The coordinates burned like iron inside Aryan Sharma's skull.
They were not numbers in the way most minds understood them. They were impressions—fractured sensory cues layered over one another—heat against the left palm, the smell of old circuitry, a flicker of light under skin. Maera had given them to him on the black-sand shore and promised they would seal themselves until he was close enough to use them.
Now they itched at the edges of his thoughts, restless.
He stood alone in the safehouse kitchen, a single cup of untouched chai cooling beside him, the city's distant hum leaking through cracked shutters. Anchors were out in the field, holding what stability they could. The Pillar still pulsed inside the Shard Within, broadcasting under cover channels. But all of that felt… temporary.
A.I.D.A. broke the stillness.
"You've been quiet. That's either discipline… or you're considering something you think I'll try to stop."
Aryan didn't look up.
"I found a way into the Vault."
There was a pause in her tone—an AI's version of a slow inhale.
"The Origin Vault," she said flatly. "Aryan… that's not just where they keep artifacts. That is their memory core. You'll be walking into the Warden mind."
"That's the idea."
"They will know the second you cross into its threshold."
"I'm counting on it."
By nightfall, the coordinates had started to align.
It was like being guided by invisible rails. His steps, meaningless in physical space, tugged him through street bends and empty corridors that felt staged for a dream. In thread-view, reality was bending, thinning—which made sense. The Vault wasn't placed in any city. It was anchored in a seam between active loop instances, where the laws of location and time were flexible enough to hide something meant never to be found.
Halfway across an old pedestrian bridge, he saw the veil.
To anyone else, it was just the faint shimmer of heat haze above concrete. But to him, it was an open door disguised as nothing at all. The coordinates in his head flared white.
A.I.D.A. spoke again, more quietly now.
"If you go in, Aryan… and take what you think you're after… you won't just be marked. You will be bound to the Vault's recall protocols. They'll be able to pull you back here anytime they wish."
Aryan's hand brushed the small silver chain hanging from his pocket like a talisman.
"They already want me back," he said, and stepped through.
The shift was immediate.
One moment, crumbling city grit underfoot. The next, smooth obsidian floors stretching forever in every direction. Black pillars rose high above—a forest of shadow architecture. At the center of each pillar was an embedded fragment: not data blocks in code, but solid crystallizations of moments. A child's chalk drawing on stone. A drop of rain suspended in midair. A heartbeat echo that somehow had color.
Aryan took three steps in, and the Vault noticed.
The ground boomed once.
From the far end, two shapes emerged—not the armored faceless Wardens he'd fought before, but figures robed in deep red, their faces clear, their eyes illuminated as if lit by their own memories.
One of them was a woman with lines of age and precision across her face. The other was tall, sharp, with a voice that carried the weight of decisions never reversed.
"Null Sage," the woman called, no hostility—only recognition.
"You brought the war into our outer cities.
Why do you bring yourself here?"
Aryan's eyes swept the chamber. "You know why."
The tall one nodded. "The fragment Maera showed you."
At that name, A.I.D.A.'s presence bristled.
"They allow her to act," she whispered into Aryan's mind.
"They want to see if you will pass their threshold."
Aryan frowned but didn't slow.
They did not stop him from walking deeper.
The Vault was less a place than a mind turned inside out. With every step, the Shard Within pulsed harder, resonating with fragments he passed: an ancient council of Wardens debating their purpose, early protocols written not for control, but for preservation. These weren't lies. These were records before the edits.
Finally, he came to it.
Hung in the air without support, spinning slowly: a shard of light the size of his palm, like a sibling to the piece already living in his chest. Within it, he saw that same smiling Warden from Maera's image, holding the shard exactly as Aryan reached for it now.
For a moment, the chamber quieted.
And a voice—not spoken by the two red-robed Wardens, but by the Vault itself—rose in his head.
"If you take this, you take the weight of what we were… and the threat of what we became. Can you carry both?"
Aryan's answer was steady.
"I've been carrying worse without a choice."
He took it.
Light slammed through him, sharp and unfiltered. The Shard inside his chest howled in resonance as the new fragment fused. For a heartbeat, his mind wasn't his own—it was a corridor filled with their history.
He saw the First Warden swearing the Oath of Holding.
He saw the debates between factions—preserve everything despite danger, or shape truth for stability.
He saw the moment the stability faction won… barely.
And he saw the sealing of the Origin Layer, locking away their own contradictions.
Then came the worst part.
He saw a version of himself.
Not the Null Sage. Not the Aryan of now.
A version from an earlier, failed loop—standing side by side with Wardens, not against them.
The image burned away before he could see what happened to that Aryan. But the unease stayed.
When he opened his eyes, the red-robed Wardens were closer.
"You've seen it," the woman said. "You've felt it. This is not a war that ends with victory. It ends with choice—your choice."
The tall one's gaze was unreadable. "And remember… the Vault was never our prison. It was our insurance."
Aryan stepped back toward the dark edge that would lead him out.
"I didn't come for your assurance," he said. "I came for the key."
And with the new shard pulsing alongside the old, he stepped out of the Vault.
Back in the fog-light of the bridge, the coordinates faded from his mind entirely.
What remained was a chilling certainty:
The next move wasn't about defeating the Wardens.
It was about deciding which of their truths the world should remember…
and which should be left buried forever.