The glyph pulsed once, then again, like a heartbeat.
Damaric hesitated. He was no fool, the overseers didn't tolerate tampering, and mines like this held more than stone beneath their surface. Men vanished chasing strange marks in the walls. But something in him,deeper than thought, older than memory,refused to look away.
The glyph was shaped like a spiral caught in flame.
He pressed his fingers to it. Nothing.
Then—
A hiss of air.
A seam cracked open in the stone, not wide, but enough for a man to crawl through. Damaric glanced toward the iron grate of the cell,still locked and guarded. But no one stirred.
The others were too weak or too scared but not him.
He slipped through the seam, into the dark.
The passage was ancient,he felt it in the walls neither carved not mined.
The tunnel dipped sharply downward, air shifting from hot to cold.
It whispered,
"We remember you.
Child of the burning line.
Breaker of chains..."
He reached a chamber at the tunnel's end small and circular. The stone underfoot smooth as glass, and at the center, a pedestal carved with the same spiral glyph.
Something lay on top of it,fragment of bone, etched in runes that flickered like firelight.
He picked it up and pain lanced through himb asharp, bright, memory.
A battlefield of ash.
Men and women in chains, running.
Flames devouring banners.
A boy, himself, dragged from a burning house.
A voice screaming a name he couldn't remember.
Then darkness.
He staggered back, dropping the bone. But the mark had already burned into him. He looked down. The same spiral now shimmered, faint and golden, just above his heart.
A voice behind him spoke,
"The seal is broken.
The first of three.
Awaken, heir of Kavara."
His breath caught.
He wasn't just a slav, he never had been. He had been buried,now he was rising and the masters would feel the quake.