Ashem dropped to his knees on the broken obsidian floor, fingers clutching the sides of his head. A low groan escaped his lips—half pain, half confusion. The echo of what had just happened pulsed inside his skull like a memory trying to fracture reality.

  “What did you do to me?” he rasped.

  Sahira stood over him, brushing dust from her sleeves. “I didn’t,” she said softly. “It was the obelisk. It affected us both.”

  He looked up at her, eyes searching. “You saw it too? The attack? The pain?”

  “I did,” she said, her voice distant. “But not like you.”

  He blinked. “What does that even mean?”

  She crouched beside him, gaze fixed on the dark stone beneath their feet. “I think it showed us both something. A lesson.”

  “A lesson?” His voice cracked. “What kind of lesson is that?”

  “Consequence” she said, looking him in the eye. “Action and reaction.”

  Ashem didn’t respond. Instead, he scrambled to his satchel and pulled out the golden artifact. He held it up, expecting it to glow, pulse—anything.

  But it was still. Quiet. Lifeless.

  “No,” he muttered. He laid it on the ground, trying to mimic what had worked before, hoping the marble floor might stir it back to life.

  Nothing.

  He picked it up and thrust it toward Sahira. “You do the spell. Again. Whatever you did.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not charged. And I don’t know how to use it like that—not yet.”

  “I’ll do it then.” Ashem gritted his teeth, closing his eyes and humming a low note, trying to match the frequency from before.

  But the artifact remained inert.

  Sahira reached forward gently. “Ashem… secure it. Just in case.”

  He hesitated, then reluctantly tucked it back into his satchel.

  For a moment, they just sat there, surrounded by silence and ruins.

  “So…” Ashem began, eyes unfocused. “Was all that real?”

  “It was,” she answered. “But not for these versions of us.”

  He turned to her sharply. “Then what happened to them? The ones who… lived it?”

  Sahira's eyes softened. “From what I saw in the Threads… all of them made it out alive.”

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  Ashem frowned. “Threads? You mean those glowing lines? The strings of light?”

  She smiled faintly, and spoke a single word in Etzari:

  “Narak’tariel.”

  Then, she translated: “Stream Vision.”

  The jungle swallowed the ruins behind them. Vines looped from boughs like coiled serpents and ferns clawed at their shins. Sahira led the way, a rolled parchment in one hand, cutting a path through the bramble with a rusted machete she’d bartered weeks ago. Ashem trailed behind, shirt damp with sweat, his eyes flicking from shadow to shadow.

  “That word—resonance,” he said, stepping over a twisted root. “You called it Shaiven once, didn’t you?”

  Sahira didn’t stop walking, but her voice floated back. “Yes, that’s the Etzari term.”

  “All those… terms. Tameru refused to elaborate on anything regarding that.”

  She parted a wall of dangling vines with the back of her hand. “Nobody knows for sure who invented them. They’re from an ancient book.”

  “That Scroll of Lareth?”

  “No,” she said, brushing sweat from her brow. “But some say it’s from the same person.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Did he… or she invent all this sorcery?”

  “Sorcery?” Sahira laughed. “They just used language to wield purpose.”

  She pushed forward, ducking under a low-hanging branch. “There’s no sorcery in a mechanism.”

  He frowned. “What mechanism are you talking about?”

  “The One of All.”

  Ashem groaned quietly. “Again with the cryptic answers.”

  She stopped abruptly and turned, boots crunching against damp soil. “It’s not cryptic,” she said, tilting her head as if it should be obvious. “That’s just the way it is.”

  Seeing his expression—somewhere between confusion and disappointment—Sahira sighed, rolled up the map, and leaned it against her shoulder like a walking stick.

  “All right,” she said, stepping toward a moss-stained rock and using it as a makeshift lectern. “Shaiven is the first of the Four Ways in The Book of Nakar. It’s Change through indirect influence. Guidance.”

  Ashem leaned in, “What about the others?”

  She turned around and continued her path, while reciting directly what she had read in the book some years ago, “Kaemir, Change through combination, synthesis. Taresh, Change through direct manipulation, transmutation,” she explained. “And Ankharat…”

  Something rustled in the canopy. Both of them froze.

  After a few seconds of apparent safety, he pressed:

  “And Ankharat?”

  Her voice lowered, still attentive to their surroundings. “Manifestation, making something real through sheer will.” She paused, listened, looked around, then continued, “The forbidden Way for many. It’s powerful. But it doesn’t come that easily.”

  Another movement—swift, precise. A branch shifting under weight not their own.

  “Did you see that?” Ashem whispered.

  Sahira’s eyes were already scanning upward. “Yes.”

  Then came the low huff of breath through feathered plumage, and the flash of something gliding between two massive limbs—a silhouette sleek and serpentine, with talons and the unmistakable curve of a hooked beak.

  “No way,” Ashem muttered. “That’s a Yakari. I thought those were just fireside stories.”

  “We call them Azkarym.” Sahira whispered, following the beast with her eyes. “They are sacred to the Ways. They’re said to appear when one is close to a threshold in the Stream.”

  He narrowed his eyes as the creature perched on a branch high above, watching them with luminous sapphire eyes. “That one doesn’t look particularly… sacred.”

  The Yakari leapt again—fluid, silent, weaving through the branches like a gust of wind in feline form. Its feathers shimmered in turquoise and ochre, catching the filtered sunlight in glints of iridescence.

  Sahira tucked the map away. “Move.”

  They broke into a run. Thorns tore at their arms and legs. The beast didn’t shriek, didn’t growl—it moved with a predator’s patience, shadowing them, herding them.

  The undergrowth thickened into an impassable wall. Then: stone. A cliff face, sheer and jagged, blocked their way forward.

  “There!” Sahira pointed. A dark hollow yawned in the rock—just wide enough to crouch through.

  They slipped inside, breath loud in the sudden silence. The cave swallowed them in pitch. Their footsteps echoed damply.

  Ashem’s heart pounded. “Is it following—?”

  He didn’t finish. The ground vanished beneath them.