I tasted metal before I saw it—the kind that filled your mouth when the world was about to give out.
The corridor behind us convulsed, a low groan crawling up the walls as steel spine buckled like bone. Concrete dust fell in slow motion. Lights ruptured one by one. The vault wasn't just collapsing. It was shedding—layers of itself peeling away like dead skin.
"We need to get out—now," Vex snapped, shoulder-checking a rust-glass console as it sparked and cracked apart.
But there was no out.
Ahead, the main exit had fused shut. The blast door rippled—not dented, but folded inward like someone had pressed a hand into fabric. The route we came from was already gone.
Then the floor dropped.
A kinetic pulse snapped through our boots—no warning, no countdown. Just a shriek of friction and gravity's hand around our throats. The corridor cracked and slid, locking into angled descent like some twisted Lucari drop rail—but older. Cruder.
We weren't escaping. The vault was taking us deeper.
Cree swore. Drayce just stared, half-hypnotized. "Kinetic lock sequence... It's rewriting us in."
"What?" I shouted over the grinding metal.
"The layout. It's adapting. Shifting around us. Not defense behavior—this is cognitive patterning. Like the old Lucari memory sanctums, but—"
"But this thing's thinking," I said, breath catching as the slope steepened. "Not just reacting."
My shard flared.
A sharp, pulsing jolt crawled up my arm—hot, like a signal spike, but wrong. Not pain exactly. More like recognition.
Like the place knew me.
A panel beside me blinked—not a display, just raw circuitry humming in fractured glyphs. For a second, I swore the pattern matched the scar on my back.
"It's not kicking us out," Cree muttered from behind me, her voice far too calm for the look in her eyes. "It's learning us."
---
The air changed when the drop ended.
Not just colder—denser. Like memory had weight down here.
We stepped off the platform into silence. No system hum, no ventilation whir. Just stillness, thick and preserved. The walls curved outward into a cylindrical chamber—half research lab, half crypt. Dust floated in webs of dead light.
"Experimental wing," Drayce said, voice hushed. "This place was sealed before the Gate breach. Ferren markings—first-gen protocols."
Rows of glass pods lined the corridor. Cryogenic units—long dead. A few were shattered, their interiors scorched. Others remained intact, lit with weak pulses that throbbed like failing heart monitors. A nameplate caught the edge of my vision: SUBJECT-Ω.
Cree's visor flared, syncing with a fragmented terminal embedded in the wall. Static licked the edge of her feed as she ran a forced decrypt.
"Got something," she said, tension clipping her voice. "Old logs. Scrambled. Ferren dialect—can't tell if it's pre-collapse or pre-ethics."
The screen flared to life—barely functional. Footage jittered through static: a surgical table, floodlights, a figure writhing in restraints. Echoed voices narrated in fragments.
> "Subject-Δ resonance spike recorded. Omega… stabilizing. Overlay drift within margin. Dual signature compatibility… unprecedented."
Then came the overlays.
Twin biometrics. Soul signature trails spiraling like mirrored helixes. Each labeled: Δ and Ω. I didn't need Cree to tell me what I was seeing.
One pattern matched the shard pulsing in my chest. The other...
"…Cael," I said, before I even realized the name had left my mouth.
Cree turned slowly. "You know that name."
I didn't answer.
The shard throbbed harder, like it wanted something from the room. Like it remembered.
I drifted toward one of the intact pods, palm brushing its frost-slick surface. And there it was: a reflection—my face in the glass.
But the eyes didn't match.
Too pale. Too old.
Like I was looking at someone wearing my bones.
---
We never made it to the next wing.
The stairs groaned beneath us, then fractured—not from collapse, but reformation. The floor tore sideways like a skipped memory, stone slurring into angles that made no architectural sense. It wasn't destruction.
It was rewriting.
"Fissure!" Drayce shouted. "Gate-born type!"
