The vault was still and dark again.
Whatever storm had tried to rewrite it—whatever clash of memory and ego had pulsed through its relic veins—it was over. The suppression relic had shut down on its own, its light extinguished as if ashamed.
Kael sat on the floor, the fused blade across his lap.
It didn't hum anymore. It breathed.
He touched the hilt lightly. "Still in there?"
"Yes," came the answer, steadier now. Fuller. A voice less mechanical, more... weighted.
Then: "We are."
Kael blinked. "We?"
"You protected me. That part... shaped us."
A pause. "I remember being singular. But I prefer this."
Kael exhaled through his nose. A mix of relief and the creeping realization of what that really meant.
His glyphs were darker now. He saw it in the reflection of a collapsed glass casing: the marks along his collarbone had thickened, sharp lines branching like veins into symbols that moved when he breathed.
Not just bound anymore.
Joined.
Behind a one-way glyphscreen near the vault's edge, Elyss watched.
She had not intervened. She couldn't have, even if she'd wanted to. The protocols forbid archivists from interfering with Core-bound events.
But she had recorded everything.
Her eyes shimmered faintly with preserved frames of the fusion—the decision, the flare, the sigil Kael had drawn not with perfection but with intention.
She had seen hundreds of champions before.
But none who had defied both a suppression relic and a Class-One convergence without breaking.
And none who had spoken to a weapon—and been spoken to back.
She rolled up her scroll, stepped through the containment threshold, and walked toward him.
Not to question.
To join the conversation.