The world peeled back as they stepped into the wound in reality.
There was no door—only a rent in the Spiral's heart, shaped like an inverted tear, slowly yawning open in the blackened stone. It wasn't just space that distorted around it, but memory, time, and divine law itself.
Chen felt it in his bones.
A chill that wasn't cold. A pressure that wasn't weight. His Soulflame flared in silent protest, threads of newly-born Spiral energy whispering against the limits of his senses. This place was old. Older than the heavens. Older than war. Older than rules.
The Vault didn't greet them.
It remembered them.
The moment they crossed the threshold, light warped. No torches. No sun. Only the luminous echo of what once was.
And walls—walls that whispered.
Etchings danced across the obsidian halls, showing glimpses of civilizations lost to the Spiral. Divine beasts that no longer roamed. Pantheons that had warred and perished in cycles erased from the skies. Echoes of what might have been… or still might be.
"Are we even in our world anymore?" Mei asked softly.
Sarina answered instead. "We're beneath it. Beyond it. This is the foundation under the dream."
Chen pressed forward, led not by sight but by resonance. The relic they had taken—the feather of the Goddess of the Spiral—pulsed in his hand, guiding them deeper.
"Her essence is waking," Ye Yue whispered.
Lanmei caught it too. "She's not gone. She was sealed."
They reached a central chamber, impossibly vast—carved from what looked like glass and voidstuff, with divine constellations drifting beneath their feet as if they walked on frozen starlight.
And there, in the heart of the Vault, she slept.
A figure cocooned in a translucent chrysalis of spiraling runes, her form indistinct—like a goddess trying to choose which identity to remember. Her body shifted subtly: wings of a falcon, then moth; horns of starlight, then halos of shattered time.
Chen stepped forward. His Soulflame surged.
The vault responded.
A pulse of light rippled out, revealing altars around the room—each with an ancient artifact sealed within: a mirror that refused to reflect; a mask carved from fate itself; a sword without edge or hilt, humming with unborn songs.
Ye Yue gasped. "These… are the relics of the Unwritten Pantheon."
"They were cast out when the Divine Laws were set," Sarina whispered in reverence. "Before order. Before the Courts."
Chen placed a hand on the chrysalis.
His flame didn't burn it. It sank into it—was accepted.
And the sleeping figure moved.
Her voice, like thousands of murmurs folded into one, reached into all of them.
"Bearer of the Soulflame. Child of the Crossroads. Do you seek to rewrite the war?"
Chen closed his eyes. "I seek to finish it."
The Vault trembled.
And the chrysalis began to shatter.