The stairs spiraled deeper than they should have.
Each step down felt like a breath drawn into the lungs of something ancient quiet, but alert. The walls here didn't pulse. They hummed, slow and steady, like a heartbeat under stone.
Kael's grip on the scythe tightened. The shadows clung to him now not in fear, but in focus. They were coiled. Expectant.
At the bottom of the stairway, they entered a final chamber.
It was vast, circular, and silent. At the center stood a single object: a stone dais, cracked but intact, and upon it a coffin made of layered obsidian and translucent crystal. Suspended above it hovered a strange sigil rotating slowly, shaped like a three-pointed eye. Its light was faint. Fading.
"What the hell is this?" Ryall whispered.
Elira moved to the dais. "A tomb."
"No." Tessan's voice was low. "It's not for a corpse. Look no offerings, no preservation runes. This isn't reverence. It's containment."
Drev walked along the outer ring, eyes scanning. "The markings are different. No Ethereal script. No Whisperborn logic. Whatever this is… it predates every ruin we've found."
Kael approached the coffin. The sigil above it flared as he neared just once. Then it dimmed again, flickering like a dying candle.
"What's inside?" he asked.
Elira glanced at him. "Something old enough to be forgotten. Something tied to the shadows you carry."
Kael didn't respond.
Instead, he stepped onto the dais.
Nothing stopped him.
He laid a hand on the glass and for a moment, he saw it.
Not a body. Not a person.
A fractured core a crystal organ of some kind, still beating weakly, wrapped in shadowy veins that pulsed in time with his own heartbeat. Not dead. Not alive.
Echoing.
The shadows on Kael's body recoiled and then bent toward it, as if in prayer.
Elira stepped forward, tense. "Kael, don't touch it."
"I'm not doing anything," he whispered.
The core inside the coffin blinked with light once.
Then the shadows surged inward.
For a split second, the chamber was filled with pressure, like reality held its breath.
And then,
Silence.
The sigil shattered. The coffin cracked open.
But nothing emerged.
Kael staggered back. His eyes were unfocused. The shadows had gone still.
Not gone inward.
Ryall reached him first. "You alright?"
Kael nodded slowly, then shook his head. "I saw something."
"What?"
"A city. Buried in dark. A sky that never moved. Chains that reached into thought."
Drev narrowed his eyes. "Not memory. Not vision. That was a transfer."
Tessan looked at Elira. "We're done here."
"Yes," she said. "This place was never a ruin. It was a seal."
Kael turned toward the steps. "Then something just came unsealed."
They left in silence.
As the final doorway shut behind them, the chamber went cold.
And beneath the broken coffin, unseen by all, a faint pulse continued once every few minutes. Weak. But growing stronger.