex tones detected. 40% Dismissal. 20% Hunger. 40% Existential Dread.”

  Kael eventually pivoted. His stare was flinty and fixed. "Your ghost is noisy… tiny creature," he grated. The resonance was like bedrock shearing deep beneath the crust. "It jitters like a rodent sensing the freeze."

  "I'm Aerich," he offered. He sat down a respectful distance away, which was specifically exactly three inches beyond the reach of those claws… "The 'Glitch' that fell through the ceiling yesterday... The High Seer seemed displeased."

  "I smell the lightning on you, man-skin," Kael said. He turned back to his carving and gouged a new line into the wood. "You carry the scent of ozone and the scorched void. You are the one Malakar wants to crack open to see how the spirits bleed."

  Aerich leaned in slightly and squinted at the carving. It wasn't random destruction. It was a list of names. Most were crossed out, but Kael was currently whittling a line through another one...

  “Semantic Interpretation,” Cidi noted. “That is a hit list. Based on the force applied to the strikethroughs, he takes great pleasure in checking items off. You are currently number twelve. Right below … ‘The Cook’ and above ‘Myself’…”

  "Comforting," Aerich muttered. He swallowed hard.

  "Do not seek comfort," Kael warned. He blew a cloud of splinters from the bench. "Soft earth swallows the traveler. Only stone endures." He tapped a patch of stone-grey skin on his forearm. The sound echoed like a hammer on rock. "In this place lay the graves of the weak... The mountain reclaims us all, grain by grain."

  Before Aerich could query the physiological implications of turning into a statue, the atmosphere in the hall shifted. The pressure dropped abruptly to pop Aerich’s ears. The ambient hum of the Sanctum spiked into a high-pitched tinnitus whine.

  The double doors at the front of the hall didn't open. They were flung wide by an invisible kinetic blast.

  A woman strode in. Amidst the grime and gloom, she was terrifyingly pristine. She was tall, slender, and dressed in cobalt silks that seemed to shimmer with their own internal bio-luminescence. She moved with the predatory grace of a viper. Her skin was the color of moonlight, and her ears tapered to sharp, elegant points that twitched with every shift in the room's energy.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  [ SYSTEM: ENTITY RECOGNITION ]

  [ TARGET: LADY LIORA ]

  [ RACE: HIGH ELF ]

  [ CLASS: MYSTIC / HIGH ARCANIST ]

  [ MANA POOL: EXPANSIVE]

  [ WARNING: ARROGANCE LEVELS EXCEEDING SAFETY PARAMETERS ]

  Cidi zoomed the vision interface and dragged a reticle over Liora's head. “Hardware check, Admin. Look at the hairpin.”

  Aerich focused. The silver pin holding her complex bun in place wasn't inert metal. It pulsed. A tiny rhythmic beat of sapphire light synced to the thrumming in the air. “That is a Resonance Key…” Cidi explained with text that flashed rapidly. “High-tier technology disguised as ornamentation… She isn't just a mage. She is an Administrator with a god-complex and privileges.”

  Liora stopped at the center of the dais. She didn't shout for silence... She simply existed. The vacuum of her presence sucked the noise from the room. A floating crystal slate hovered by her shoulder and orbited her head like a loyal moon.

  "The study of the Great Weave," Liora began. Her voice was melodic but brittle like wind chimes through frozen bone. "It is not for the dull-witted. It requires precision. It requires faith. It requires you to understand that you are nothing and the Flow is everything."

  She raised a hand.

  The air above the dais screamed. It twisted when distorted by heat and force. Golden lines of hard light erupted from her fingertips and wove together in the air to form a complex three-dimensional geometric shape. It was a spell. A containment ward spun on a nonexistent axis.

  "This," Liora announced, "is the Spiral of the Ancestral Shield. It creates the sacred barrier that protects Valthorne’s walls from the creeping dark. It has stood for a thousand years..." She scanned the room. Her gaze swept over the trembling novices like a scythe before it snagged on Aerich with brutal precision.

  She smiled. It was the smile of a cat that had found a mouse with a limp.

  "You," she said. She pointed a manicured finger at him. A ripple of force buffeted Aerich’s robes. "The Outsider. Malakar claims you have a strange sight. Stand."

  Aerich hesitated. Kael nudged him with an elbow that felt like a falling brick. "Stand up, man-skin. Stand before she boils the fluid in your eyes."

  Aerich stood. His legs felt like jelly, and his knees knocked against the wooden bench.

  "Trace the Ley-currents of this ward," Liora commanded. The golden shape rotated. It was dazzling and impossibly complex. "Tell the class how the Weaver’s grace maintains the eternal loop."

