Ashardio stood before the old sigil again — the one hidden beneath the tactical field, where dust and silence had guarded truths no voice dared speak. But this time, he didn't just observe it.
He understood it.
It wasn't merely a symbol. It was a mark of passage.
A blood-bound key that responded not to words, but to will.
He drew his thumb across the edge of the design, letting his own blood bead onto its lines. The stone beneath him trembled faintly, and with a groan like ancient breath, the platform began to sink — not downward, but inward, as if space folded around him.
Darkness claimed the edges of his vision.
Not hostile.
Not welcoming.
Just… expectant.
When the motion stopped, he stepped into a chamber unlike any the surface world could have imagined.
A vault of echoes.
Walls of crystalline memory shimmered around him, each holding flickering imprints — moving images, fractured voices, pulsing truths. Faces he'd never met looked at him as though they knew him intimately.
One spoke aloud before he even touched the glass:
"Vaes'Theron must not remember. Not until the Weave strains at its weakest. Not until the Lock shivers."
He turned away from the voice and approached the center of the chamber.
There, suspended in threads of temporal glass, floated a memory not his own.
A throne room. A boy — barely more than ten — standing before twelve kings. Fear in their eyes. Not of what he had done. But of what he could do.
"You are not bound to time," one said. "You are a wound in the chronology."
"You are a riddle with no right to answer," another whispered.
And then the boy turned his head — and Ashardio saw his own face.
Unscarred. Innocent. Yet already dangerous.
The Council had never punished him for heresy.
They had feared him.
Not for what he was.
But for what he might unlock.
Deeper still, another memory pulled at him. One the Vault didn't want to show. One buried beneath protocols.
He forced it open.
A woman.
Hair the color of fading stars. Eyes full of sorrow.
His mother.
Not as he remembered her in dreams — soft, distant, warm — but as she had truly been: fierce, calculating, torn.
She held a scroll woven from Voidscript and sang a lullaby in a tongue not spoken since the Thirteen Thrones fell.
"To the child between thread and silence,To the key born of broken light—Sleep now, and forget."
Then she pressed a kiss to the infant's forehead — and Ashardio felt the echo of it across lifetimes.
His mother hadn't just hidden him.
She had rewritten him.
Erased the dangerous parts of his blood.
The Vault around him began to groan.
Cracks formed along the walls — not of stone, but of memory resisting its own revelation.
And he heard them — the Celestials — whispering again.
Not from the sky.
From within.
"The lattice frays. The gate yawns. The lock begins to turn."
Ashardio fell to his knees, visions crashing into him: • A sea folding in on itself. • A hand reaching through time. • Kaelith, standing before a door made of bone and memory.
And then… silence.
Not peace.
Warning.
He wasn't just a Weaver. Not merely a remnant of a lost house.
He was something older.
Something buried.
Something that should have never woken.
And he was waking.
As he rose, he felt the Vault closing behind him. Not to trap him. But to preserve itself. It had shown him what it could — and now it receded, its purpose fulfilled.
Ashardio stepped back into the field of dummies above.
But he was not the same.
His blood remembered.
And the unseen gate in the weave of the world?
It had begun to listen.