The temple didn't settle after the blast.
It watched.
Its stones creaked with slow, ancient memory, like something buried too long was tasting the air for the first time in years. Dust drifted from the broken ceiling beams in thin, trembling lines.
Manraj's breathing was the loudest sound in the ruin.
Zoya stayed close—one hand lightly touching his wrist, not fully holding, but anchoring him all the same. Her silence still hummed faintly in the air, a pressure that pinned the unstable flames and shadows back into their corners.
Azhar stood a few steps away, shoulders tense, gaze locked on the cracked floor where the seal had shattered. The shadows around him twitched like nervous animals.
"Don't move," Azhar murmured, barely audible.
"But it's quiet," Zoya whispered.
"That's exactly why," Azhar said.
"Right before something remembers its body… it always goes quiet."
A ripple travelled through the floor—small, harmless-looking.
But Manraj felt it like a hand closing around his heart.
He took a step back.
The ripple followed.
"Azhar," Manraj said, voice unsteady. "What did we actually wake up?"
Azhar didn't answer immediately.
He stared at the crack spreading through the stone, expression tightening.
"The seal didn't break because of you," he finally said.
"It broke because it was waiting for you."
That didn't comfort him.
Zoya's fingers curled tighter around Manraj's wrist.
"What does it want?" she asked.
Azhar exhaled, slow and bitter.
"The same thing it wanted the night of the ritual."
Another ripple.
This time, the entire ground shuddered.
A low, soft sound rose from the darkness beneath them.
Not a roar.
Not a scream.
A memory of one.
Manraj stumbled. Images flashed—fire, circles of ash, a boy's hand pulling him back, another pushing him forward, a creature of white light trying to reach him before everything went black.
The air tasted metallic.
Zoya steadied him again. "Manraj. Look at me. Stay present."
His chest burned—not painfully, but like his flame was trying to speak.
"I know that sound," he whispered.
Azhar's jaw tightened. "Of course you do. It knew you first."
The stone directly in front of them cracked open with a sharp, violent snap.
Zoya flinched.
Manraj froze.
Azhar moved in front of both of them before he even realized he'd done it.
From the broken floor, a faint white glow seeped upward—soft, pulsing, alive.
Zoya whispered, "That isn't fire."
Manraj whispered, "It isn't shadow either."
"No," Azhar said quietly.
"It's what they sacrificed to bind you."
The glow sharpened, forming an outline—horns, wings, a shape too big to exist in such a small space, pressing against the world like the world was too small to hold its name.
Manraj couldn't breathe.
"Azhar," Manraj said, voice breaking, "what did they do to us?"
Azhar didn't look at him, but his voice—low, rough—answered anyway:
"They didn't choose an element for you, Manraj."
"…they stole one."
The glow flared.
Zoya pulled Manraj back just as the floor exploded in a burst of white light—
Not
fire.
Not shadow.
Something older.
Something that remembered the ritual.
And remembered him.