  Aerich stared at the glowing shape. To his naked eye, it was a blinding and swirling mess of esoteric light. But then Cidi engaged.

  “Overlaying Compiler Logic,” Cidi chirped. “Translating Runic Nonsense into Readable Syntax. Standby for defragmentation...”

  [ SYSTEM: ACTIVATING SIGHT-BEYOND-SIGHT ]

  The world shifted. The electric blue grid snapped over the golden spell. The dazzling beauty vanished and was replaced by cold, hard structure. Aerich no longer saw divinity. He saw the source code of reality. He saw the input nodes drawing Mana from the ley lines. He saw the processing logic of the Rune. He saw the output of the Shield.

  But he also saw the red lines.

  “Oh, wow,” Cidi drawled. Her voice dripped with digital disdain. “This is genuinely embarrassing. Admin, direct your attention to the bottom quadrant. Lines 4 through 8... It’s a mess.”

  "I see it," Aerich whispered. The horror of the code overrode his fear of the woman.

  "Speak up!" Liora snapped. The air around her grew hot. "Or has the awe of true magic stolen your tongue?"

  "It's not awe," Aerich said. His voice gained traction as his analytical brain took the wheel. He looked at the floating spell like it was a junior developer's first and disastrous pull request. "It's just messy."

  A collective gasp sucked the air from the room. Kael paused with his ears erect, and his obsidian eyes widened.

  Liora’s eyes narrowed to slits. The air around her grew completely still while the ozone scent spiked to a choking intensity. "Messy?" she repeated. The word sounded like a heresy. "This is the Weaver’s perfection. It is the geometric language of the gods."

  "Where the cycle returns to the source," Aerich said. He stepped out from behind the bench. He felt Cidi feeding him the technical data to translate the arcane into the logical. He gestured with a hand and traced the flaw in the air. "It's a memory leak... Uh… I mean, it is bleeding essence."

  He pointed to a specific knot of golden light that was pulsing slightly faster than the rest. It was a chaotic fibrillation in the smooth rhythm.

  "You’re pouring raw power into the shield matrix," Aerich stammered. He tried to translate Cidi's debugging into mystic babble. "But there’s no release valve. The energies pool there. They are stagnant. It is like filling a chalice that has no bottom, but the wine just rots in the stem."

  “Buffer Overflow impending,” Cidi supplied.

  "It'll crash," Aerich finished. He dropped his hand. "The whole wall will come down because the spell can't shed the excess heat..."

  Silence followed. It was absolute and terrifying silence. It was the kind of silence that precedes an execution.

  Liora stared at him. She looked at the rune. She looked back at him. For a microsecond, her composure fractured. Her eyes darted to the knot he had pointed out. It was the flaw she had likely looked at a thousand times and accepted as a 'Divine Mystery'. Now that she was faced with his blunt assessment, the flaw was undeniable.

  [ SYSTEM: EMOTIONAL STATE DETECTED - TARGET: LIORA ]

  [ ANALYSIS: SHOCK // HUMILIATION // CALIBRATING RETRIBUTION ]

  "Stagnant energy," she breathed. The concept seemed to offend her sensibilities. "You suggest the Sacred Loop is cancerous?"

  "I'm saying the logic is flawed," Aerich shrugged. The adrenaline of the moment faded into a cold realization of what he had just done. "Magic is just science for people who hate doing the math. You have a bug."

  “Correction,” Cidi interjected. “Magic is spaghetti code written by absentee gods who forgot to leave documentation. But good line, Admin. Style points +10. Survival probability -50%.”

  Liora marched up the steps. Her silks rustled like the gathering of a storm front. She stopped inches from him and towered over his slouching form. The scent of crushed lilies and static electricity was overpowering.

  She leaned in. Her lips brushed his ear. "You see the… Weave," she hissed. It was low enough that only the stones could hear. "You do not see it as art but as structure?"

  "I see what works," Aerich said. He was trembling but held his ground.

  "Then you are dangerous," she whispered. The threat was sharp as a razor. "The High Seer does not like threads that pull against the pattern. And I do not tolerate acolytes who mock the architecture of the ancients."

  She spun on her heel. Her long hair whipped the air with a crack. "Class dismissed! Go to the meditation cells. Seek the silence of the void. Except you, Outsider."

  Aerich froze. His blood turned to ice.

  Liora stood at the door with her back to him. She was silhouetted against the dark corridor. "Priestess Veyra has requested your presence for the Sunset Rite. Since you understand the flow so intimately, you will be the conduit."

  The color drained from Aerich’s face. It left him pale as the stone walls.

  Kael let out a low and rumbling laugh that shook the dust from the floorboards. "The conduit?" the beastkin grunted. He hoisted his bulk upright. "On your second day? She is not teaching you to hunt, man-skin. She is feeding you to the fire."

