The stone door pulsed like a beating heart.Kael stood before it, blood dripping from his fingers. The spiral on his palm glowed brighter than ever, veins of silver crawling up his forearm as if trying to escape his skin. Lira knelt behind him, her breath ragged, her side torn open by a glaive she had barely dodged. The chamber trembled with a distant rhythm, not from footsteps or collapsing walls, but from something deeper.Beneath them.“You cannot open it alone,” came a voice from behind.Kael turned, blade already halfway drawn, but stopped when he saw her. The Archivist. Not the twisted phantom they had fought at the black stair, but the one who had first warned him in the shattered memory of the library. She looked real now. Solid. The streak of void in her hair danced like smoke.“It only responds to choice,” she said. “Not to force.”“I have made my choice,” Kael growled.“Then you are already closer to death than you know.”Lira tried to speak but coughed up blood instead. Ka

The steps echoed too long in the silence. Kael did not look back as he descended into the hollow beneath the Wyrmgate. Each footfall dragged with it the weight of everything he had endured. Firelight danced on the carved walls, illuminating scenes of ancient ruin and twisted glory. He knew this place was not built by mortals. The architecture whispered wrongness, like the walls had learned to listen.Behind him, Lira watched. She had refused to go further. Her eyes had turned silver again, and she whispered, “Whatever lies beyond that door… you must go alone.”He had nodded, not trusting himself to speak.The final staircase opened into a wide chamber lit by a cold, pale flame that floated in midair. It pulsed like a heartbeat, but not his own. In the center stood the door.It had no hinges. No handle. No name.Just smooth black stone veined with crimson light that pulsed when he neared it.Kael raised his hand. The spiral on his palm burned through his glove. He touched the surface.

The wind howled through the broken towers of the shattered keep, dragging ash and salt across the stone like a blade scraping bone. Kael stood at the edge of the cliff, breath heavy, fingers clenched around the hilt of the blood-wet sword. The sea below thrashed like a wounded beast, its foam blackened by the filth that bled from the corpse of the wyrm.Behind him, the remnants of the battalion were silent. No cheers. No relief. Just the terrible stillness that follows something too costly to be called victory.Kael turned slowly, his eyes hollow. His cloak clung to his shoulders, soaked through with sea spray and gore. He passed through the broken gates of the keep without a word. No one dared stop him. Not after what they had seen. Not after what he had become.Inside, the hall was in ruins. Half the roof had caved in during the wyrm’s death throes. The floor was cracked, marble sundered by the tremor of its final scream. Kael’s steps echoed faintly as he moved through the wreckage

The silence that followed the shattered barrier was not stillness. It was a silence filled with trembling power, a heavy breath drawn before a scream. Kael stood at the heart of the broken threshold, arms slack at his sides, flame flickering along his fingers. The ground smoked beneath his boots. Dust hung like a veil in the air, and beyond it, something ancient stirred.The ruins beneath the mountain had never been meant for mortal eyes. That was what Lira said. That was what the Archive had warned him about. Yet Kael walked forward anyway, past the molten edges of stone and the whisper of broken runes. His heart beat hard in his chest, but not from fear.This was it. The place where his mark had first begun to ache. The place he had seen in half-formed dreams and visions too jagged to hold.The chamber was enormous. Not carved, but grown — veins of silver light ran through the stone like roots, pulsing with a deep rhythm that echoed through the soles of his feet. Something slithered

Kael stood at the threshold of the ruined temple, his blade lowered but not sheathed. The silence pressing in around him was not natural. It was heavy, choked with the ash of burned memories and buried truths. The walls groaned faintly as if breathing, and every breath of wind that passed through the shattered arches carried a whisper not meant for mortal ears.Lira came up behind him, her voice low. “This place remembers.”He nodded. The spiral mark on his chest pulsed faintly under his tunic, heat blooming just beneath the skin. It had not stopped burning since they crossed into the outer sanctum. Somewhere deeper within, the Veiled God waited.“I can feel him,” Kael muttered.“Not just him,” Lira said. “Something else is watching.”Kael moved forward, his boots crunching over scorched stone. The temple bore the scars of a forgotten war. Statues of faceless sentinels lay cracked and headless, and the shattered remains of a mural bled a black tar-like substance from its cracks. The d