They reached the basin by nightfall.
Caldrith's Basin wasn't a true valley—more like a depression in the land, cupped by ragged rock and the skeletal remains of old watchtowers. The air was thicker here, laced with a charged kind of silence that pressed against their skin like unseen fingers.
And at the center, veiled in wind-blown mist and half-eclipsed by crumbling stone, was the Convergence Stone.
It pulsed.
Softly.
Rhythmically.
Alive.
Kaelen stepped toward it before he realized what he was doing. His hand lifted, drawn as though by memory rather than intent. Glyphs stirred beneath his skin like waking nerves.
Selene grabbed his wrist before he touched it.
"Not yet," she said. Her voice was quiet. Firm. "These stones… they remember. If we touch it unprepared, it could shatter us both."
He looked down at her hand still on his wrist.
And for a moment, neither moved.
Then another voice broke the spell.
"Let her speak."
Seraphine.
She stood a few paces away, arms crossed over her chest, cloak flaring gently in the wind. Her eyes gleamed with reflected glyphlight, but there was something darker underneath. Jealousy, maybe. Or something she didn't dare name.
"I know these stones," she said. "Not just from records. My mother took me to one when I was a child. She called them the Veins of the Old World."
Kaelen frowned. "You never mentioned that."
"I never intended to." Her lips thinned. "But now we're here. And that thing is awake."
She approached the stone slowly, gaze never leaving it. Her voice dropped lower.
"They weren't just communication hubs. Not really. Before the Tower, the Convergence Stones were used by Truth-bearers to pass memories. Whole histories burned into sigillight."
"That's what I felt," Kaelen said quietly. "When we got close. It's like something inside me started pulling toward it."
Mira muttered from behind, "Is it pulling toward you, or are you pulling toward it?"
Seraphine looked over her shoulder. "The difference doesn't matter. The Wellspring is tied to these stones. If you want to open the path… Kaelen has to give something."
"What kind of something?" Selene asked sharply.
"A memory," Seraphine said, turning back to the stone. "A true one."
Kaelen swallowed.
His dreams had become sharper since the last vision. Faces he couldn't name. Symbols burned into obsidian vaults. A boy's scream buried under rubble. A promise whispered at the edge of a cliff.
"What if the memory isn't mine?" he asked.
Seraphine's expression darkened. "Then the stone will know. And it'll burn you for the lie."
Silence followed her words. Mira started checking her notes again. Selene stared at the stone as if it might bite.
Kaelen stepped forward.
His hand trembled as he reached toward the glyph-forged surface.
And then—
A voice whispered through the stone.
"Kaelen..."
He staggered.
Selene caught him.
Seraphine moved on instinct, hand raised with a warding glyph forming midair, but nothing attacked. The whisper faded as quickly as it came, leaving only a long echo.
Kaelen blinked rapidly. "It… it knew my name."
"You heard it?" Selene asked.
He nodded.
And beneath her calm, Selene's hand tightened slightly around his.
Then, quietly, Seraphine said, "That wasn't the stone."
Kaelen turned. "What?"
"That voice," she said. "It came from inside the memory. You're not just unlocking the Wellspring… you're waking something that was bound."
Mira sucked in a breath. "Okay. So just to clarify. We're about to open a door we can't see, using a memory we're not sure belongs to Kaelen, to wake something sealed by ancient glyph-mages who didn't survive the last time it stirred?"
"Exactly," Kaelen said.
Mira just muttered, "Of course."
They didn't try again that night.
Later, after setting up camp beneath the crooked stone arches of an old tower, Kaelen sat alone by the embers. The others had fallen asleep—or at least pretended to. Mira snored lightly from her pack. Arkyn hadn't moved in hours, though his glyph pulses had stabilized. Seraphine was curled in the far corner, face turned away. And Selene…
She came to sit beside him again.
She didn't speak right away.
But when she did, her voice was softer than it had ever been.
"I'm afraid," she whispered.
Kaelen turned. "Of the stone?"
"No. Of… me." She looked down at her hands. "What if what I find there changes everything? What if I remember why my mother left me? What if it turns out I wasn't worth keeping?"
Kaelen hesitated. Then he reached over and gently touched her wrist—mirroring the moment she'd stopped him earlier.
"You're afraid of breaking," he said. "But I think you're already stronger than you realize."
Selene looked up at him.
Their faces were close. Closer than they'd been in days.
And this time, when her breath caught in her throat, she didn't pull away.
Kaelen leaned in.
Not for a kiss.
But just enough that their foreheads touched, breath mingling, silence thick between them.
A promise made without words.
Seraphine saw them from across the fire.
She didn't interrupt.
But her fingers closed tightly over the glyph-charm she wore beneath her cloak, and her eyes shimmered with something almost like pain.
Far above them, in a Tower chamber laced with glass and obsidian, a figure traced a burning glyph across an ancient map.
"The Wellspring stirs," the Envoy murmured. "And the Veritas line draws breath again."
A second figure stepped into the light.
"The Herald is ready."
The Envoy smiled coldly.
"Then let them walk to the edge of memory. And burn for what they find."