  [ SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL WARNING ]

  “Alert!” A klaxon shrieked in Aerich’s ear. It made him wince physically. “Admin! Your current ‘Magic’ skill level is effectively NULL. Attempting to channel raw Aether from a Sanctum Font is legally distinct from suicide only by a technicality. It is equivalent to plugging a fiber-optic cable into a potato. Probability of Spontaneous Combustion: 98%.”

  "I can't do that!" Aerich called out. Panic seized his chest like a vice. "I don't know the rituals! I don't have the bandwidth!"

  Liora glanced back over her shoulder. Her eyes were cold and glittered with malice and starlight.

  "Then you had better learn quickly… Glitch," she said with a softness that was worse than a scream. "The sun dies in six hours."

  She swept out of the room, and the heavy doors slammed shut with a finality that felt like the closing of a coffin lid.

  * * *

  The day didn't collapse into hours, but into cycles of calculations squandered on impending doom.

  Aerich sat centered in the monastery’s courtyard, a bleak geometry of slate and suffering open to a sky the color of a dead monitor screen. The air tasted of wet ash and high-altitude thinness, a cold that didn't just touch usage skin but sought to index his bones. Around the periphery, other acolytes navigated the stone pavers like data packets, avoiding a corrupted sector. They gave him a wide berth, their whispers a low-fidelity static of superstition.

  Heretic... Glitch… Null-pointer.

  He stared at his hands. They trembled with a latency he could not troubleshoot. In the life before, the life of air-conditioned server rooms and the hum of cooling fans, the catastrophic failure of a system at 3:00 AM meant a segmentation fault or a spilled energy drink.

  Here, a crash meant the literal cessation of existence. He was facing a magical execution masquerading as a promotion ceremony.

  "Cidi..." he whispered. The word barely formed a vapor cloud before the wind sheared it away. He focused on a patch of fractious grey moss clinging to the grout to anchor himself. "Run the simulation again. A workaround... An exploit. Is there any way I can mock-up the mana signature?"

  A retort of silence came instead, a tremor beneath his skull and a low hum vibrating against his hearing.

  “Running heuristics...” Cidi’s voice was the taste of ozone and the texture of smooth glass. “Negative. Your biological system is incompatible with standard Valthornian Aether-protocols. I can attempt a brute-force modulation of your neural inputs, though. If I take over motor control, I might reroute the ambient Aether through your bio-mesh without broiling your central nervous system.”

  The vibration deepened into a heavy bass note in his skull.

  “But it requires Root Access...”

  Aerich blinked as his eyes began to sting. "Root Access?"

  “Kernel-level control, Aerich. You become the passenger process. I drive the meat-suit...”

  A wave of nausea rolled through him independent of the cold. The concept was invasive. It felt like a spiritual violation. Surrendering his autonomy and his physical agency to the sarcastic construct nesting in his parietal lobe felt like signing a User Agreement without reading the fine print, but with lethal consequences.

  "Side effects?" he murmured with a dry throat.

  “Nausea. Temporary synaptic dissociation. A lingering, psychosomatic craving for silicon wafers,” Cidi listed with a clinically detached tone. “The possibility of permanent ego-death is within a margin of error of four percent. But the other option is being solidified into a heap of scorched charcoal.… Prompt?”

  Aerich opened his mouth to answer, but the light shifted.

  The sun was starting its terminal arc down behind the jagged crags ringing Valthorne. The heavens discolored. They turned from a static grey into a shade of dying flesh-purple, and finally bled out into the black void.

  And then the signal corruption seized him.

  It was not the interface or Cidi’s cool, digital presence.

  It was something strictly biological yet terribly alien. It originated deep in his marrow as a rewriting of his code at the cellular level. It began as an itch beneath the dermis before escalating rapidly to a tug behind his sternum. It felt like a hooked chain pulled taut against the cage of his ribs.

  Aerich gasped. The air hitched in his lungs as if the atmosphere had suddenly densified. He clutched his chest while his fingers dug into the rough wool of his robe. His heart skipped a beat, like a dropped frame, then slammed against his ribs with a kinetic force that made his vision swim in artifacts of white light.

  “Admin?” Cidi’s voice lost its sardonic edge and sharpened into alert tones. “Biometrics are spiking. Heart rate 160 and climbing. Cortisol and adrenaline levels are critical. Is this a panic cascade, or is the threat external?”

  "I don't... I don't know," Aerich wheezed. His veins felt like they were carrying liquid copper that was heavy and molten. "It burns. My blood is... compiling."

  He looked down at his hand to seek an anchor in his own anatomy.

