The air grew tighter with each step.
Kael descended slowly, his fingers grazing the wall as if to steady not just his body, but his thoughts.
The silence below was not empty—it pressed inward, like lungs that refused to exhale.

The stairwell ended.

What opened before him was not a chamber.

It was a wound.

The stone folded outward like broken ribs, and in the center, upon a half-submerged altar, it waited.

It.
Not moving.
Not speaking.
Not dead.

It rose from the ground as if it had never been placed there.
A form too massive to be crafted, too grotesque to be natural—grown not by design, but by centuries of silent worship curdled into flesh.
A tumor of reverence.

Its torso opened like a chapel hollowed by time.
Ribs curled outward, forming a crown of prayer.
Its face—elongated, cracked, a skull stretched with impossible symmetry—held no mouth, no expression.

Only eyes.
So many eyes.
Closed. Sealed. Waiting.

Its arms hung in ritualistic patterns.
Some pointed inward, toward itself.
Others outward, toward Kael—like it had been expecting him. Or judging him.

All around it, kneeling figures carved in stone—brittle, faceless—bowed eternally toward the altar, as if caught mid-worship before turning to ash.
One of them held a shard.
Identical to Kael’s.
It glinted faintly in the still air.

Kael didn’t breathe.

The creature did.

But not through lungs.
Through the walls. Through the memory. Through the River pulsing just beyond the stone.

Something in the silence pulsed.
And then, without moving—
A sound like stone remembering how to weep.

Kael stepped closer.
The air didn’t grow colder—
It thickened, like the space between two overlapping dreams.

He stopped in front of the kneeling figure.
Its stone fingers clutched the fragment with reverence.
A perfect twin to his own.

Kael reached out.

The moment his fingers brushed it—

A breath. Not his. Not human.
A sound without sound, filling the chamber like a memory drowning in silence.

His hand recoiled, instinct screaming—
but his body didn’t move.

Instead, the altar pulsed.
A faint hum began to echo through the bones of the room, not from the creature, but from beneath it.
The ripple of something ancient shifting.

The creature’s eyes remained closed.
All of them.

But Kael felt it now.
It wasn’t asleep.
It was... listening.

The shard in his hand grew warmer.
Not glowing.
Beating.

It matched the rhythm of the one on the altar.
Two hearts. One thread.

And then—

A voice.
Inside his head.
Not words. Not commands.
Just weight.
An emotion: recognition.

He stumbled back.

For a moment, everything went still.
Even the silence waited.

Then—
One of the eyes opened.

Only one.

A slit of darkness.
Empty. Bottomless.
A well with no end.

Kael’s knees buckled.
He hit the ground, the shard slipping from his grasp and clattering across the floor.

It stopped at the base of the altar.

The air changed.

Above, the creature did not move.
But now Kael knew.

It had seen him.
And it remembered something—
about him—
that he did not.