The dream always began with fire.

  Kael Ardent gasped awake, his fingers clawing at the sheets as if he could tear himself free from the memory. His skin was slick with sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs like a prisoner desperate to escape. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the cramped attic room he rented above the Scriptorium of Elysiora, with its stacks of yellowed scrolls and the ever-present scent of ink and dust.

  Just a dream. Just a dream.

  But it wasn’t.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to hold onto the fragments before they dissolved like smoke.

  A silver city beneath a bleeding sky.

  A machine humming with a voice that wasn’t human.

  A hand—his hand?—pressing a button.

  Then—light. Silence. Nothing.

  Kael exhaled sharply, pressing the heels of his palms against his temples. The images were slipping away again, leaving only the aftertaste of dread.

  Why do I keep seeing this?

  The floating city of Elysiora was already awake by the time Kael stumbled downstairs, the morning bell tolling in the distance. The Scriptorium’s main hall stretched before him, a cavern of knowledge where scholars and scribes moved like shadows between towering shelves. The air hummed with murmured incantations—spells to preserve parchment, to summon quills, to bind words that might otherwise fade.

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  "Late again, Ardent."

  Kael flinched as Master Orlan, the head archivist, materialized beside him, his grizzled face unimpressed. The old man’s eyes, sharp as a hawk’s, flicked to the dark circles under Kael’s own.

  "Bad night," Kael muttered.

  Orlan’s expression softened—just slightly. "You’ve been saying that for weeks."

  Kael didn’t answer. How could he explain that he was afraid to sleep? That every time he closed his eyes, he saw things that couldn’t possibly be memories?

  The assignment should have been simple.

  A merchant had donated a crate of artifacts recovered from the Sunken District, the ruins beneath Elysiora where the old world had drowned. Kael’s task was to catalog them.

  His fingers brushed against something cold.

  Beneath layers of dust and brittle cloth, a disc of black metal lay nestled in the crate. Its surface was etched with spiraling symbols that made Kael’s pulse stutter.

  I know these marks.

  But he shouldn’t.

  The moment his skin touched the metal, the world lurched.

  Vision:

  —A laboratory, walls lined with glowing panels. A man in a white coat—him?—standing before a machine, his reflection warped in its glass surface.

  "Final sequence initiated," said a voice that wasn’t a voice. "Shall we proceed, Dr. Veyne?"

  His hands trembled. "Do it."

  The machine whirred—

  —Then pain. A scream. His scream.

  Kael wrenched back with a choked gasp, the disc clattering to the floor. His breath came in ragged bursts, his vision swimming.

  Dr. Veyne.

  That name—his name?—echoed in his skull like a curse.

  "Ardent?" Orlan’s voice was distant. "What in the skies is wrong with you?"

  Kael couldn’t answer. His hands shook as he stared at the disc.

  Because now, etched into the metal where there had been none before… was a single word.

  NEXIS.

  And it was glowing.