A chasm yawned open beneath us—black and humming, threaded with pale static. I grabbed a broken handrail, nearly yanked backward by the sudden shift. Tanek pulled Cree up just in time. But Reisya—she slipped.
"Reisya—!"
She clung to the edge, legs dangling above the glow. I reached, but something moved below her—rising.
Not from the fissure. Through it.
A Nullspawn emerged.
It phase-stuttered—no texture, just a blur of edges and screaming silence. Humanoid, almost. The skin pulsed with old Lucari script, warped and glitched. It wore a face.
Mine.
Its head twitched. Jaw unhinged too far. I couldn't breathe.
Then—
Reisya screamed. Not in fear—in refusal.
The glow around her hand flared—deep violet edged in black, impossible to track. Her blade ignited, carving runes into the air mid-swing. Not tech. Not code.
The glyph burned between her and the spawn like a ward.
The creature seized mid-phase—flesh locking in place like ice. Its body cracked as if frozen from the inside, then imploded without a sound.
The fissure snapped closed. Reality hiccuped back.
We stood in silence.
Reisya stared at her hand like it belonged to someone else. Her fingers still trembled.
Drayce took a step forward. "Reisya… what the hell was that?"
She backed away. Eyes wide. "I didn't mean to. I—it wasn't supposed to—"
She sheathed her blade too fast. Avoided everyone's gaze.
No one spoke. Not right away.
But I saw the glyph still burning faintly on the metal beside her, a memory scorched into reality. It didn't look Lucari.
It didn't look human.
It looked meant.
And whatever she'd done—it wasn't borrowed tech.
It was will.
---
We thought it was gone.
The air had settled, for a moment. Just for a moment. Then Cree gasped beside me—and I turned to see her staring at... herself.
She stood across from us, identical down to the cut on her cheek from earlier, breathing hard like she'd just run a mile. Her voice cracked.
"Riven," she said, "you remember what I told you—when Emeric burned? That it wasn't fire, not really. Just... light that forgot how to hold shape."
My throat dried. I hadn't told anyone that. No one but Cree and me knew what we saw in that lab.
Cree backed away from her own double. "That's not— That's me."
Then it shifted.
Bones didn't break. They just folded inward. The flesh rethreaded like old data recompiled in front of us. And now it was Reisya—eyes wide, trembling, lips curling into a too-perfect half-smile. "I didn't mean to," it whispered, like a mocking echo from moments ago.
Then it became me.
Not just physically. I felt it—like a tether brushing against something deep inside. The way it stood, the weight of its stance, the small twitch I thought only I had when adrenaline hit too fast. It wore me.
And it smiled.
Not a human smile. It didn't blink. Just teeth and something like satisfaction.
"This isn't an attack," Drayce muttered. "It's recording us."
"No," I said. "It's studying."
We drew back slowly, trying not to provoke it. The thing didn't move. Just shimmered, shifting fluidly between us, like trying on different masks to see which fit best. The expressions were too close. Almost… intimate.
"This isn't the vault anymore," I whispered.
My shard pulsed.
Not in harmony. Not recognition.
It pulsed like a warning.
The mimic's form flickered—no longer any one of us, but some composite. Mouths layered over mouths, voices stuttering three names at once. I felt a pressure behind my eyes like something was trying to look through me.
"It's not tech," Cree breathed. "Not even sentient in a way we know."
"It's reading us," Reisya said hollowly, "like a soulstream trace. Our essence."
The mimic turned.
And in my voice—my exact cadence—it said:
> "You're all already remembered."
Then it stepped back into the wall, and the stone sealed like breath on glass fading.
We stood there, frozen, unsure if we'd just met a ghost—or been catalogued by something that dreams in skin.
-
The air changed when we crossed the threshold.
Not colder. Not warmer. Just... thicker. Like walking through breath that wasn't ours.
