[POV: Ezekiel]
The corridor pulsed like it was remembering how to collapse.
Every few steps, the ground beneath him shivered, not with weight—but with denial. As if it couldn't decide if it was still supposed to exist.
Dust fell in flakes from a ceiling that wasn't made of stone, but something more complex—mirrored bone, folded glass, and forgotten script.
The walls were breathing.
Softly.
As if the palace were trying not to wake itself.
---
Ezekiel moved slowly.
The air didn't just press on him.
It adjusted to him.
Every thought he formed echoed back, not in words, but in shapes—glyph-like pulses in the vault walls that responded to conceptual tension.
The Law inside him remained still.
Dormant.
But not asleep.
It was waiting.
Not for danger.
For friction.
---
He paused at a junction—three paths opened before him.
One led downward.
One curved into a spiral of broken stair.
One went straight into the dark, no echo returning.
The knife at his side—Not Yet—twitched.
But it didn't point.
It listened.
So did he.
And heard something…
> Breathing.
Not his.
Not human.
Something big, and quiet, and near.
---
He turned to the spiral.
Took a single step.
And the breath stopped.
---
[POV: Empress Meradelle – In the Depth-Sync Chamber]
The glyph-table quivered beneath her fingers.
Fifty-nine suppressor runes across the palace had dimmed.
Eight had failed.
One had inverted—an impossibility.
A whisper-mage from the Black Inquiry was trembling as he read her the report:
> "Your Majesty… the Vault Lines… they've been reactivated."
She said nothing.
> "He's moving through the Suppressed Layer."
Still nothing.
> "And… the Law inside him is beginning to remember the walls."
That made her look up.
Slowly.
Eyes like violet stone.
---
"Collapse the East Archive," she said.
"Block the Bone Stair. Flood the Red Level. If he passes the Echo Threshold—"
She stopped herself.
> No. Not yet.
---
"The girl from Below," she said softly. "Where is she?"
The whisper-mage hesitated.
"Gone, Your Majesty."
A long pause.
Then Meradelle whispered:
> "Then he's not alone."
---
[POV: Ilhera – Tier II Ingress Vein]
The passage cracked ahead of her as she ran—lightless, limb-thin veins of tunnel left behind by Conceptal shockwaves from forgotten wars.
She wasn't following Ezekiel's scent.
She was following the sound of wrongness.
Like a Law had shifted.
Like a name had been said, and the world was trying to redefine itself to keep up.
She had felt it when he spoke the word.
> "Witness."
She had whispered it too.
Even though she wasn't supposed to.
Now the Scriptwatchers would feel it.
Now the Below would stir.
And now—so would everything beneath him.
---
"Ezekiel…" she muttered. "Please don't go deeper."
She paused at a turning vein.
Listened.
And heard… silence.
Not absence.
> Weight.
She moved faster.