Chapter 28 · Voidbound - Chapter 28: The War They Erased

"Don't touch that."

I froze, hand an inch from the stone tablet. Mira's voice cut through the dark like a blade.

"Why not?" I said, not turning around. "You gave me the gun. You let me shoot the gate. Now you're scared of a piece of rock?"

"I'm scared of what happens when you read it," she said. Her boots scraped closer. "Every archive the Guild ever sealed had a trigger ward. You open the last page, the whole network lights up."

"Good." I pressed my palm flat against the tablet. Cold bit into my skin, sharp enough to sting. "Let them see."

"Kael—"

"They killed every Voidling in the world three hundred years ago," I said. "Then they wrote the story so clean nobody even asks why. You think I'm walking out of here without the truth?"

She didn't answer. I took that as permission.

The stone hummed under my hand. Lines of script flared silver, crawling across the surface like veins filling with light. I recognized some of the glyphs—old pact marks, the kind nobody used anymore because the Guild said they were "unsafe." The rest looked older. Alien.

"What does it say?" Mira asked.