We move north.
The cracked ring hovers in Wren's hands now, pulsing faintly with each step. It doesn't glow—it *breathes.* Every beat pulls us deeper beneath the city, through stone older than even the Vault records. This place wasn't built. It was *left behind.*
Sov takes point, silent and sharp. Branvel and Jeral flank the rear, keeping watch. Kett and Narth walk beside the younger seal-holders, hands near weapons but eyes forward. No one speaks unless necessary.
The deeper we go, the colder it gets—not the chill of air, but of memory.
The path finally ends at a gate.
No hinges. No seams. Just an obsidian wall, smooth as water. The cracked ring pulses harder, and the wall responds—ripples, bends, *parts.*
A stairwell waits beyond. One single descent, narrow and circular.
Wren looks at me. "This doesn't lead to another chamber."
"No," I say. "It leads below the city's bones."
Lira touches the wall as we pass. "What was this place?"
I don't answer.
Because I feel it now.
A pressure. A presence.
And then we step through—and everything shifts.
Not the world.
*Us.*
The stairs end in a chamber that shouldn't fit beneath the city. Massive, open, carved in a spiral that leads to a black dais at the center. Above it: a map. Not of Darnem Hollow. Not even of this world.
Of *threads.*
Floating lines, each a path of memory, power, silence—and at the center, a fracture.
Vellidra's mark.
Branvel breathes out. "It's a map of the Vault's failures."
"No," I say. "It's a map of what the Vault was meant to stop."
A flicker dances across the chamber wall.
A figure. Half-seen. Bone-threaded.
The rival has been here.
The cracked ring begins to spin slowly in Wren's hands.
"We're late," Sov mutters.
"No," I say. "We're exactly when we're meant to be."
Because this isn't the end.
It's the part the city buried so deep, even the Vault forgot it.
And now?
It's waking up.