The Vault pulsed.
Not like before — not the clean hum of untapped power.Now it was a heartbeat, deep and primal, shaking the dust from bones no one remembered burying.
The stabilizer Veylen installed flickered — already failing.
They had bought time.
But nothing more.
Cray sat with his back against a cracked pillar, knuckles scraped raw.
"So what now?" he asked. "We kill a god? We negotiate with the thing eating reality? Someone hand me a plan that doesn't involve us dying horrifically."
No one answered.
Elian stood near the edge of the mirrored pool beneath the Vault, blade resting at his side. It had grown warm — no, fevered.
It ached to be used.
And the Seed was listening.
Lysara worked silently, arranging her last two glyph coins in a spiral pattern on the floor. Each one bore a memory — hers, Elian's, even one from Veylen. They flickered when placed, absorbing presence.
"A warding seal," she explained, not looking up. "Won't hold the Seed. But it might hold what's coming."
"Which is?" Calen asked.
Veylen knelt at the pool.
He drew a symbol into the liquid light with a piece of chalk that hissed when it touched.
"A feeder."
He looked up at them all.
"There was something before the Seed. Something that preyed on it. Fed on raw potential like a leech in the mind of god."
He stood.
"And it's waking up."
Calen paled.
"I thought the Seed was the source."
"It was," Veylen said. "But it wasn't the first."
The light in the Vault dimmed.
Then — sound.
Not loud.Not even sharp.Just… wrong.
A sort of inverted lullaby, like a child humming backward through broken teeth.
The water of the pool rippled. The glyphs Lysara had etched began to melt.
Then it emerged.
A shadow, but not cast by light. A shape, but not of form. It rose from the pool in fragments — flutters of teeth, wings made of absence, limbs that broke the eye's attempt to count.
Elian felt it before he saw it.
It didn't look at him — because it had no eyes.
But it knew him.
It had no name.
But a thought bloomed in his head all the same:
"You are the door."
Elian gritted his teeth.
"No," he whispered.
"I'm the lock."
The shadow surged.
The chamber erupted into chaos.
Lysara cast her glyphs in layered chains, but they disintegrated on contact with the thing's mass — as if language itself was rejected.
Calen threw anchors to stabilize reality, but they buckled under the creature's mere presence.
Veylen shouted something — a name, a fragment of forgotten truth — and the thing recoiled.
Only Elian stood firm.
Because the Memory Blade sang.
And Elian let go.
He moved like flowing fire — not attacking, not defending, but remembering.
Every movement, every strike, every dodge — they weren't made.
They were recalled.
He had fought this thing before.
Some part of him had.In another life.In another world.
He struck the shadow through the center of its non-form.
And it felt it.
It reared back — not in pain, but in recognition.
"Warden." the thought echoed through all their minds.
"Chosen not by law, but by loss."
Then it turned.
It ran.
Or more precisely — withdrew, collapsing into itself like a nightmare folding under dawn.
Back into the Vault.
Into the Seed.
Not defeated.
But sealed.
For now.
Silence fell.
The pool returned to stillness.
The Vault, scarred but dormant.
Veylen collapsed to one knee.
"We need to bury this place. Burn every map. Cut it from the memory of the world."
"I agree," Elian said.
But he didn't move.
Because he felt something the others hadn't.
Not fear.Not power.
Familiarity.
The Seed had known his name.
Not just the Warden.
His real name.
The one he hadn't spoken in years.
The one not even he remembered.
Later, after they made camp on the ridge above the Dominion, Cray passed around a flask and muttered, "So, anyone want to guess what we just did?"
"Closed a chapter," Lysara said softly.
"No," Veylen whispered. "You opened one."
Far away — beyond every border of reason and empire — a creature older than time stirred in its slumber.
It had felt the Vault flare.
It remembered Elian.
It remembered losing to him.
And it would not lose again.