The Vault didn't explode.
It shuddered.
A soundless rupture passed through it—like time cracking, like a breath held for centuries exhaled all at once.
Kael stood at the heart, unmoving.
Around him, the spiral beneath his feet began to unravel—not vanish, not fade, but unwind—thread by glowing thread, retreating into the core of the platform. The containment sphere groaned, no longer holding or held.
Something had changed.
Something had been chosen.
The light twisted.
Reality buckled.
Kael blinked—and saw himself.
A dozen versions, flickering around him: one still holding the Echoheart; one old and broken; one never having touched the relic at all. They circled him like orbiting thoughts, half-formed and aching. Some looked at him with rage. Others with grief. One smiled, softly, then was gone.
What did I choose?
The Vault didn't answer.
The platform cracked beneath his feet.
The relic pulsed once more—then shattered. Not violently, but with purpose. Its shards dissolved into Kael's chest, threading light into his veins. His heart beat—not with rhythm, but with memory.
He gasped—and the world fell upward.
The Vault fractured.
Corridors convulsed, winding in and collapsing upon themselves. Runes blinked out mid-glyph. Light bent backward. Echoes screamed. Relic guardians awoke, then fell silent. Some began to weep—a low metallic chime that echoed through the broken stone.
Above it all, the spiral sigil unraveled skyward, pulled into unseen stars.
Kael's body dissolved in the light—
or maybe the light dissolved into him.
He woke.
Stone beneath him. Wind above.
The surface.
The sky looked the same—blue streaked with gold—but the air felt rewritten, like someone had erased something from the world and hadn't told it what was missing.
Kael sat up slowly.
His hand shook.
On his palm, burned into skin and spirit, was a new spiral—jagged, incomplete, but alive.
Footsteps.
Elira's voice: "Kael?"
He turned.
She stood at the edge of the ruin, clothes torn, face drawn—but her eyes still held fire. Tovan followed close behind, blood on his temple but breathing.
They stopped when they saw him.
Elira's voice dropped. "You're... different."
Kael didn't answer. He didn't have the words.
Behind them, the Vault's entrance had collapsed—nothing remained but a hollow circle, etched faintly in the earth.
Not a seal.
Not a lock.
Just a mark.
A memory.
Kael looked down at his palm.
The spiral pulsed faintly.
He didn't know if he had unsealed the core… or bound it again.
He felt hollow, but not empty. Like a door that had opened inward, and now waited for something to walk through.
But something had changed.
And whatever echo followed—it would not be the same.
The spiral continues.
But this time, it remembers differently.