Rael's eyes snapped open.
But the Vault's light was gone.
He was not standing. He was suspended—adrift in a weightless void, a space that pulsed with cold intent. Darkness stretched infinitely in all directions, but it wasn't empty. It breathed. It watched. It remembered.
The silence was absolute—until it wasn't.
First came the soundless pressure, a low-frequency hum that vibrated in his bones, not his ears. Then the whispers. They slithered between thoughts, skipping language entirely. They spoke in emotion, in trauma, in symbols carved into the backs of his eyes. Every word felt like it had already been said. Every thought, like it was not his own.
"You are not the first."
A voice—ancient, fractured—echoed through the dark.
"But you may be the last."
Shapes moved beyond Rael's vision. Not bodies. Suggestions of form. Too large, too old to be confined to a single shape or moment. They circled, curving around the folds of time like predators around prey they'd already swallowed.
The Vault was alive. Not a machine, not a structure, not a place. A mind. A wound. A test.
And it had decided to show him its true self.
Rael tried to speak, but the sound died before it left his lips. He looked down and realized—he had no mouth. No skin. He was awareness, stripped bare. And the Vault was peeling away the rest.
Memories came next.
But wrong.
Twisted.
He saw himself as a child—but too tall, eyes missing.
His mother—but faceless, voice reversed, holding a mirror that bled.
He saw Nori.
No, not her. A version of her, with too many arms and hollow laughter that echoed sideways. Her gaze tore open some part of him he didn't know existed.
And then, Caelum—broken, sobbing, kneeling in a field of corpses made of stars. Screaming a name Rael didn't yet know.
He spun through illusions. Was forced to confront himself in a thousand variations—cruel, cowardly, corrupted, kind. A version of himself begged to be killed. Another tried to strangle him. Another simply wept.
The Weaver came then.
Not in form, but in presence.
A cold that didn't chill, but froze meaning itself.
Its voice was velvet wrapped around razors. It slithered across his thoughts like oil across fire.
"I remember the First Circle," it whispered."I remember the gods who failed.""I remember you, Rael. Before you remembered yourself."
Rael's essence trembled.
He didn't know what the Weaver was. A forgotten god? A parasite? A punishment? It didn't matter.
What mattered was that it wanted him to give in.
To collapse beneath the weight of what could be.
To submit.
But Rael did not.
Instead, he thought of stars.
Flickering ones.
Stars that had returned.
He thought of Caelum's silence, not as abandonment—but as faith.
He thought of the others in the Circle.
Waiting. Watching.
Hoping.
And something answered.
The darkness shuddered.
Not recoiling. Recognizing.
A single point of light bloomed inside Rael's chest—not physical, but conceptual. A memory of defiance. A refusal to let the past decide the future.
The Weaver hissed, withdrawing like smoke sucked into a dying fire.
And the Vault responded.
The ground returned beneath his feet. The air thickened with warmth. The walls of the Vault coalesced again—not metal, not stone, but something ancient and expectant.
Rael stood.
He was changed.
He wasn't sure how. He couldn't feel his body the same way. Couldn't hear thoughts in a linear pattern. But he was awake now in a way that went beyond the physical.
Something had shifted.
The Vault had judged him.
And it had not devoured him.
Not yet.
From far away—like hearing thunder in a dream—he sensed movement.
The Circle, waiting.
Caelum, watching.
The next step would not be taken in darkness.
Rael turned toward the light beginning to crack through the Vault's sealed wall.
The test was over.
The choice was not.
He walked forward.