Marcus groaned after the Keeper of Echoes' riddle. The judgment hung over him; its whisper buzzed in his head. His knees buckled, and he caught himself before falling.
His hands went to his temples, fingers tangling in jet-black cropped hair. Localized pain throbbed in time with the erratic blue flicker of the sigil on his left palm.
Through the haze, he looked up at two silhouettes a few feet away. Taryn Sol's wild auburn hair shimmered in the light of nearby rifts. Lysara Veyn stood still and composed, her star-flecked skin dark against the fog. Neither woman had flinched. The Keeper's words had begun there, yet the spatial pressure had left them untouched.
Why only me? Marcus thought, jaw clenched.
The throbbing settled behind his eyes. He lowered his hands and straightened, then settled into his left-dominant guard. His fingers twitched against the dagger hilts.
He looked to Taryn, ready to ask whether she had heard the voice. Her face showed deep shock, but she was not looking at him. Her hands shook as she adjusted the bandolier at her belt. Dark residue from her sigil-blasts stained the vials.
Taryn stepped back. "That… that was not the riddle, Marcus."
"Wasn't what?" he managed, nausea rising.
"The riddle." She turned to him, storm-gray eyes searching his face. "When we first climbed the Shattered Threshold, the riddle was 'Seek truth in shadows.' It has always been that. Every climber entering this floor hears it. It's the one mechanical constant in the Spire, a thread woven through our fates."
Cold moved through him, unrelated to the mist. He leaned against a massive pillar and reached into Marcus Reed's fragmented memories, searching for a trace of that first ascent. Only jagged edges answered. Bright silver flashes filled his vision. A deep betrayal gnawed at him, but no face connected to the crime.
"I forget, Taryn," he said, tightening his grip on the primary hilt. "You know that."
She nodded quickly. Past failures tightened her grip on the blade. "Right. The fall." She stepped closer, sulfur and lumivine sap rising from her leather armor. "But if the riddle has changed, the Spire has recalibrated its variables. 'Light fractures, stars fall.' The floor has grown darker and heavier, trying to purge us. It may be a warning of what lies ahead."
Marcus glanced into the open dark above the plaza. If the prison's conditions had shifted, an anomaly had triggered it. A new variable was in play.
"Does that mean someone successfully completed the climb?" he asked, tracking the implications.
"No." Taryn shook her head. "If a climber reached the summit and made the wish, the Spire's code would collapse completely. The tower would vanish."
The Spire had changed its own terms. Perhaps a repeated riddle had lost its value, and a harsher filtration cycle suited its sentinel programming. Deeper mysteries waited beyond the alteration.
"Is the puzzle solvable?" Marcus pushed away from the pillar. "Forget the old file. This is the evidence we have. Can we work with 'light fractures, stars fall'?"
Taryn focused on the shifting runes in the walls. Her training carried her past the fear. "In Aetheris lore, light is the structural source of every sigil, and stars are the anchors holding the rifts stable. If they are falling, the entire floor is collapsing in on itself." Her hand drifted to her blade. "We can decode it. We must. But the gateway will not be where the old maps placed it."
"Then we move," Marcus said. Whatever else this vertical prison was, it did not tolerate study in one place for long.
They crossed the desolate ruins. Marcus watched for the Hounds' amber eyes, while another thought nagged at him, one he kept from the two women.
They passed a towering pillar carved with a weeping eye. He marked its position beside a pile of broken bricks, like a detective mapping a crime scene. Five minutes later, the hair at his neck prickled.
He glanced over his shoulder.
The weeping-eye pillar had vanished. A smooth, uncarved monolith stood in its place. Runes on the columns twisted across the black stone as soon as his back was turned. The Spire was distorting their spatial awareness to trap them.
"The layout is changing since we can't see it directly," Taryn said. The frantic clink of her gear undercut her explanation. She pointed toward a shifting block of masonry. "It's the Spire's sentinel programming. The tower isolates climbing teams by scrambling geographic data when they change focus. If we look away or let fog block our view, the system marks us as a mistake. Then it rewires the path and drops us into a containment pocket."
"Light fractures," Marcus murmured. His left palm began to throb. This time, the truth shone in the light: the layout itself deceived them.
He stopped. Taryn and Lysara took two more steps before noticing.
"Marcus?" Taryn called.
"Give me a moment."
He had studied the sigil's mechanics since the judgment whisper struck him. The Keeper's voice had overwhelmed his foreign essence, and his knees had buckled under the clash with the Spire's frequencies. The Keeper had exposed the channel's refusal to obey him. The body had activated the power twice on instinct, but his conscious mind still did not understand the physical vessel's syntax.
He glanced at his left palm and tried to trigger the blue light, aiming to override the body's automatic habits.
Nothing happened.
He framed the command as an investigator's intuition and directed his mental energy toward the rune's etched lines. The sigil flickered once, weakly, then went dark.
He tried again, forcing the connection harder. Agonizing heat spread through his palm, but the channel resisted. Blue energy crawled into his muscle fibers and faded before it could answer.
It won't answer me. Not like this.
The two successful activations had come while his body moved in a left-dominant, survival-driven pattern. The sigil reacted when the physical form was complete. It was a foreign language built over years he had not lived, and he would have to learn its physical syntax piece by piece.
He closed his fist, locking away the pain, and looked up.
Lysara watched from beneath her hood. She stepped closer, studying him as he attempted to channel the rune.
Taryn broke the silence. "You tried to force the channel."
Marcus kept his posture steady and said nothing.
She turned away, the vials clinking against her leather armor. "You'll learn. He always did things the hard way first." She lowered her voice. "Every Sigil-Bearer does, according to the ancient lore. That's the part of him that never left."
Marcus could not tell whether the remark offered comfort or laid a trap. He filed it away, adjusted his daggers, and kept moving into the changing ruins.