But what drew Phoenix’s eye wasn’t the corpse.
It was the carved symbols etched into the floor beneath him, faintly pulsing with residual astral energy. Glyphs. Familiar. Not in meaning—but in the way dreams sometimes felt more real than memory.
Sam Riaz crouched beside the body. “No sign of struggle. No obvious wounds. But the symbols… they weren’t part of his usual healing ceremonies.”
Phoenix knelt beside one of them, fingertips hovering. Her vision shimmered. A flicker of fire. A name whispered on a breeze. She blinked it away.
“He did something he wasn’t supposed to,” she murmured.
Venloran had been a fixture in the Bayou for years—a spiritual guide, a city healer, a so-called astral therapist. Clients claimed he helped them reclaim lost pieces of themselves. Maya had even found a glowing five-star Matrix review from a local executive: "He rewired my karma."
But beneath the surface, cracks widened.
Phoenix and Sam spoke to former patients, each more shaken than the last. One woman claimed her dreams no longer belonged to her. Another said she forgot her partner’s name after a session. A third confessed she saw Venloran’s face in her mirror, mouthing words she couldn’t hear.
“What if he wasn’t healing anyone?” Phoenix asked, her voice low. “What if he was… taking pieces of them?”
Later, at his rustic lab on the city’s edge, Dr. Elias Hawthorne examined photos of the glyphs with furrowed brows.
“This isn’t modern symbology,” he muttered. “This is something… older. Pre-collapse. Possibly even proto-Awakening. Spirit calligraphy.”
He laid out similar sigils on a lightboard, overlapping some of Phoenix’s dream sketches from earlier in the season.
“You keep dreaming these,” he said. “I don’t think that’s coincidence. And I think it’s time you stop running from your power.”
Phoenix crossed her arms, jaw tight. “I’m not running. I’m trying to breathe.”
While Phoenix and Sam traced Venloran’s clients, Maya Torres dove into a technomantic subnet—an obscure, semi-archived node rumored to predate even the modern Matrix grid.
She found something in a sandboxed system flagged ÉCHO-VEIL.
Buried in encrypted fragments, Phoenix’s name appeared alongside designations Maya didn’t understand:
“CYCLE: SHARD 3… host echo unresolved… override: PHOENIX / THRESHOLD–AWAKE”
And then something stranger:
“Simulated Persistence Integrity: Unstable”
She sat back, fingers trembling. “What the hell are you?”
“He was extracting… fragments of essence,” Phoenix said, her voice hollow. “Using spirit calligraphy to draw them out. Bottling them. Maybe studying them.”
Sam looked at her. “Could he have been experimenting on you?”
“I don’t think so. But I think someone like him has before.”
Phoenix confronted one of Venloran’s closest disciples, a young man named Kesel. Under pressure, Kesel admitted Venloran had spoken of a higher calling, a “veil behind which all things wait to be remembered.”
He thought Venloran had found a way to reach through it.
“Is that why you killed him?” Sam asked.
“No!” Kesel cried. “He was afraid. He said something was watching him. That he’d gone too far.”
Phoenix met Sam’s gaze. “Then who silenced him?”
Back in her apartment, Phoenix stared at a fresh message scrawled across her mirror—glowing faintly in astral ink only she could see.
“They are listening. Remember the fire.”
She closed her eyes. The glyphs swam behind her lids. The voice from her dreams—soft, persistent, familiar.
“Find me.”
But for the first time… she wondered if it was really someone else calling to her.
Or a fragment of herself, clawing its way back into the light.
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