Malrik stood at the center of his throne chamber—its walls carved from petrified bone, the floor marked with runes that burned with slow, rhythmic fire.
The room had gone quiet. Not just in sound.
In presence.
The bloodshards embedded in the stone began to hum. Soft. Then shrieking.
Malrik's eyes, black-ringed and fire-lit, narrowed.
"Vault Two has bled."
A ripple of heat curled the air.
Something behind the stone had stirred.
Not an escape.
An echo destroyed.
But not before it marked its killer.
He turned slowly toward the eastern wall, where a great tapestry—woven from skin and thread of shadow—depicted the Thirteen Vaults.
Number Two now glowed red.
"He survived it," Malrik whispered. "Of course he did."
He extended one clawed hand. The glyph in the tapestry shifted, forming Kael's sigil—
a crown, struck through with lightning.
Behind him, shadows knelt. Three of the Veilmarked Lieges.
"Shall we dispatch the Voice-Eaters again, my lord?" asked one, her face stitched into silence.
Malrik shook his head.
"No. Let the boy march. Let him bleed my armies. Let him break them."
His lips curved into a smile that had no warmth.
"Every strike will bring him closer. Every victory will make him louder."
"And when he's loud enough…"
He turned fully now, flame licking from his fingertips.
"The Deep One will hear him."
Malrik extended a single claw, slicing it across his palm. The blood hovered, then shaped into a messenger—veiled in red shadow, voice a whisper.
He gave it a name.
Not Kael's.
But a name Kael had long forgotten.
The messenger vanished.
"Let the child remember what he buried," Malrik whispered.
"Let him become what the Vault saw."
A ridge overlooked the Vale, jagged and silent—windless.
And atop it, cloaked in threadbare dusk, stood a figure unclaimed by light.
No name.
No banner.
Just eyes like dying stars.
He watched as the Vault's red light faded to cinders.
Watched Kael emerge. Watched Malrik stir.
And then, without sound, he smiled.
"So. He lived."
He extended a hand, scarred with ancient glyph-burns.
In his palm: a stone. Smooth. Grey.
Inscribed with the first language.
He turned it once. Twice.
"It begins again."
He knelt in the dust and drew a symbol in the dirt—a glyph none had used since before the Kingdoms fractured.
A veil-wound glyph. A tether between planes.
As it flared, whispers rose—not from around him, but from beneath his own skin.
"Watcher. Warden. Why do you stir?"
He didn't answer. Only stood.
And turned his gaze eastward.
Toward Kael.
Toward war.
"The Sovereign awakens," he whispered.
"But what rises with him is older than the crown."
They camped in the ruins of a shattered watchtower a mile from the Vault's edge.
Darric stood watch, scanning the treeline.
Lyra sat sharpening her blade, gaze flicking toward Kael now and then.
Kael said nothing. He stared into the fire, unmoving.
Not brooding.
Listening.
That whisper—soft, slow—hadn't left since he climbed out of the Vault.
"…he still breathes…"
Lyra finally spoke. Quiet. Measured.
"What happened down there?"
Kael didn't look at her. "It broke."
"We know that. We saw it fold in on itself. We saw you…"
She hesitated. "We saw what was left of you."
Kael's fingers curled slightly.
"It knew me," he said softly. "Before I said anything. Before I remembered it myself."
Darric turned now. "You're marked."
Kael nodded once. No denial.
"It's not possession. It's not control."
"It's… a piece of something that used to be me."
Lyra frowned. "A shard?"
"A shadow," Kael said.
"Of something worse."
Lyra finally sheathed her blade.
"You're still you," she said. "But if that changes…"
Kael met her gaze.
"You'll stop me."
Darric: "No. We'll remind you."
Kael's silence stretched a beat longer, then he gave a slow nod.
"Let's move by dawn. If Malrik hasn't felt it yet, he will soon."
Later, as the others slept, Kael stepped beyond the firelight.
He stared eastward, eyes faintly glowing.
The glyph beneath his skin pulsed once more—not in warning, but in resonance.
Something was awake out there.
And it knew his name.
"Let it come," Kael whispered.
"I'll become what I have to be."
Isryn moved like a whisper through the twisted woods east of the Vale.
Her cloak was dark as the Veil itself, blending seamlessly with the shadows cast by the dying trees. Her eyes—pale and unreadable—scanned the Veil ripple like a predator tracking prey.
"Kaelen Rivenhart," she murmured, voice like ice.
A flicker of red fire sparked in her palm—a small orb of Veil energy, pulsing with the same ancient power she sensed had been disturbed in Vault Two.
"You've changed," she said softly.
"But I will find you.
Before they do."
She vanished deeper into the night, leaving only a cold wind behind.