The sky shifted before the mountains did.
It began with the light. Not dimming, not darkening—just wrong. Shadows grew longer than they should. Colors lost their edges. The blue above had a faint violet hue that shouldn't exist in daylight.
Gerson walked with his cloak drawn tight, though the air wasn't cold. It was heavy, like pressure built behind unseen walls.
He had no memory of how he died in his old world. Only that he had. And then, this—a place of LAW, of fate that chose and discarded at whim. He was one in a hundred. Chosen. Called. And yet, as he stared into the horizon where the Veiled Scar opened beneath fractured cliffs, he felt less chosen than trapped.
"Kaelen," he said, brushing his hand over the dying bark of a blackpine tree. "You feel that?"
The older warrior grunted, shifting his hand to the hilt of his axe. "LAW pressure. Not like before. This... this feels like an echo that never ended."
Behind them, Mira walked with deliberate silence. Her crimson braid caught the distorted sunlight, and her amber eyes flicked to every tree, every shadow.
"It's not the Vault itself I'm afraid of," she murmured. "It's what remembers inside it."
Gerson didn't reply.
They had followed the Seer's map for six days through lands where compasses spun in circles and water ran uphill. Twice, they passed shrines filled with LAW-touched bones—monuments to Called who didn't make it.
On the seventh day, the forest thinned. The trees receded as though unwilling to witness what lay ahead.
Before them, the Veiled Scar yawned open. A valley split by unseen forces. The Cradle Vault lay within—half-buried, breathing mist like a sleeping god. Black stone columns jutted from the earth, leaning at angles that hurt the eye.
A wind swept up from the hollow. Not cold, but dry. So dry it carried no scent.
Even Kaelen slowed. "We're being watched."
"By what?" Mira asked.
"Not what. Who," he replied. "The Vault remembers."
They made camp just shy of the cliff's edge beneath a cracked archstone rumored to have once been part of a palace swallowed by the Scar.
Gerson stared into the abyss where the Vault sat. A stairwell curled down the cliffside, worn and cracked, leading into shadow. Nothing stirred within. No birds. No creatures. Only fog.
And yet, the longer he looked, the more he felt it breathing.
That night, dreams came hard and fast.
Gerson walked in a room of doors—each pulsing faintly with LAW sigils. One opened as he passed.
Inside, he saw himself.
Older. Bleeding. Crowned in fire. Around him, figures knelt. Not in reverence, but resignation.
The other-Gerson met his gaze. "I am what you could become," he said. "But you won't like what it costs."
Another door opened.
This one held a battlefield. A woman screamed his name—Mira. Her bow shattered. A blade pierced Kaelen's chest. And standing over their corpses was a shadow with Gerson's face, smiling.
When he awoke, dawn was a red line across the Veiled Scar.
Mira sat against a boulder, arms wrapped around her knees. She wasn't sleeping. Just... remembering.
"I dreamt of my sister," she said softly. "She died before I was Called. But in the dream, she had a LAW. She begged me to run. But I couldn't move."
Kaelen stirred nearby, breathing deeply, eyes still closed.
"I dreamt of the Murmuring Queen," he said. "She wept blood and sang in languages I don't know. I understood her anyway."
Gerson didn't share his dream.
He didn't want it to be real.
They broke camp as the sky brightened unnaturally. A second sun hovered faintly above the horizon—an illusion born of proximity to the Vault. The wind had stilled entirely.
As they approached the first stair leading down, a low hum began in Gerson's chest.
It wasn't his heartbeat.
Mira touched his shoulder. "Your LAW is reacting."
"I know," he whispered. "It wants me to go inside."
They stood at the edge of the threshold. The black gate loomed ahead, runes sliding across its surface like shifting scales.
Kaelen stepped forward. "We go together. No one wanders."
"Agreed," Mira nodded, drawing a thin dagger.
Gerson swallowed dry air and looked back once—at the horizon, the dying trees, the path they'd taken.
When he turned forward again, the Vault was open.
The gate had silently parted.
No sound. No tremor. Just darkness beyond.
The Cradle Vault had accepted them.
But it would not let all of them leave.