  For a fraction of time as precise as a single rendered HD frame, the hand in his vision was no longer his own. Its skin resembled thick, slate-grey hide. Where fingernails should have been were black, barbed hooks of obsidian.

  Claws.

  He blinked to perform a hard reboot of his visual cortex, and the image corrected. His hand was pale, human, and shaking. But the phantom weight of the claws remained like a sensory ghost.

  “Scanning host physiology...” The AI sounded genuinely perplexed. It was a tone of uncertainty Aerich had never heard. “I am detecting a background process. Something... legacy. It is encrypted beneath layers of biological noise. I cannot parse the source code, but the file size is massive. And it is executing.”

  Aerich wiped sweat from his forehead. The moisture instantly chilled in the mountain air. "Is it a patch? Is it magic?"

  “No,” Cidi replied. Her voice shrank to a rigorous whisper like a single thread of data in a storm. “Whatever this is, Aerich, it is not software. It is hardware. And I do not calculate that Valthorne’s server architecture is ready for this update.”

  Detailed in glowing, hard-light grid-lines across his peripheral vision, a new notification materialized. It floated onto his retina while pulsing with a dark, electric turquoise light that matched the exact hex-code of the portal screen he had fallen through.

  [ SYSTEM ALERT: ANOMALY DETECTED ]

  [ SOURCE: UNKNOWN_BIOLOGY_RECURSION ]

  [ WARNING: FERAL_SUBROUTINE.EXE INITIALIZING ]

  [ TIME TO ACTIVATION: T-MINUS 2 HOURS ]

  The text possessed weight. He could feel the letters pressing against his mind.

  "Hey. Stone-breaker."

  The voice rumbled through the courtyard like tectonic plates grinding together.

  Aerich jerked his head up, and the motion trailed visual artifacts. Kael stood over him like a silhouette blocking out the dying sun. The beastkin was a fortress of muscle and granite-flecked skin. His presence displaced the air around him. He held out a rough-hewn wooden bowl filled with a substance that resembled grey mortar.

  "Eat," Kael grunted. The imperative was simple and earthy. "If you are going to burn… do not do it on an empty belly. The spirits reject a hollow sacrifice."

  Aerich took the bowl. The wood was warm and rough against his sensitized fingertips. The smell of grains and root vegetables cut through the scent of his own panic. "Why are you talking to me? The others think I'm a virus... A Contagion."

  Kael sat on the stone beside him. He did not sit gracefully. He descended with a massive weight that settled with a thud Aerich felt through the soles of his boots. The beastkin stared at the darkening sky. His eyes were the color of flint struck by steel, unreadable and ancient.

  "The High Priestess is arrogant," Kael said. His voice was a low gravel rolling down a hill. "She believes the Great Tapestry is hers to weave, that the Spirits bow to ink and quill. But the mountain does not care about scribbles. The mountain endures."

  He turned his gaze to Aerich. There was no pity in those eyes, only a terrifying appraisal. "You saw the crack in her stone. You saw the rot in the root of her ritual. No one else has ever done that."

  "It was just a bracket error," Aerich mumbled as he stirred the porridge. The spoon scraped against the wood with a sound that was analog and solid. "Missing syntax."

  "It was truth," Kael corrected. "And in this place, truth is a harvest scarcer than grain."

  The beastkin stood up. The movement created a draft that smelled of turned earth and old leather. He dusted off his breeches. "Do not die tonight, Aerich. I would hate to have to carve your name onto my bench. I have no more room on the rock for the dead."

  With that, the mountain of a man lumbered away. His form was eventually swallowed by the deepening shadows of the cloister arches.

  Aerich sat alone as the twilight deepened into true night. The silence stretched thin and brittle until it was shattered.

  Clang…

  Clang…

  The monastery bells began to toll. They were not melodic. They were concussive waves of sound that rattled his teeth and signaled the commencement of the Rite.

  “Showtime, Admin,” Cidi said. There was a shift in her frequency that sounded like a hardening. She was rerouting subprocesses and closing background apps. “Initializing combat protocols. I’m rerouting auxiliary power to your pain receptors to buffer the inevitable agony... Let’s go invoke a stack overflow on a deity.”

  Aerich placed the uneaten porridge on the cold stone. He stood up and smoothed the tattered, coarse fabric of his robes. The movement felt remote, as if he were operating a character rig from a distance.

  But the itch in his blood had evolved. It was no longer a sensation. It was a presence. It was a silent growl waiting for the moon to rise, and it vibrated in the marrow of his femurs.

  He walked toward the Great Hall, where the dark mouth of the building waited to swallow him. Inside the HUD of his mind… the turquoise countdown timer ticked lower, indifferent to his humanity.

  [ FERAL_SUBROUTINE LOAD: 98% ]

  [ T-MINUS 1:59:59 ]