Chapter 17

The map on the engineer's desk didn't belong in this century.

Its edges were singed black, curling inward like dying leaves. Ink had faded to a rusty brown that spoke of centuries passing in silence. There were no kingdom borders marked upon its surface, no trade roads threading between settlements. Just a spidery lattice of runes and glyph junctions etched deep into ancient vellum that crackled at the slightest touch. The scent rising from it was unmistakable: dust and old fire, secrets and forgotten wars.

Royal Engineer Serane didn't speak at first. He just stared at the parchment as if waiting for it to transform before his eyes, as if the very act of observation might unlock its mysteries or make it disappear entirely.

"Where did you get this?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper in the stillness.He slid a trembling hand across his mouth, fingers lingering at the corners as though holding back words that wanted to spill forth unbidden. "You shouldn't be here."

"Too late," I said, stepping closer to the desk. "You agreed to meet."

"I said I'd consider it." His eyes darted toward the shadows. "If the wardlines weren't being watched."

"They are," I replied, letting the weight of that truth settle between us. "That's why I'm here."

Liora kept watch at the door, her face half-shadowed by the flickering glyphlight that lined the corridor beyond. We were deep in the sub-archives of the Engineers' Quarter, buried far beneath the city's central glyphline like some forgotten secret the earth itself wanted to keep hidden. No windows existed at this depth. Just echoing stone corridors that stretched into darkness and humming containment vaults that pulsed with barely restrained power.

The silence down here wasn't empty. It was full of waiting.

Serane tapped the map with a finger that seemed reluctant to make contact. "This predates the Fracture Wars. Maybe even the Crown itself. Maybe everything we think we know about our own history."

"You're saying we didn't build the glyph system," Liora said flatly, though I could hear the tension threading through her voice.

"I'm saying we built on top of it." Serane's words hung in the air like an accusation. "Like children playing with tools they don't understand."

He pulled aside another scroll with reverent care. Layered diagrams spread across the desk: sigil repeats that spiraled into impossible geometries, feedback harmonics that made my eyes water to follow, spatial recursion theory that bent back on itself in ways that shouldn't be possible. All techniques taught in Academy glyph theory, drilled into every student until they could trace the patterns in their sleep.

But not invented there. Never invented there.

"The old records talk about 'ghost-lattice echoes,'" Serane continued, his voice dropping to match the whispered acoustics of the archive chamber. "Sigils that activated long before Crown design even existed. They found them buried under mountain passes, carved into stone that predated human settlement. Woven into canyon walls where no human foot had ever walked. Nobody asked where they came from. Nobody wanted to know."

I leaned in closer, my breath fogging slightly in the cool air as I traced the lines with my eyes. The patterns seemed to shift in the lamplight, revealing depths that hadn't been visible a moment before.

Here and there, a familiar shape emerged from the chaos of ancient symbols. Not from this world of stone and steel and growing things.

From home. From the sterile laboratories and humming servers of Tokyo.

"They're not glyphs," I murmured, the realization hitting me like cold water. "They're logic patterns. Algorithmic structures."

Serane blinked rapidly, his scholarly composure cracking. "You recognize them?"

Liora looked at me with sharp intensity, her hand instinctively moving to rest on her weapon's hilt. "From where?"

I didn't answer immediately. Couldn't answer. The implications were sprawling out in my mind like cracks in ice, each one revealing depths I wasn't prepared to examine.But I didn't have to speak. Serane caught the pause, read the expression on my face like text written in his native language.

"You're the summoned one, aren't you?" His voice carried a mixture of awe and fear. "The one they pulled from another world."

"I am."

He hesitated then, weighing something in his mind. His hands moved beneath the table, retrieving something he'd kept hidden even from himself.

And slid out a copper plate that gleamed dully in the lamplight.

Etched deep into the surface was a broken design that made my chest tighten with recognition. Part glyph in the style I'd learned to read in this strange world, part code in the binary languages of my birth. A recursive loop built with surgical precision, designed to adapt and evolve over time like a living thing.

Feedback systems. Learning algorithms. Artificial evolution in metal and magic.

Like it was thinking. Like it was growing.

"The ruins," Serane said, his words careful and measured, "aren't dead. They adjust. The more we interfere with them, the more they reconfigure their responses. They're learning from us."

I felt a cold pressure building behind my eyes, the familiar sensation of a headache about to bloom into something far worse. The kind of headache that came from staring too long at problems that had no good solutions.

"These aren't just tools," I whispered, the words scraping my throat raw. "They're responding to us. Studying us."

He nodded slowly, like a man confirming his own worst fears.

"But here's what truly scares me," he said, leaning closer across the desk until I could see the exhaustion etched into the lines around his eyes. "They're not just reacting to what we do."The lamplight flickered, casting dancing shadows across the ancient maps and modern diagrams."They're preparing for something."

The return trip from the sub-archives was meant to be uneventful. A simple ride in the mechanical lift, emerging into the normal world of daylight and ordinary concerns.

It wasn't.

