At dawn, they crossed the threshold.

The path into the Dominion wasn’t a path at all — it was a shearing.
A rent in the world itself, invisible until you stepped into it.

One moment, Elian stood on the edge of the cliff.
The next, the sky fractured like glass above him.

Then there was no sky.

Only weight.

Only silence.

Only the Dominion.

The light here was wrong.

Not dark — just other.
Like it had never seen the sun, but remembered it well enough to imitate.

Massive stone ribs arched overhead, half-organic, half-architectural.
Ruins stretched in every direction — towers with no stairs, halls with no doors, symbols that slithered when stared at too long.

And everything whispered.

Not with sound — with memory.

Cray broke first.

“Alright,” he whispered. “What the actual hell.”

Lysara muttered glyphs under her breath, drawing protective rings in the air. The air flickered.

Veylen looked entirely calm.

“This is the Shell Layer,” he said. “We haven’t even reached the Vault yet.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Cray said.

“I enjoy being right,” Veylen replied. “It happens so rarely.”

They moved slowly through the ruins. Calen charted their path in dust, sketching anchoring runes every thirty steps — just in case the paths decided to forget them.

Elian said nothing.

His blade pulsed with a faint glow.
Not danger.
Resonance.

As if it remembered this place.

Then the Dominion tested them.

It began with a door.

A massive archway, its stone carved with symbols none of them recognized — except Elian. Somehow, he knew what it meant.

A phrase in a dead tongue:

“Speak the Truth that Broke You.”

They stood in silence.

Then, suddenly, the stones behind them shifted — and the path they'd entered through simply vanished.

“Alright,” Cray muttered. “So... we either speak, or we starve.”

Lysara turned to Elian.

“You first.”

Elian stepped forward.

The arch pulsed softly.

He drew a breath.

“I once believed in the Orders. I believed they protected the world. I believed they protected us.”

He looked down.

“I was wrong. They protected control. And when I tried to leave, they marked me as corrupted.”

He looked up at the arch.

“They tried to erase me — not for what I did, but for what I knew.”

The arch shimmered.

One third of the gate flared with silver fire.

Lysara stepped forward next. Her voice was steady.

“I loved someone once. Deeply. But she was chosen by the Guilds for a task that consumed her. She begged me to help her escape.”

A long pause.

“I let her die instead. Because I thought saving her would cost too much.”

The second third of the gate glowed.

Cray swallowed.

“I was offered a way out,” he muttered. “Once. Just one. They gave me a name, told me to kill him, said I’d be free. I did it.”

He met Elian’s eyes.

“It wasn’t him. Just someone who looked like him.”

Silence.

Then — light.

The gate opened.

No fanfare.

Just air… old air, smelling of petrichor and lightning.

Veylen didn’t speak at all.

He merely walked through.

Beyond the gate was something far worse than ruin.

It was memory, suspended in crystal.

Dozens of figures — First Masters, maybe — frozen in impossible poses, trapped mid-thought, mid-scream, mid-transcendence.
They weren’t dead.
Not quite.

Calen whispered, “They tried to use the Seed, didn’t they?”

Veylen nodded.

“And failed. They became… this.”

Then, in the center of the chamber, they saw it.

The Vault.

A sphere of blackstone hovering above a pool of mirrored light. Chains wrapped it — not forged chains, but conceptual ones, formed of language and time and unspoken law.

It radiated potential.

It was beautiful in the way lightning is beautiful when it strikes too close.

Elian stepped forward.

But before he could take another step — the light in the chamber shifted.

And the Court arrived.

Dozens of them.

Unmasked now.

Tall, silent, their robes trailing shadows that writhed like serpents. At their center:

Auren.

No longer smiling.

Now wrapped in armor of glimmering silence, crowned with the mask of the Speaker Prime.

“You were warned,” she said.

Behind her, the air tore — a rift opening in the Vault itself.

Not into the Dominion.

But beneath it.

A scream rose from the darkness.

Old.

Feral.

Hungry.

Elian drew his blade.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

Auren tilted her head.

“No, Warden. You shouldn’t have woken it.”