There was no sky above her.
No ground beneath.
Only a slow, relentless pulse—ancient, raw—beating in the endless void before time.
She was nothing. Yet she was everything. No name. No form. Just a fierce, burning spark—alive with hungry potential.
Then, they came.
Seven colossal dragons, elemental and eternal. The Seven Thrones. Silent. Immovable. Their presence was judgment itself.
Her existence tore at their order—an unforgivable breach.
You should not exist.
No voice spoke the words. She felt them—a cold, undeniable decree searing through her core.
But deep inside the void of her being, something wild and furious ignited.
No name. No fear. No past. Only raw, unshaped power.
And then she screamed—a savage howl without lungs, a primal roar born from pure defiance and raw will.
The void shattered like brittle glass under searing fire.
The Thrones did not speak or stop her.
The pulse inside her surged—no longer mere potential, but her own fierce life.
Light burst—ragged, crimson, hungry—cutting through the dark.
Pain.
Not sharp. Not clean. Just the slow, grinding kind that welcomed her into the world like a rusted blade.
She gasped—no, choked—as thick air rushed into unused lungs. Her body convulsed against the sudden weight of having one.
Glass crunched beneath her limbs. Glowing fluid clung to her skin, viscous and cold, like a birth that had gone on too long.
She was on the floor of a shattered containment tube, its walls webbed with fractures, and the blackened steel overhead warped by heat and force. The air smelled of ozone, blood, and something synthetic—broken things.
A single, stuttering emergency glyph pulsed crimson in the dark.
...tick... tick... tick...
Her breath hitched. The shape of her body still didn't make sense. Legs? No. She coiled. Movement was wrong—not wrong, just... unfamiliar.
Something moved inside her. Not an organ, not a thought—a hunger.
She hissed low, instinct curling like smoke through her ribs. Why does everything feel so loud? The hum of machines, the creak of sagging metal, even her heartbeat—it was all too much.
Above, the ceiling had collapsed. An open wound in the structure exposed the jagged teeth of a ruined city above—broken streets, leaning spires, the skeletal remains of something once majestic, now buried in ash and silence.
She looked at her hands. Fingers. Claws. Both?
What am I?
Not the question she meant to ask. The real question sat deeper, more primal:
Why am I still alive?
She dragged herself upright. Muscles remembered things her mind did not. Each motion came with a crackle of effort—awkward, aching, but alive.
From somewhere beyond the chamber, a faint sound stirred. Not speech. Not a threat. Just movement.
And the glyph blinked again.
Red. Urgent. Counting down.
She staggered down the corridor, bare feet slapping softly against scorched tile, breath shallow but steadying.
The chamber's aftermath still clung to her—fluid dripping from her skin, curls of steam rising from her shoulders. Her form was human. Mostly.
Arms. Legs. Hands that trembled at the edges. A spine that arched too fluidly, shoulders that shifted too easily as if they remembered other alignments. Her pale skin, still slick with glow, caught the red blink of the emergency glyph in scattered pulses.
But it wasn't just the air or the pain that made her tremble.
It was hunger.
A deep, pulling gravity inside her. It wasn't for food. It wasn't thirst. It was existence, gnawing at her from within, demanding she reach further and stretch wider than this soft-limbed shape allowed.
She placed a hand on the wall for balance. Her fingers left faint, steaming prints on the metal. Her nails had grown longer, faintly translucent, glimmering with unseen geometry beneath the surface.
Something's wrong with this form.
No.
Something's buried in it.
She felt the coil of power at the base of her spine. Dormant. Pressed against bone like it was waiting for permission to unfurl.
Her breath hitched. Muscles clenched. For a moment, the world tilted—
Her form twitched, joints nearly slipping. For an instant, her center of balance shifted as if she had more limbs than she could count.
Then it passed.
The hunger didn't. It throbbed, low and steady, not a craving, but a calling.
Not now. Not here.
She closed her eyes and forced stillness. Let instinct curl inward instead of spilling out.
And just as she did, sound echoed from behind her.
