The underground vault wasn't silent.
Though no wind stirred and no gears turned, something pulsed within the walls, like the beating of a buried heart. A rhythm older than language, deeper than song.
Lynchie stood alone at the threshold of the final sanctum—a crescent arch carved from shimmering bone and mirrored crystal, marked in glyphs that shimmered only in peripheral sight. Behind her, the observatory dome had vanished entirely, replaced with a spiraling tunnel of stardust and memory, closing off any hope of turning back.
At her chest, the Splinter Glyph pulsed in tandem with the vault's cadence.
She stepped forward. Her boots didn't echo on the polished obsidian floor, as if sound itself was not permitted in this sacred space. Every breath she took felt magnified. Every heartbeat, pronounced.
The chamber ahead was circular, its ceiling a concave of shadowed glass in which no reflection stirred. At the center, a low pedestal bore an open codex.
It wasn't written in ink. The pages shimmered with flowing syllables made of memory and starlight, vanishing and returning with every blink. A language that remembered itself—or waited to be remembered.
She approached, and the pages turned without touch. The air grew dense with meaning. Not words. Not thoughts. Impressions.
A presence stirred.
Then the voices began.
Not aloud, not from the air—but from within her. Whispers not in unison, but overlapping. Endless. Older than the First Tree. Newer than breath.
She tried to pull back.
"He watches still."
"One splinter never broke."
"You carry the Echo."
"He did not choose to forget."
"He waits."
Lynchie clutched her temples, the Splinter Glyph flaring with incandescent pain. She fell to one knee, but did not cry out.
Then, from the Codex—a pulse.
A spiral of symbols rose, hovering midair. They rotated, burned, whispered. Her body vibrated, bones singing with a frequency not made for mortal ears.
Her lips moved. Not by will.
"I am... the fragment."
Another voice spoke through her mouth.
"We are the Chorus of the Unnamed."
And all at once, every syllable twisted. The chamber folded in on itself. The mirrored dome shattered outward—not into shards, but into doors. Dozens. Hundreds. Each with a fragment of a name.
One door glowed brighter.
A voice—not echo, not memory, but intent—reached into her mind.
"If you open this door, you will no longer be unmarked."
She reached forward, hand trembling.
Then, from behind her, another hand caught her wrist.
"Don't," the voice whispered. Familiar. Fractured.
It was her brother.
But not.
Something had found her.
The vault breathed.
And the Codex turned one more page.