They camped just above the Vault, in a stone chamber that once served as a watchroom. The old walls were lined with rusted brackets and cracked lenses—whatever had once been watched from here, it had long since slipped into silence.
Kael sat near the far wall, legs drawn up, arms crossed over his knees. The Echoheart no longer glowed, but he still felt it in every breath—like it was threaded into his blood.
Elira crouched nearby, silently cleaning a gash on his arm with the edge of a cloth. Her expression was tight, controlled.
"You're lucky," she murmured.
Kael glanced at her. "That's not how it felt."
"It's not about feeling," she said. "You survived. That's rare, lately."
Tovan stood by the entrance, his back to them, hand resting on his sidearm.
"This isn't working," he said.
Elira looked up. "Tovan—"
He turned, face sharp. "We were relic-hunting. Exploring. But now we're waking things that weren't supposed to exist anymore. That thing—" he pointed toward the collapsed Vault, "—wanted him. Not us. Him."
Kael stood slowly. "Because of the Echoheart."
Tovan crossed his arms. "Exactly. It's not helping you anymore. It's using you. And it almost got us killed."
Kael's fingers curled at his sides. "You think I don't know that? That I don't question it every step?"
"No," Tovan said. "I think you believe it's worth the cost."
Elira stepped between them before the silence broke into something worse.
"Enough. We're not splitting up in this place. And none of us came here without risking something."
She didn't say it aloud, but the rift growing between them felt more dangerous than any ruin.
Tovan held Kael's gaze a moment longer, then turned away again.
Night in Vareth wasn't quiet.
Not truly.
The walls breathed. The wind carried old chants through broken towers. Kael drifted in and out of sleep, dreams flaring behind his eyes like sparks from a dying flame.
He stood again at the cracked seal—but it glowed now with red light. And before it stood a figure.
Cloaked. Faceless. Surrounded by glimmering echoes of shattered relics floating like debris.
The seal cracked in reverse, folding inward like time was bending around it. His name echoed—not said, but remembered backward.
The figure turned to him slowly, voice like silk dragged across stone.
"You are not the only one who heard it break."
Kael tried to speak, but the dream ended.
He woke, gasping.
The Echoheart pulsed once—softly, but with a red hue now glowing just beneath the surface.
He sat upright, staring at the glow.
Something had shifted.
By morning, the group pressed on—silent, tense. They followed an old corridor north, guided by fragments of Elira's ward-sense and what little mapping data remained in her journal.
Eventually, the path forked.
To the left, the corridor sloped upward toward what remained of Vareth's upper citadel. To the right, a narrow path twisted along a crumbled aqueduct, vanishing into mist.
Kael stopped.
The Echoheart pulsed again—slow, deliberate.
Elira looked at him.
"Well?"
Kael stared down the right-hand path.
"I don't know why," he said. "But that way."
Tovan grunted. "More relics, more madness."
Kael nodded.
"Where the silence ends."
They turned down the forgotten path, unaware that far above them, amid the ruins, a lone figure stood atop a shattered spire.
Wrapped in bone-cloth and flickering relic light, it watched their descent.
It whispered:
"The Eye stirs again. So the gate must open."