The stolen dirigible, affectionately named "The Old Girl" by Grandmother Vander, groaned under the strain of their descent. Its silken hull, usually a bright, proud blue, was patched and dull, discolored by the suns rays, but still functional.
Calliope wrestled with the helm, her knuckles white. "Easy now. We're descending too fast. Old Girl doesn’t like being rushed." Below them, the earth ripped open into the Whispering Chasm, a vast, humid scar in the ground that swallowed the canyon light.
Mylo, already nervous, peered through a porthole at the dizzying drop. "You're going to drop us right onto a sacrificial altar, Cali. I can already smell the rot." The air, thick with sulfur and damp earth, did little to calm his anxiety.
Attia simply held the coiled rope tighter, her eyes wide. "Whoa."
Calliope ignored Mylo, her gaze fixed on the ruins jutting out from the chasm wall, a structure that was half temple, half tomb, carved from black basalt that seemed to drink the light.
"Look around," Calliope said, a thrill in her voice. "That architecture... the carvings are many centuries older than anything in CaerCylwen. It’s worth the risk."
The temple's entrance was a colossal stone face with a perpetually screaming mouth, slick with green moss and condensation from the perpetual underground spring. Above it, the superstructure was latticed with crumbling spires and balconies.
Attia leaned past Calliope, not with fear, but with a technician's critical eye. "It's beautiful... but Cali, look at the stone. The supports are cracked. This whole entrance feels like it could crumble."
"If we get caught, Grandmother will see us grounded until we’re fifty," Mylo whispered, the fear of the matron a greater threat than the crumbling temple.
Calliope finally flashed a confident smile. "She taught us enough about infiltration, didn’t she? We won't get caught. We'll be in and out. Attia, you stay right behind me."
The Old Girl settled roughly onto a precarious ledge near the temple's maw. Calliope keeping her perched lightly as she secured the mooring lines to a massive, ancient statue of a serpent.
"All right, everybody, follow me. Don’t touch the glyphs. Just don’t look down," Calliope instructed, already pulling her climbing harness tight.
Mylo grumbled, hoisting his gear. "Couldn’t we have at least just walked here? We could have avoided any traps. Pressure plates.... Pfff."
"We're too far out," Calliope shot back. "We have to use the Whispering Chasm entrance. Gotta stay out of sight for this one."
As they began their short climb toward the temple entrance, a loose rock tumbled past Mylo and disappeared into the void with a faint thump. Mylo immediately tensed. "Called it. Something's going to happen."
Attia hesitated at the claustrophobic mouth of the stone face. "Cali, that passage looks cramped and slick with moisture."
Calliope paused, turning to her sister. She lowered her voice to a fierce, protective murmur. "Attia, look at me. What did I tell you?"
Attia took a deep breath, clutching the trowel she'd dubbed "Digger." "That... I’m ready."
"That’s right! So?" Calliope smiled, pulling her through the entrance and into the echoing darkness.
They slipped past the immense stone mouth and into a passage of oppressive silence. Their headlamps illuminated walls covered in faded, complex glyphs that seemed to shift form in the periphery. The air grew still, dry, and cold, far removed from the humid chasm.
Calliope moved with the easy confidence of a born archeologist, a part of her that her parents never appreciated and definitely did not approve of. Mylo, hunched over, spent his time muttering warnings and inspecting the flagstones for hidden pressure plates.
It was Attia who stopped them, "Wait."
She pointed a thin beam of light into a high recess above an archway. "Look at the locking mechanism. It’s not mechanical. It’s resonance based."
"We don't have time to study the architecture, Attia," Mylo hissed. "Find the artifacts."
"This is how we find them, Mylo, that's a door and she's found a lock," Calliope interjected, a hand on her sister’s shoulder. "What do you need?"
Attia quickly unslung her specialized toolbox, a collection of delicate tools and acoustic tuners. "If I can find the primary frequency of the stone, the lock should dissolve. But it’s going to make noise."
Mylo groaned. "I'm the one who bypasses defenses, not the little tinkerer here. Just let me at the lock and I'll pick the tumblers, easy-peasy"
"We're wasting time, Mylo," Calliope snapped. "Do your part or get out of the way. Attia, do it."
Attia worked quickly, her fear replaced by focus. She carefully tuned a dial, and a low, resonant hum filled the chamber, vibrating through the basalt floor. With a soft chime, the massive stone door before them slid inward, revealing a grand inner vault.
The vault was vast, lit by a faint, unnatural luminescence emanating from the very center of the room. It wasn't full of golden statues or coin, it was a repository of knowledge. Ancient scrolls lay in protective boxes, astronomical charts covered the dome ceiling, and a delicate, crystalline object rested on weathered pedestal.
"The motherlode," Calliope breathed, forgetting to keep her voice down. "They hoard knowledge! This isn't a crime, it's a retrieval. Grandmother just got too comfortable letting them keep it here in the dark."
Attia moved straight toward the light source. It came from a single, multifaceted crystal, jagged and pulsing with deep violet energy, suspended in a protective glass sphere. It was mesmerizing, unstable, and terrifying.
"Whoa, I think this is a real Source Shard of the First Era," Attia whispered, her hand hovering inches from the glass.
Mylo scoffed, already filling his own bag with smaller, easily sellable metallic baubles. "That's a dusty old paperweight. Keep an eye out for anything glowing before you fill the bag with junk."