The room was low and circular, carved with interlocking geometric veins across the walls—glowing faintly red, like veins full of memory instead of blood. Vex said nothing, just knelt beside a cracked pedestal in the center. The core embedded in it pulsed slowly, as if it were thinking.
"Not Lucari tech," Drayce muttered. "Ferren root-architecture. Pre-collapse. We shouldn't even be seeing this."
Vex bypassed the seal with a biosplice—a messy grafting of code and wetware that smelled like burnt marrow. The pedestal opened like a blooming flower of rusted metal and light.
The logs streamed to life around us—holographic remnants, flickering, glitching. Not files. Confessions.
A voice spoke first. Female. Precise, too calm to be human.
> "Subject-Δ rejected the third infusion. Neural re-stitching failed. Recurrent loops collapsed. But Ω... held."
A male voice followed—tired, shaking.
> "It was never about division. It was about anchoring. We had to split the soul to survive traversal. One bound to flesh. The other, to return through memory."
Selene Veyla. Kaelen Thorne.
I didn't recognize them, but my shard did.
It pulsed once—deep and low, like grief wearing steel.
Reisya stepped closer, reading the shattered glyphs across the wall. "They didn't just want to survive the Gate. They wanted to control the passage. Map it. Use it."
One log flashed red, corrupted. A sentence stuttered to life before dissolving:
> "If Subject-Ω survives, he'll become the bridge. But if the bridge dreams—"
[DATA CORRUPTED]
Bridge. Not key. Not host. Bridge.
I turned, drawn toward the silhouette drifting in the hologram mist. Not detailed—just the outline of a body, curled in cryostasis. A face half-seen through frost and static.
But I knew the posture.
I knew the scar on the jaw. The tilt of the head. The way the hands didn't quite close, like they were waiting to hold something that never came back.
Ω.
I wasn't sure if it was a mirror or a memory.
But I knew—I knew—the figure was me.
The shard buzzed at my spine like a tether pulling taut.
Something inside this place had remembered me before I ever got here.
And maybe... maybe I hadn't come back alone.
---
The hallway ahead shouldn't have existed.
I knew that instinctively, the way your skin knows when lightning's about to strike—when reality folds too tightly in one direction.
The lights overhead didn't just flicker. They bled. Memories, smeared along the walls like echo-ink. Smiles that weren't ours. Screams that hadn't happened yet.
We moved as one, cautious, silent, every step triggering something deeper in the vault's spine. The air vibrated with that familiar undertone now—shard resonance, but inverted. Off-beat. Reversed.
And then we saw them.
Us.
Shapes ahead. Walking in mirror.
Some were fractured. Limping. Torn across places we'd never been hurt. One version of Cree was missing her entire left side—flickering like a corrupted feed. Another version of Drayce had three eyes, all scanning in different directions like something that had evolved to see more than we were built for.
A twisted version of me turned as we approached—mouth sewn shut, fingers twitching in broken rhythm. I stopped breathing.
Then he turned.
Cael. Or what wore his shape. Calm, centered, eyes like ash caught midburn.
He looked directly at me. Like he'd been waiting.
"You weren't supposed to find this place," he said quietly. "Not before it began again."
The vault trembled—not physically, but in pulse. Like every wall was listening now. Holding its breath.
"What is this?" Vex whispered, blades half-drawn. "A test?"
"No," I muttered. My shard had gone silent.
Because it recognized them.
Because they weren't illusions.
"They're us."
Reisya exhaled sharply, backing into my side. "Gate echoes?"
"No." My voice cracked. "They're records."
Of what could be. Of what wasn't. Of who entered, but didn't return.
"No one came alone," Cael's echo said again, more softly now. "One crosses. The other remains. The Gate doesn't open by force."
He tilted his head, and I realized—
It was never about getting out.
It was about drawing us in.
Something inside had called us here.
And as the shard sparked again—flaring once, like a warning or a welcome—I understood:
This place wasn't waking up.
It had been waiting.