The Gallery didn't sleep.
At night, the walls pulsed faintly — not with light, but with the memory of it. Every root-etched seam across the bone-white interior throbbed with warmth just beneath the surface, as if the structure remembered being alive.
Kael hadn't slept. Not really. His body went still, but his mind spiraled. Each time he blinked, he saw flashes of things that hadn't happened—or hadn't happened yet. Seth's voice whispering in his left ear. Mercy humming, not in his hand, but in the air above his chest.
Across the room, Eris sat sharpening her blade. Again. The edge already gleamed, polished to a reflection. She wasn't looking at the steel. Her gaze kept drifting to Ilya, who sat in the center of the Gallery's largest root-ring, silent.
"She hasn't blinked in an hour," Eris murmured.
"She's listening," Kael said.
Eris paused. "To what?"
He didn't answer. Because he knew.
Earlier that day, after the others had gone, Kael had wandered the Gallery alone. The tremor hadn't started yet, but the air had begun to shift — denser somehow, like it carried weight.
He found himself drawn to the far eastern wall, where a new crack had formed. A root, pale and thread-thin, curled along the fracture like a vein exposed beneath skin.
It pulsed, not like a heartbeat, but a countdown.
When Kael pressed his fingers to it, a sound bloomed in his skull — faint and steady, like humming through old bone.
"It's not gone. Just waiting."
He had pulled his hand back, but the vibration lingered in his fingertips.
The Chronicler had taken to whispering to herself again. She sat near one of the fractured vaults, copying glyphs onto parchment that looked more like dried skin than paper.
"I've seen this shape before," she muttered. "But not like this. It's inverted. Like the writing's been… twisted."
Kael moved to her side. "Where?"
She didn't look up. "A ruin east of the Maw. Older than the Order. They called it a reliquary."
He frowned. "Of what?"
She finally looked at him. "Things too old to be gods, and too broken to be dead."
That night, the Gallery breathed.
Not a wind. Not a quake.
But every wall flexed inward, then out — as if the building itself exhaled.
Ilya stood.
She didn't speak. Her eyes glowed faintly silver in the rootlight. She walked slowly toward the central ring and knelt, fingers splayed against the floor.
Kael stepped forward. "What is it?"
Ilya didn't look at him. "Something beneath us moved."
Eris rose, her hand tight on her blade. "Another root?"
Ilya tilted her head. "A seed."
The next morning, Kael stood where Ilya had knelt. The root-circle beneath her had shifted slightly, split at the edges. A faint light glimmered between the cracks — not silver, but deep blue. Aetherium? Or something worse?
He didn't touch it.
Instead, he turned to Eris. "We need to go down."
She shook her head. "Not yet. This place is alive. It's watching how we react. If we move too fast—"
"Then it learns," he finished.
They said nothing for a while. Just listened to the quiet hum rising from beneath.
By noon, the Gallery had changed again. A new fissure opened in the west chamber, curling into a spiral pattern that matched the runes etched onto Mercy's blade.
The Chronicler stared at it for nearly an hour.
"It's… echoing," she finally whispered.
"Echoing what?" Eris asked.
The woman looked up, eyes shadowed. "Whatever we buried."
That evening, as the last light died over the cliffs, a child entered the Gallery.
She was no older than six. Barefoot. Dust-covered. No one recognized her.
She walked past Ilya, who didn't move, and knelt beside Kael.
She reached out, touched his palm.
And whispered: "It's still hungry."
Then she vanished.
No footprints. No scent.
Eris didn't sleep that night. Neither did Kael.
The next day, the tremor began.
Just a ripple through the soil.
But it echoed down through the root-veins, past the Gallery's base, into the forgotten stone beneath.
Kael woke with blood in his nose and Ilya's whisper in his ear:
"When it wakes… it remembers us."
By the second night, the Gallery pulsed with cold. Not cold like wind, or rain, or stone, but something deeper. The kind that got into your breath, then into your thoughts. The kind Kael remembered from the Maw, when Draven had whispered to him from behind Mercy's hilt: "You were always going to be hollow."
