The stairwell no longer felt like a descent but a passage through memory, each step forward echoing not in stone but somewhere deeper, beneath skin and sinew, as though every inch of progress stirred a thousand forgotten echoes awake inside him.
Caliste emerged from the chamber with his breath slower, steadier—his movements newly weighted not by exhaustion but by the strange gravity of revelation. The gauntlet still encased his arm like a second skin, its blackened surface etched with veins of pulsing heat that dulled only when he exhaled deliberately, anchoring himself back into the present. Above him, the surface waited. But the man who had first entered this place—chasing shadows, doubting the truth of old maps and cryptic phrases—was gone.
What returned to the surface was something sharper. And quieter.
Night had fallen.