The lift platform that should have risen in perfect silence jolted to a halt halfway to the surface, metal grinding against stone with a shriek that echoed through the shaft above and below us.Liora pressed her palm against a diagnostic glyph embedded in the platform's control panel. Light flared briefly, then settled into an angry red pulse. "Jam," she said, her voice tight with controlled tension. "Not mechanical failure. Magical interference."

"Sabotage?" I asked, though I already suspected the answer.

She didn't reply immediately. Her attention was fixed on the wall beside the platform, where the stone surface had begun to groan like a living thing in pain. A ripple of glyphlight flickered across the inner pillar, spreading outward in waves that hurt to look at directly. Red light, not the familiar blue of properly authorized activation. Someone else's signature written in stolen power.

"Move," I said.

We jumped down from the stalled platform, landing hard on the maintenance level below. Serane had warned us not to use the narrow tunnel that stretched away into darkness, had spoken of structural instabilities and incomplete ward coverage. But warnings were luxuries we could no longer afford.

The light here was thin and unreliable. Old glyphs sputtered to life only when we stepped directly beneath them, casting brief circles of illumination that died the moment we moved beyond their range. The tunnel stretched ahead like a throat waiting to swallow us.

Halfway through the crawlspace, where the ceiling pressed low enough to force us into an uncomfortable crouch, I saw it.

A charm. Delicate as spider silk, nearly invisible in the gloom.

It was buried behind a collapsed beam, wedged into a crack in the ancient stonework where casual observation would never find it. Thin as wire and twice as deadly. A watcher-sigil in a style I didn't recognize, pulsing with barely contained malevolence.

Not Crown-issue. Not anything from the official archives.

"Someone knows we were there," I said, the words tasting like ashes in my mouth.Liora stepped forward without hesitation, her movements precise and economical. She snapped the charm with a twist of her dagger, the delicate construct dissolving into sparks that faded quickly in the tunnel's darkness.

"Then we move fast," she said.

Back in the safehouse, I sat with the copper plate and my notebook open beside each other on the rough wooden table. The patterns weren't just similar; they were layered like palimpsest, the same hand having traced both sets of symbols across decades of careful work.

The final page of the notebook still held that scrawled line in handwriting that might have been my own in another lifetime:

"Deviation event imminent. Subject vector exceeds algorithmic bounds."

Below it, coordinates that mapped to a specific time: two days from now.

A place: Duskhome.

A glyph-forged city near the border, small but rich with experimental sigil technology. The kind of place where new theories were tested, where the boundaries between possible and impossible were pushed until they snapped. A perfect test site for something that needed to remain hidden until it was too late to stop.

I felt the tension winding tighter in my chest, like a spring compressed beyond its breaking point.Then I heard the knock.

Three soft taps against the door. A pause that stretched just long enough to make me doubt I'd heard anything at all. Then two more taps, precise and purposeful.

A code I hadn't taught anyone in this world. A code from home.

I grabbed my blade, the metal singing softly as it cleared its sheath.

Liora was already beside the door, armed and ready, her movements flowing like water over stone.

A piece of parchment slid under the frame, its edges crisp and unmarked by weather or time.I picked it up with hands that wanted to tremble.

There were no words written on the surface, just a single glyph that I'd seen carved into ruins beneath the capital. Etched into the walls of sabotage sites. Burned into my memory like a brand.And then a second symbol that stopped my heart entirely.

One I recognized only from Tokyo, from the sterile laboratories where I'd spent my former life. A proprietary mark used in predictive loop testing, in systems designed to model human behavior and reshape it according to predetermined parameters.

A warning. Or perhaps an invitation.

Liora looked at me, reading the expression on my face like a map of territory she'd never wanted to explore. "What does it mean?"

"It means," I said slowly, each word carefully measured, "someone else out there knows what I'm looking for."

Her face went pale in the lamplight. "And they're ahead of us?"

"Or they want me to catch up. Want me to find what they've left for me to find."That night, sleep refused to come.

I stood on the safehouse rooftop, scanning the horizon with eyes that had learned to see patterns in darkness. The distant lights of Duskhome glittered like fallen stars, innocent and beautiful and doomed.

I remembered the feeling from the Tokyo laboratories. The cold, impersonal stare of automated systems testing your every move, measuring your responses, cataloging your weaknesses. Back then it had been data points and probability curves. Human decisions boiled down to metrics and fed into machines that cared nothing for the lives they touched.

Here, it was glyphs and ancient magic. Cities built on stolen power. Lives hanging in the balance of equations written in languages that predated human civilization.

Someone had built a system that spanned worlds and centuries.

And someone else was trying to finish it.

The notebook's final glyph shimmered faintly under the moonlight, its meaning becoming clearer with each passing moment.

It wasn't a signature left by some ancient scholar.

It was a command, written in the syntax of systems that treated people like variables in an equation too complex for human comprehension.

"If vector exceeds parameters: reset."

Reset what? The city? The experiment?

Me?

The wind picked up, carrying with it the scent of distant storms and the taste of endings. In two days, in Duskhome, I would find my answers.

Or they would find me.