The deeper they descended into the Forgotten Vaults, the less the world behaved as it should.
Gravity twisted. Echoes came before sound. Walls realigned when Cael wasn't looking.
The glyphs weren't just on stone anymore—they were in the air, drawn in drifting silver light like fireflies tracing forbidden scripture. Some curved in graceful arcs. Others spun like wheels with jagged teeth. All of them whispered meanings just outside of understanding.
The path narrowed. Mireth lit a mana-wick, but it flickered uncertainly, dim against the ambient hum of raw Essentia. She placed a hand against the wall. "This place doesn't remember being part of the world."
Cael nodded. The Cognition Core, pulsing softly in his satchel, had begun to sing—a resonance that vibrated through his ribs, not with notes, but with intent.
They passed beneath an archway inscribed with three glyphs: Name, Silence, and Unraveling.
And then they were there.
A chamber unfolded ahead—vast, circular, its walls spiraling upward like a nautilus shell. At the center stood a monolith of obsidian, its surface etched with a single, massive glyph.
It didn't glow. It consumed light, bending it inward.
Cael stepped forward, heartbeat echoing in his ears. The Glyphweaver's Quill hummed faintly in his satchel. Without thinking, he drew it—and the tip bled inkless light.
He crouched beside a broken slab of stone, its surface scorched with partial glyphs, as if someone else had tried—and failed—to define what lay here.
Cael whispered a word, and the quill moved:
𝘛𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩.
No flash. No blast of power.
The slab beneath the glyph ceased.
Not shattered. Not disintegrated. It simply… didn't exist anymore.
Cael reeled back, breath caught. Mireth ran to him, eyes wide.
"What did you do?"
"I… wrote it too clearly," he said, voice hollow. "Defined it so precisely, it had no room left to be uncertain. So reality discarded it."
She stared at the space where the stone had been, now a hole with no depth.
"That's what the Void wants," Cael murmured. "Not chaos. Certainty. Absolute form. One glyph to replace all others."
The Cognition Core pulsed faster.
Then came the voice—not sound, but meaning, folded into thought:
"Become the Name Beyond Names."
He blinked.
In his hand, the quill was already moving.
On the monolith.
He didn't remember starting.
"Cael!" Mireth grabbed his shoulder.
He stopped. The glyph—half-formed—writhing with unstable potential.
"You don't understand what you're writing," she said. "That's not language anymore. That's law."
Cael dropped the quill. It clattered to the floor, sparking with residual mana.
His hands trembled.
He looked at his arms. The glyphs tattooed into his skin since his exposure to the first Void rift were glowing faintly now, interlinking like runes forming sentences.
"What happens if I finish it?" he asked quietly.
"I don't know," Mireth said. "But I think you'd stop being you."
He swallowed, backing away from the monolith.
And for the first time… it pulsed.
Like something inside had noticed him.