"Be careful, Attia," Calliope warned.
Just as Calliope reached for a stack of rare scrolls, Attia’s foot bumped the plinth and the crystal fell, the sphere containing the shard violently shattering.
The sound was instantly deafening. The violet light exploded outward in a shockwave of raw power, scorching a hole in the ceiling of the vault. The unstable crystal shard flew from its place.
"Uh... guys?" Attia’s voice was lost in the roar.
Calliope’s eyes went wide with sudden, cold dread. "Mylo! Attia, we gotta go!"
The temple itself shuddered. Dust and ancient mortar rained down. The shockwave had triggered a chain reaction, and the roof was collapsing.
"Attia! Get the bag!" Calliope shouted, pushing her sister toward the gear.
They scrambled back through the entry passage, barely ahead of the crumbling debris. They reached Old Girl, battered and rocking violently on the chasm ledge.
Mylo was the first to lash out.
"The whole ceiling! You saw it, Cali, she did it! You could fill a damn library with all the things you didn't do right, Attia!"
Attia was tearful, clutching her small trowel in a death grip. "I didn't mean to! I just... I tried, but... I lost the pack!"
Calliope stared at the ruined temple, then at the empty loot bag. "The crystal... the Source Shard?"
"Gone," Mylo spat. "Everything’s gone! We risk Grandmother’s wrath, the Enforcers, this whole chasm, and for what? She jinxes every she does, Cali! Every single time!"
Calliope’s hand shot out, grabbing Mylo’s collar and slamming him back against the dirigible's hull. "Just drop it, Mylo."
"No!" Mylo yelled, wrenching free. "She's supposed to be our asset! She's got the brains, but she has the luck of a dead rat! I get my ribs cracked, and she just gets a pass? Every time!"
Attia shrunk back, folding into herself, the sting of the name "Jinx" settling deep into her heart.
The Old Girl didn't fly as high on the return trip. It drifted slowly, painfully, back toward the spires of CaerCylwen, its crew silent. The temple raid was a disaster; the loot was gone, and the structure was smoking ruins in the Chasm.
Grandmother met them at the on return deflating all hopes of brushing this under the rug. Her face a mask of granite worry that didn't crack until she saw the soot clinging to Calliope’s jacket.
When Calliope confessed the details, the resonance lock, the chamber, the violet crystal, the old woman did not yell. She looked older, her features heavier and tired, as if the weight of the World itself now rested on her shoulders.
"You didn't just steal relics, Cal. You found the Anchor," she said, her voice hollow, "It shouldn't have been possibly to bypass the lock, but never mind..." She led Calliope away from the others, toward the small, secure workshop she kept hidden above her home.
Inside, Grandmother didn't touch the scattered tools. She moved to a dusty, locked strongbox, taking out a small, lead-lined case. She opened it just enough for the faintest shadow of a familiar violet light to escape, before snapping it shut again.
"That crystal was one of the Conjunction Points," Vander explained, her gaze distant, referencing truths she had kept from the children for years. "It wasn't a treasure; it was the Anchor holding the world steady. The carvings in that temple? They weren't decoration. They were the schematics for reality. Flawless patterns. The things the Halikarnians, the "truth worshippers" spend their lives tracing."
She looked directly at Calliope, the severity of the moment palpable and felt both their hearts beat. "You didn't just break a rock, Cal. You fractured the Form of this place. Everything we see, the beauty, the struggle, all of it; it’s all a poor shadow of what it should be. Now, that shadow is all we have left. The knowledge to fix it is gone, too."
Calliope stared on in shock, unspeaking.
Grandmother leaned in, her eyes piercing. "This secret dies here. If anyone learns the Form is shattered, the chaos won’t just stay in the Lanes. It will unmake everything." She placed a hand on Calliope’s arm, her grip firm. "You will never speak what happened to anyone. Ever. Do you understand the weight of that perfection you destroyed? Whispers have a way of falling on the wrong ears."
Calliope could only nod, processing that their family feud had accidentally endangered the entire cosmology.
"You made the breach, you start the repair," Grandmother stated flatly, producing a set of complex, antique calibration tools and a small, strange map etched onto treated leather. "These are the Dispersal Kits. They were meant to align the Points, not repair the fracture, but they are all we have left. You will track down the other 'Forms' legendary vestiges of the First Men and recover whatever remains that can act as a temporary seal. Only then can you rest. You leave at dawn."
"And Attia?" Calliope asked, the thought of leaving her sister was such a betrayal. It left a thick knot in her throat.
Grandmother’s expression hardened. "Attia’s involvement ends now. She is too volatile, and the truth would break her. You go alone. She thinks you abandoned her for failing. Let her believe it. It's safer that way."
Calliope walked out of that workshop knowing she was now bound by a secret older than CaerCylwen, trading her sister’s immediate comfort for the stability of the world.
Meanwhile, in the dark corners of their makeshift home, Attia sat alone, clutching a handful of scorched schematic she’d salvaged from her tool kit. She didn't understand the geometric diagrams, but she understood the silence. Calliope didn't just leave; she vanished with the dirigible, Old Girl, leaving behind only the bitter taste of Mylo’s words: Jinx.
Attia is not a fighter. Attia is a jinx. Calliope left her.
The abstract concept of a broken, perfect world meant nothing to her. All that mattered was the tangible ache of abandonment, fueling a slow, furious transformation that would soon give rise to the volatile brilliance of Jinx.