The caverns beneath Dawnhaven always felt like someone else's memory.
Stone arched into shadows so deep that torches gave up after a few feet, their glow swallowed by damp rock veined with metal.
Every step Caedrion took echoed against walls that had not known a living tread in centuries.
He had walked here once before, guided by desperation, carrying only Baelius' crude null-flame batteries.
Those offerings had been enough to stir the heart in the deep, but only barely.
Whispers, fragments, half-breaths of something that should have been impossible.
Now he returned with something closer to what it had been waiting for.
The perfected battery pulsed faintly in his hand, a shard of latticework rhythm locked into alloy and sigil.
Its glow was not firelight, nor rustlight, nor any mortal flame.
It was a cadence that seemed to thrum with the bones of the world itself.
