The air inside the Vault screamed as the black clawed hand dragged itself up from the chasm. Its form slithered, half-substantial, half-forgotten—a creature not meant to exist in any realm, even less in the sacred sanctum of soul memory.
Rizz stood firm, wings slightly unfurled, their golden-and-abyssal tips fluttering with divine tension. Isaac's silver eye burned brighter, casting fractured reflections across the rune-lit floor. Aethra's staff began to hum with temple-forged mana, but even she hesitated.
"What is that?" she whispered, voice trembling.
The Record Keeper's translucent form pulsed. "A Forsaken Soul-Binder… one of the first creations exiled from divine and demonic origin alike. It was erased, unremembered by time. This one… has clung to a dying echo. It followed your awakening, Isaac."
"Me?" Isaac asked, stepping back. "Why would it follow me?"
Rizz's voice was cold. "Because you opened the mirror."
The creature pulled itself fully into the chamber. It had no face—only a swirling void beneath a broken bone-plate crown. Black chains wrapped its limbs, some snapped, others glowing with runes in unknown tongues. Its voice was not spoken but remembered—echoing straight into their minds.
> "The Vault has betrayed us. The Sealed Soul must not awaken. You should have remained split. Divided. Forgotten."
Without warning, it lunged.
The chamber's runes flared as the creature struck. Rizz moved first, faster than lightning, blades of mirrored energy forming along his arms. He clashed with the Binder mid-air, sparks of divine friction igniting the air.
"You don't belong here!" Rizz roared.
Isaac leapt back, hands glowing as he focused on space-folding defenses. He twisted a portion of the room mid-leap, causing one of the creature's chains to slam into a barrier of inverted time. It slowed—briefly—but then burst through, howling with a sound like shattering memories.
Aethra slammed her staff down, calling on her Soul Echo Technique. "Anchor of Spirit: Restraint!" Ethereal wings expanded from her back, and spectral vines of memory wrapped around the Binder's arm. It screamed, flailing, but was dragged back for a moment.
"It feeds on forgotten selves," the Keeper warned. "It consumes the discarded fragments of awakening—your doubts, your shadows."
Isaac gritted his teeth. "Then we fight it with clarity."
He reached toward the bond between his eye and Rizz's seal. The thread of resonance ignited, bathing the chamber in an otherworldly glow.
Suddenly, they weren't alone.
For a split second—just one—they saw flashes of lives not their own.
A battlefield of stars…
A mirror shattering in a silent temple…
A child torn between fire and void…
A warrior stepping into a realm beyond fate.
"Those… are us," Rizz said quietly. "From before."
"From what was forgotten," Aethra added.
The Binder howled again, now retreating slightly, its form rippling.
> "No! You are not whole! You are shards! False sparks! Lies pretending to be light!"
Isaac stepped forward now, light rippling from his soul.
"Maybe," he said, voice firm. "But even lies hold truth when faced."
He raised his hand—and for the first time, his own seal revealed itself. A crescent loop bound in a shifting spiral—half silver, half shadow.
The Vault responded.
Golden glyphs on the floor began rotating. The ceiling shimmered with reflected skies. The sphere above them cracked wider, and from it descended a drop of liquid memory.
The Keeper chanted, voice rising over the roar. "You are witnessed, Soul-Binder. You are remembered. And in remembrance… we seal you again!"
Rizz, Isaac, and Aethra acted in perfect harmony.
Rizz slashed through the Binder's midsection with a blade of balanced soulfire.
Isaac fractured space behind it and reversed its momentum, forcing it to spiral into the containment runes.
Aethra sealed the final rune with the Words of Witness:
> "Let this be bound in the vault of truth—never again to rise from the shadows of forgetting."
The creature shrieked—and collapsed inward, dissolving into a chain of shattered echoes, pulled back into the vault's chasm.
The silence afterward was almost sacred.
They stood still, breath heavy, until the Keeper floated down again, eyes glowing.
"You have faced a fragment of what awaits. You are no longer just heirs of power—you are preservers of balance. But now… choices must be made."
Rizz stepped forward. "What kind of choices?"
The Keeper raised a hand.
Three doorways appeared.
One pulsed with blinding light—an angelic path through divine refinement.
One bled with crimson and obsidian—marked by destruction and ascension.
And one was forged of mirrored glass—uncertain, shifting with potential.
"Choose not now," the Keeper said. "But soon. For once walked, these paths cannot be undone."
---