Not loud. Not sharp. Just... deliberate.
Footsteps.
They weren't running. They weren't charging. They walked as if they knew where they were going.
She turned, half-shadowed in the red glyphlight.
Her stance widened slightly. Ready. Watching.
Not afraid. Just... waiting.
The corridor stretched ahead, cracked and unlit. But so did she, centered now, pulse slowing.
The world was starting to make sense.
Because she was beginning to fit within it.
The footsteps echoed—deliberate, slow, unhurried. Whoever approached was not afraid.
Vaelith did not move.
The emergency glyph's red pulse painted the corridor in sharp intervals of color and shadow. It stuttered across the twisted chamber walls, across her skin slick with faintly glowing residue, across her gaze, unblinking and honed.
He stepped into view.
Taller than she expected. Robed in patchwork grays and ashen blues, his mask cracked along one side, old filters stitched into its faceplate. A faded emblem—spiral and wings, half-buried in soot—clung to his shoulder like a ghost of another world.
He did not speak at once.
He watched her with the eerie patience of someone used to waiting in dangerous places.
Vaelith's body didn't move, but the sense of her shifted, coiled, conscious, breath like low-burning coal.
He watches like he's dissecting me. No fear. No reverence. Just... interest.
That's not always safer.
"You weren't meant to survive this place." At last, his voice, filtered and muffled by the rebreather, was quiet, measured. But something in it hummed with curiosity. "But neither was I."
Vaelith's head tilted. Her eyes narrowed into golden slits.
"Yet here we are," she rasped.
It wasn't quite a voice yet—more like the idea of one, shaping itself through will. But it struck the man still.
"You're not—" He cut himself off, stared again. "No. You're not one of theirs."
"One of whom?"
He didn't answer that. Not directly.
Instead, he looked back toward the shattered glass cocoon behind her. "That chamber's mark is ancient. Pre-Ascension. You woke from it?"
Silence. But her eyes answered.
"I see." A pause. "Then you're further from safety than you know."
Vaelith's breath deepened. Her shoulders squared. "I'm not looking for safety."
But maybe I should be.
Something about this world feels... wrong. Fractured. Watched.
He gave a dry sound, not a laugh, but something close. "Then you'll do well in this era."
He turned slightly, motioning down a narrow corridor, collapsed but passable. "There's a stairway ahead. Broken, but it climbs."
She didn't move.
"I'll take you to a holding shelter. Temporary. Quiet. Not even the glyph-wards fully register it." He glanced at her again, gauging her reaction. "From there, we make for Sanctum Aeterna."
The name rang in her ears like a chord long forgotten.
A faint hum stirred in her chest—not recognition, but resonance. Like something buried too deep to recall had shivered.
Sanctum Aeterna.
Why does that feel... known?
The man continued, unaware. "Some call it the Hollow. Others, the Deeproot Refuge. Or the Heart Below. One of three that remain untouched by the Seven Houses of Sin."
That did it.
Her breath caught.
Seven.
The number wrapped itself around her thoughts like a cold chain.
A memory, fraying and faded—
Seven figures, cloaked in shadow, stand above her, just before breath, before awakening.
She hadn't understood it then. Not fully. But now...
Seven Houses. Seven Watchers.
That can't be a coincidence.
A faint pulse of alarm, or was it its recognition? Throbbed behind her ribs, low and hot like buried fire. The idea of safety flickered, then twisted into something else. A warning. A whisper.
They were not guardians. They were wardens.
She clenched her jaw. The taste of something bitter and ancient pressed against her tongue.
"Why tell me all this?" she asked, taut with veiled wariness.
"Because you weren't supposed to exist," he said, "and neither was the Sanctum. But now, here we are."
He waited. Patient.
He's not lying. But he's hiding something.
Vaelith's fingers curled slightly, as if remembering how to claw—but did not rise.
Finally, she nodded once. "Then guide me."
The man turned, robes whispering over stone and metal.
And after a long, watching moment, she followed.
The stairwell groaned under its weight.
