Kael didn't speak for a long time.
The chamber's collapse had left the corridor behind them sealed by rubble and dust, as if the room had never existed. The Mindtrace relic—the source of it all—was gone, consumed in the structural failure… or buried too deep to reach again.
They stood in the low, humming hallway of the Vault's inner sanctum. The air here felt heavier. Electric. Like secrets were watching.
Aila sat against the wall, hands still trembling.
"I saw him," Kael said at last, his voice barely more than a whisper. "That boy. The one who called me Echo-Born."
Oran glanced over sharply, his tired eyes narrowing. "You sure it wasn't another fragment from the Mindtrace?"
"No," Kael said. "This memory… it wasn't fractured like the others. It felt real. Intact. But not mine."
"What do you mean?" Aila's voice was soft, but her eyes searched him like scalpels.