He woke to frost dusting his fingertips.
Not from outside. From within.
Eris was already up, pacing near the far wall. The spiral-shaped fissure from the day before had cracked further, roots curling along its edge like tendrils from a wound.
Kael didn't speak. He wrapped his fingers in cloth and rose slowly.
"The roots are drawing in," she said, not turning. "Like they're bracing for something."
"They're listening."
Eris shot him a look. "You said that yesterday."
He gave her a humorless smile. "They're still doing it."
The Gallery had begun to shift in shape. The walls, once perfectly curved like the inside of a ribcage, now bulged in places. Some bone-joints had split. Others had sealed over entirely.
It felt more like a body every day.
Ilya sat in the center of the largest hollow. Before her: a pile of ash, fragments of memory-slate, and a length of twisted bone.
The Chronicler hovered nearby, silently watching.
Kael knelt beside them. "What is she doing?"
"She's sculpting," the Chronicler murmured. "Memory."
Ilya's hands moved in slow, careful motions. The bone in her grip etched faint lines into the slate shards. From the ash, shapes began to form—tiny, delicate, terrifying in their precision: Lyra's pendant. Seth's eyes. A crack that mirrored the Maw's spiral.
None of these things Ilya should remember.
Kael swallowed hard. "Is she drawing what's coming?"
"No," the Chronicler whispered. "What the place remembers. She's… filtering it."
Kael glanced toward Eris, who stood rigid at the edge of the room. She wasn't watching Ilya. She was watching him.
That afternoon, the Cutclean arrived.
No one saw her come in.
One moment the entry arch was empty, the next it held a woman wrapped in gray linen, her left arm wrapped in rusted wire. Her face was covered but for her mouth, which looked carved from ash.
"I heard the frost hum," she said simply.
The Chronicler stepped forward. "You're from the east."
The woman didn't nod. Didn't blink. "We burned the last rootnode outside the Deadshore. Now we follow sound. When memory grows too thick, it must be severed."
Her fingers reached inside her wrappings, withdrawing a pendant. Not a Mercy relic—not a weapon. Just a coin-shaped sliver of Aetherium, etched with seven tiny cuts.
"We mark ourselves," she said, offering it to Eris.
Eris didn't take it. "What's it for?"
"To forget cleanly."
Later, Eris cornered Kael.
"She's not wrong."
Kael raised an eyebrow. "About what? Self-mutilation?"
"About memory. This place doesn't just store it. It twists it. That kid—" she nodded toward Ilya "—shouldn't know what she knows. She's feeding it."
"She's not the only one," Kael said.
Eris blinked. "What?"
He opened his palm.
Frost bloomed across his skin in tiny branching patterns—like root-veins made of ice.
That night, Ilya's sculpture changed.
She stopped drawing faces.
Instead, she shaped a mouth. Not hers. Not Mercy's.
Something wider. Hungrier.
Kael watched from across the Gallery as her hands moved like they weren't hers. Eris had left to speak with the Cutclean emissary. The Chronicler dozed, her hands still clutched around a scroll.
Kael stepped closer.
The mouth on the slate cracked open.
Not literally. But something inside him recognized it.
A whisper shuddered through the room:
"Do you want to see what it swallowed?"
He stumbled back.
Ilya looked up.
Her eyes weren't silver.
They were white.
At dawn, the pendant Ilya wore cracked down the middle.
Kael felt it from across the room—the snap reverberating through the Gallery like a cracked bone.
The Cutclean emissary stood over it. She did not react.
Instead, she pressed a rusted blade to her own palm, opened a small line, and let blood drip onto the broken pendant.
"Now it remembers," she said.
Kael knelt beside the pendant's two halves.
Inside the break, something glowed—a seed, smooth as glass, pulsing faintly blue.
Not Mercy. Not Aetherium.
Something new.
"Burn it," Eris said, appearing behind him.
Kael stared at the seed.
Then at his hand.
The frost-veins had reached his wrist.
"I don't think I can."
That night, the Gallery trembled again.
And something beneath it answered.