A new message appears on my HUD.

But it isn’t like the others. It isn’t the angular handwriting of the Codex, and it isn’t the cold digital typography of Ocean’s Law. It’s written by hand. Cursive. Ink that seems to have been pressed onto the page with quill and nankeen by fingers that don’t belong to this century.

[Do you wish to sign a contract? Y/N]

’Sign a contract? What contract?’ 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

I look at my hand. Sebastian Conor’s Echo Fragment is evaporating—ash being blown off a fire nobody lit. The blue crystal loses shape, loses color, and slides between my fingers like inverted smoke. In three seconds, there’s nothing left.

The Fragment is gone. It burned itself away. And the only thing left is the question floating in my HUD, written in handwriting older than humanity itself.

I don’t have much to lose now that the fuel has already been spent.

I press Yes.

The room darkens.

Not the lights themselves—the existence in them. As if something is draining the luminosity out of the air. The wall torches stay lit, but the light they produce stops carrying. The shadows in the corners expand outward, slow, like a pair of lungs filling on a deep inhale.

On the floor, directly in front of me, a circle begins to form. Lines of energy draw themselves into the stone.

I can say it’s not runes or glyphs. It’s something older.

Geometric patterns that curve into impossible spirals, each line connecting to the next in a sequence my brain tries to follow and gives up on.

The energy is chaotic and uncontrolled. Electrical and organic at the same time.

I feel fear.

Not the tactical fear that lives at the surface when a man is in danger. The ancestral one. It lives at the bottom of the stomach before any thought arrives—pure animal instinct, telling you something larger is on its way.

The circle pulses.

Once.

Twice.

On the third pulse, the center of the circle sinks. Not physically—dimensionally. The floor is still there, but the space inside the circle is deeper than the floor should allow.

And something begins to rise.

The feet first. Bare. Skin a faded petroleum-blue, like ancient ice viewed through layers of dust. The legs follow—long, lean, covered by a tunic that must have been white millennia ago and is now pale gray, embroidered with silver thread coiling through the cloth in patterns shaped like tree roots. A worked leather belt at the waist, with a thin sheath at one side. A short sword or a long dagger, hard to say which.

The torso emerges. Narrow chest. Angular shoulders. Light plate armor in silver across the shoulders and forearms, each plate engraved with miniature carvings that look like text in a language no longer spoken. A long mantle falls from his back, the fabric moving slowly, with no wind to move it.

And then the face.

The ears are pointed. Long. Swept back from the skull like blades. The face is humanoid but wrong—the features too fine, too symmetrical, the angles of the jaw and cheekbones sculpted with a precision human evolution has never produced. The eyes are white. Not blind—white. No iris. No pupil. Just a pale luminosity that doesn’t blink.

The hair is long. Silver. Falling along the shoulders like threads of liquid metal.

Something about him reminds me of Chronia. Not the look—the presence. The air behaves differently around him. Reality is gently bending to accommodate something that shouldn’t be here.

His body is translucent. Not completely—I can see the shape, the colors, the details. But through him, if I focus, the outline of the wall appears. Like a ghost rendered at too high a resolution to be a ghost.

Around him, a fire. Bone-white. Slow flames licking the air without heat, without glow. Every time a flame moves, the light around it dims. The fire doesn’t illuminate. It absorbs. The shadows in the room deepen with every pulse.

I don’t put my hand on Eventide. I don’t sense any killing intent. What I feel is... neutrality. A calm that isn’t peace. The total absence of any opinion regarding my existence.

Once he has fully materialized, the being turns toward me.

And he bows.

A deep reverence. The torso inclines forty-five degrees. The right arm crosses the chest. The left hand goes behind the back. The position is impeccable. A reverence performed a thousand times for someone who actually mattered.

He doesn’t speak.

I start coughing. Choking, actually. Not from danger—from sheer shock. My hands are shaking. What’s standing in front of me isn’t necromancy. It isn’t summoning. It’s nothing I’ve seen across thirty years on this side.

"You... understand me?"

He straightens. The white eyes meet mine. He doesn’t answer.

I try again. "Who are you?"

Nothing. He turns his head slowly, looking around the room. The white eyes sweep across every surface with an almost reverent care. His fingers touch the air, feeling the texture of something invisible. He is awed. Not by me—by the fact of being here.

He starts to speak. To himself. Quietly. In a dialect I have never heard. The words are long, the vowels drawn, the consonants soft as water moving over stone. It isn’t the ancestral runic language of the tower. It’s something else. A living, personal dialect.

"Vel’shara... ith morai. Ith morai kaen’dur..."

I catch fragments. Not the words—the structure. Some of the roots are similar to the ancient runic I saw in the tower’s puzzle, like distant cousins of the same mother tongue.

"Hey," I say. "Can you hear me?"

He stops. Turns to me. Tilts his head slightly, like a bird processing a new sound.

"I’m Dryden. I summoned you. I think."

The white eyes study me. No hostility. No submission. The clinical curiosity of someone cataloging a new species.

His hand drifts toward his hip. Touches the grip of the weapon at the sheath. Casual. Instinctive. A man adjusting his belt without thinking.

The instant his fingers touch the weapon, my eyes burn.

Memory of Lightwaves activates on its own.

Gold smoke rises from the corners of my eyes. My vision expands. And for a flash—less than a second—I see something inside him. Not memory or past, but something deeper. A signature the system recognizes before I do.

The activation ends.

Silence.

The being is looking at me. Something has changed in the white eyes. Not color or shape. Recognition.

He bows again. The same impeccable reverence. The same arm across the chest.

And this time, he speaks. In his own language—and somehow, I understand him.

"Master..."