Location:Vel'thari Containment → Obsidian Academy Grounds
Date/Time:1 Frostforge,9942 AZI — Day 365
Realm:Lower Realm, Doha
The seal cracked at dawn.
Jayde felt it through the mantis first — every sensory pit flaring at once, all of them locking upward. The ambient corruption that had been the constant background of three hundred and sixty-five days thinned. The formation work holding the sealed dimension closed was cycling down, the year complete, the mechanism doing what it had done every fifty years since before the Academy had a name.
The bracelets woke.
Across all six bases, in every corridor and firing position and stripped-down pocket, the students who had one felt the pull start. The safe-point insertion that had put them into the containment a year ago running in reverse — the formation reaching down through each bracelet's anchor, finding the wearer, preparing to take them back to the staging ground.
