The vault was near.
She could feel it.
Not behind the tides, but beneath the omissions—the paragraphs the world had skipped, the silences between what had been written and what must never be.
She took a step forward.
The sea didn't part.
But it obeyed.
Ink solidified beneath her boot, forming a staircase of unraveling syntax. Each step was a word forgotten by the world—her passage rewriting their existence with every breath.
At the bottom stood the vault.
A massive door of braided text, spinning in layered dialects: visual, auditory, emotional. It was not locked by key, but by recognition.
The Signature of the Lost.
Only one who bore a fragment of every unwritten fate could open it.
Only someone who had remembered them all.
Elowen knelt before the door.
Removed the lantern from her belt.
And slowly, reverently, opened it.
Light spilled not outward, but inward—flowing into the vault's surface, feeding it memory.
Faces appeared in the metal.
A boy who never grew up.
