Liara didn't remember how she got there.
One moment, she was crumpled on the stone floor, the Remnant shrieking behind her. The next, her body had led her through dim corridors beneath the academy—paths she'd never walked before but somehow knew.
The Vault's door opened for her without a word.
The chamber within had changed.
The ancient mirror pulsed with life, its surface glowing silver-blue, swirling like stormclouds under moonlight. The twin pendants—hers and the fractured one in the crystal—floated in the air, drawn to each other like twin suns.
Syeralyn's mark across her skin burned brilliantly now—runes shifting and realigning in patterns she didn't recognize, but that made her feel whole.
Then, the mirror spoke.
Not in sound.
In memory.
Long ago, a soul was torn to seal a rift between worlds—Kael's soul.
One half was sacrificed to the Vault—the other banished beyond the veil.
The seal required two relics: twin pendants forged from starlight and sorrow. One remained guarded. The other... vanished.
But a soul cannot remain broken forever.
The mark of Syeralyn was passed to protect the next Catalyst—one who could reunite the pieces or destroy them forever.
You, Liara, are that choice.
Liara stumbled backward.
Kael.
The name echoed through her very bones.
The silver figure in the Rift. The voice in her dreams. The feeling in her heart like a wound that had never fully healed.
He had never been gone.
He had only been locked away.
"Why me?" she whispered.
The Vault pulsed.
Because your soul remembers him.
Because your mark chose you.
Suddenly, a burst of pain. Her pendant cracked. A spark leapt from the fractured relic to her hand—and with it, a vision:
Kael, chained in a realm of void and flame, silver hair disheveled, his body wreathed in magic.
He turned toward her slowly.
And for the first time—his face was clear.
He looked at her as if he had waited a thousand years.
And then he said her name.
"Liara."
She gasped and fell to the floor.
The Vault dimmed. The mirror went dark.
But it didn't matter.
Because now—she knew the truth.
Kael was real.
He was bound.
And the seal… was breaking.