The citadel's groaning subsided into something heavier—like a held breath that had lasted centuries.
The glow along the memory-quartz veins did not fade this time. Instead, it sharpened, a cold brilliance etching every shadow into focus. The air felt brittle, as if sound itself might shatter it.
Ashling's palm still tingled from the memory-core's pulse. Keiran's voice—clear, unfractured—lingered in her bones. But underneath it was the other voice: childlike, timeless, and unbearably lonely.
Nyrelle rose from her knees, her ink-streaked hands trembling.
"It calls to us," she said, though she didn't need to. They all felt it.
Lys took the lead now, which was rare. He moved without hesitation through the fractured corridors. The path was almost nonsensical—walls where doors should be, stairways descending into ceilings—but each turn seemed to obey a rhythm none of them could name.
They reached a passage sealed by a door of blackened bronze. Across it, three glyphs burned faintly, each one a wound in the shape of a letter.
Nyrelle reached for her satchel, producing a sliver of obsidian carved with spiraling runes. She pressed it to the first glyph. It dissolved into ash.
"One lock," she whispered. "Two remain."
Ashling's memory-core thrummed against her ribs. Images bled into her vision—Keiran's hands bound in silver threads, the Concordium's crest searing into his shoulder, his eyes unblinking as something was torn from behind them.
She flinched, and the second glyph burned away.
The third lock resisted. Not magic—memory. It demanded the same wound it once inflicted.
Ashling hesitated.
Then Lys stepped forward. His hand touched the mark. A hiss, a sharp breath, and the bronze door yielded.
The Hall of Severance was not a hall at all. It was a cavern—vast, spiraling downward into a chasm without visible end.
Chains hung like dead vines, each one ending in a shard of polished bone. On every shard, a name was inscribed, only to be violently scratched out. The sound of the scratches never stopped; they echoed in the stone like rain.
In the center of the cavern, upon a platform of fractured obsidian, floated a sphere of light and shadow, constantly folding in on itself. It pulsed in sync with the memory-core.
Ashling stepped closer, and the sphere noticed.
Not like an object being observed, but like a sleeper recognizing the voice that had just entered their dream.
"Keiran?" she whispered.
The sphere trembled.
Then the childlike voice returned—clearer now, though still broken by echoes:
"Not whole. Not yet. The Severance is still in me."
Nyrelle's breath caught.
"This is the anchor. The final fracture."
The air shifted again. The Libramancer from before had followed. She did not carry the seal now—only her own eyes, wide with something between reverence and fear.
"If you take it," she said softly, "you will become what he was meant to be before the Concordium touched him. But you will also inherit his unfinished sentence."
Ashling's heart pounded. "Sentence?"
"Not punishment," the Libramancer said. "Continuance."
Lys turned to Ashling.
"If we don't take it, the Concordium will. And then…"
He didn't finish. He didn't have to.
Ashling stepped onto the platform.
The sphere met her halfway.
When it touched her chest, every chain in the Hall screamed. The scratched names glowed, reappearing for a heartbeat before vanishing again—not in loss, but in release.
The childlike voice merged with Keiran's, and for the briefest moment, she heard him laugh. Not as a hero. Not as a ghost. As himself.
And then the platform began to crack.
"We have to move!" Nyrelle shouted.
The Libramancer raised her hand, weaving a corridor of frozen time just long enough for them to sprint back through the bronze doors.
Behind them, the Hall collapsed inward, its walls folding like pages being turned by a hand far larger than theirs.
When the last sound faded, the citadel spoke again—this time in a tone like iron on stone:
Anchor retrieved.
Thread alignment at 62%.
Prepare for Convergence.
Ashling didn't know what that meant. But the way Nyrelle went pale told her they were running out of chapters before Shaleven's truth was complete.