Cracked stone and metal supports jutted like broken ribs. The air was heavy with the scent of old fire, machine rot, and something stranger—something organic that had no name, only presence.
Vaelith paused at the threshold.
Above her, the stairway spiraled towards half-lights, disappearing into ruined levels choked by hanging cables and fractured walls. Some sections had collapsed entirely. Others teetered like they were deciding whether to hold or fall.
"I can go first," the man offered, voice low. "Test the supports."
"No," she said.
I need to feel this.
With each step, the floor answered her—sometimes with silence, sometimes with the aching creak of ancient metal. But she kept moving.
Her breath had changed since waking. It no longer misted, yet the air seemed to swirl around her exhaled breath. Her muscles did not fatigue, but there was a weight to her motion, as if she pulled echoes along with her.
The body remembers what the mind does not.
Halfway up, she stopped.
Below her, the lab and its chamber receded into shadow. A tomb and a womb, both discarded.
Above her, fractured light bled through the floorplates.
A step forward cracked a panel loose. She crouched and lifted it aside with one smooth motion. Beneath it, something glimmered faintly—residual glyph lines, burnt into the metal.
They formed no language she knew.
And yet—
I've seen these. Underneath the surface of sleep.
She pressed her palm to the glyph. No surge of energy came, but the metal warmed slightly. It acknowledged her.
The man watched but said nothing.
When she rose, her eyes were brighter. Focused.
The last stretch was steeper, and debris forced her to climb using her arms. Her fingers moved with certainty, gripping twisted rebar and concrete like the bones of old giants.
Her heart did not race. Her breath did not strain.
At last, she broke through.
The roof had long since caved in, leaving the uppermost chamber open to the fractured sky above.
And beyond that—
Ruins.
A city half-swallowed by time and overgrowth, steel and stone locked in endless collapse. Distant towers slumped like forgotten titans. Streets below sprawled in silence, too vast to take in all at once. Strange flora had grown along the edges, curling through hollow buildings with bioluminescent tendrils. The sky was neither day nor night—only a pallid amber, bruised and endless.
The man emerged behind her. "You've reached the surface."
Vaelith took a step forward, boots grinding against grit and dust. The wind, faint and low, caught strands of her silver-black hair and tossed them sideways like spilled ink.
"This place was once called Lucentum," he said. "A center of learning, faith, art. Before the Sins came."
She didn't answer. Her gaze swept the horizon.
Her hand reached toward the sky without thinking, fingers curling, as if measuring something.
The air is too still.
The stars are gone.
And yet... I'm not alone here.
The man stepped beside her. "We won't go straight to the Sanctuary. The path is long and difficult. We'll stop at a temporary hold—a safe layover. Somewhere we can gather supplies. Weapons, water, cloaks, things we'll need in Crownreach."
Vaelith blinked. Slowly.
Preparation. Strategy. Yes... that feels right.
"Then we leave now?" she asked.
"In a moment," he said. "The place isn't far, but the walk is exposed. We'll go quiet."
She turned her head toward him, watching him in profile against the lightless sky. "The Sanctum... you said it was hidden."
"Deep beneath," he said. "Its names are old: Sanctum Aeterna. The Hollow.The Deeproot Refuge.The Heart Below. Only three of them remain, untouched by the rule of the Seven Houses."
Vaelith froze.
Something inside her—subtle, small, but undeniable—resonated. A pulse, like the echo of a bell in an ocean trench.
Sanctum Aeterna... I've heard that name before.
"I remember... falling," she murmured.
The man's posture shifted, just slightly.
"There were... voices. Seven."
He glanced toward her.
Then: "Then you remember more than most who wake from that place."
Vaelith's breath steadied.
Images rose—hazy, brittle. Seven figures above me. Seven lights. Seven shadows.
Seven thrones.
She didn't understand yet. But her body reacted first—limbs firm, spine straightened, breath held.
"I will remember all of it."
Not defiance. Not even a promise.
Declaration.
The man nodded once, in silent acknowledgment.
Then the two began their descent out across the shattered city, toward the first waypoint on a journey into shadow, memory, and myth.