The first passage didn't descend—it spiraled.
It wrapped inward like the threading of bone, an elegant curve built from pressure-smoothed stone. Pale amber veins pulsed gently within the walls, giving off just enough light to make the shadows feel deliberate. Not hiding things. Waiting with purpose.
Riku walked ahead of the others.
Each footfall felt quiet, though his boots struck solid stone. The deeper they moved, the more the corridor felt… listening. As though every breath stirred echoes not in the air, but in whatever memory the walls still held.
Kael tapped his scribe every five meters, letting it absorb vibration and orientation. "The resonance levels have stabilized," he muttered, though his voice didn't echo. "Still within traceable range of the upper vault."
Sira trailed behind, half-watching the shadows behind them. She hadn't spoken since they left the main chamber. Her focus was deep-set, instinctive—like a predator waiting for something that hadn't quite decided to strike.
Thirty meters in, the corridor gave way to a cavern.
Riku stopped at the threshold, and his breath caught.
The chamber wasn't vast, but it was alive. A lattice of translucent vines covered the walls, glowing with a slow, vascular rhythm. The roots ran into the ceiling, vanishing into dark apertures like inverted wells, and from their arcs hung dozens of seed-like orbs, each the size of a closed fist. Some flickered faintly. Others pulsed in steady harmony.
But at the center of the room stood the structure that stopped all words in Riku's throat.
It wasn't a throne.
It wasn't a forge.
It was a cradle.
Massive. Formed of rootbone and stone fused so tightly it seemed grown, not constructed. Within it lay the curled remains of something vaguely humanoid—sleeved in tattered symbiotic wrappings, its chest caved inward, but its hands still clutching a half-broken staff with six notches along the shaft.
Kael approached the cradle slowly. "The readings here are... variable."
Sira took one step forward and froze. "It's not dead."
They both looked at her.
"I don't mean alive," she whispered. "But it remembers being."
Riku walked closer.
The moment his hand touched the cradle's outer bark, the staff in the figure's grip shifted slightly—without breaking.
And then it happened.
The wall to his left lit with image—not light, not heat, but a kind of fungal-phosphor glow. A story, painted in motion, flickered across the chamber's curved surface.
Dozens of humanoid shapes—some tall, some vine-laced, some with what looked like mushroomed crowns—moving in tandem around a great basin. Beneath their feet, the ground pulsed like it was breathing. Above them, a shape—massive, ringed, too large to see fully—cast an unbroken circle of shadow.
Then came fire.
And the figures collapsed, not from death, but from being unlinked.
The roots above began dimming, one by one.
The story stopped.
Riku let out a slow breath. "This wasn't a people," he murmured. "It was a network."
Kael knelt beside the cradle, inspecting the staff. "I don't think this was a leader. I think it was a conduit."
"And this chamber?" Sira asked quietly.
"A node," Kael replied. "Of something bigger."
Riku looked back at the way they'd come.
"How many of these do you think exist beneath us?"
"Dozens," Kael said. "Hundreds. Maybe more."
Sira was already moving to the edge of the chamber, where the roots sank deeper through cracks.
"I'll scout forward," she said.
"No," Riku said. "We go together. No splitting."
She paused, then nodded once.
Kael spoke again, softer this time. "There's something else. The gauntlet… when we entered this space, it registered two signals."
Riku turned. "What?"
"One's here. This cradle." Kael looked toward the withered figure. "But the other? It's still active."
"Where?"
Kael stood. "Beneath."
A pause passed between them, thick as magma.
Then the rootline beneath their feet gave a single, low tremor.
Not an earthquake.
A heartbeat.
Riku turned to the sleeping body one last time, then to the notched staff