They reached the Vault's heart like men entering a throat.
The corridor opened into a wide, domed chamber, its ceiling lost in shadow. Runes chased one another along the walls, pale lines that looped and returned like nervous fingers. Light settled into the room in thin veins, and in the center sat the thing they had come for: a low pedestal cradling a shard of metal the size of a palm. It hummed in a pitch that pinched at hearing, small and wrong and terribly alive.
No one rushed. No one laughed. The Ninefold spread out, forming a rough ring, every pair of eyes registering the same sharp fact — the Vault did not want them there.
Raal moved first, threads at the ready, slicing the air in soft silver arcs. The shard's hum spiked and the runes along the far wall flared like breath. The guardians responded by unspooling from the stone in a dozen places—thin, mirror-limbs that clicked and reformed, reflecting their shapes back at them with cruel delay.
Mael watched them assemble with the patience of a man watching a clock unwind. He could have stepped forward, taken the shard, left. But this was not a grab-and-go job. The Vault tested. This was the test.
He breathed slow and let the room speak to him in those tiny off-beats he knew how to hear. Then he did what he always did in the middle of ruin: he listened until the rhythm felt like a flaw he could press.
Edge Pulse was quiet when he began. A little shift from his chest, a thrum along the air. It moved like a stone dropped in a narrow well—clean, precise. The first mirror-limb that reached for Raal's threads hit nothing; the pulse had folded the air ahead of the limb, a small vibration that snipped tendon and wire in a single, soft disconnect. The limb stalled, then flopped like broken instrument.
Raal grunted and tightened his weave, sending threads that braided into the stone to hold it in place. The twins moved with practiced bullying, blades flashing, baiting the guardians to come where the Ninefold wanted them. Lirra danced at the edge, a shadow that left bloody lines behind.
Mael stepped forward then, slow as a metronome. His Phase Mark was simple: a minute geometry laid in Mirra beneath his boot. He pressed the mark into the floor with a toe, a tiny sigil nobody else would notice, and blinked sideways — not a jump, not a vanish; a clean swap between his place and the mark, as if he had unhooked himself from one frame and reattached to another. It was subtle, and that made it lethal.
A guardian lunged; Mael had been where the strike would land, then he was not. The blade missed the emptiness where he had stood and instead cut through a mirrored limb that had been in the wrong time. The guardian spasmed, and the room filled with the sound of metal collapsing.
They pushed inward. The shard pulsed, and with every beat the chamber threw memory at them—visions like brief films that played across the walls: people who had built the Vault, hands folding over the metal, chants half-remembered. The images tried to confuse Raal's threads, to make them slip. The twins blinked and fought through the hallucinations, each strike clean and necessary.
Mael kept listening. When a trio of guardians coalesced into a tight knot and advanced as one, he stepped forward and used Flick Resonance. The motion was a single, contemptuous snap of his fingers—enough torque pushed through Mirra to send a microburst slicing the air at blade-thickness. It hit the cluster at the precise knot where the guardians' forms joined. The burst traveled along the junction like a fault line, and the three creatures peeled apart with internal noises like glass snapping. One dropped to the floor, inert, another dissolved into a thin sheet of reflective slag.
The effect of Flick Resonance was not loud. It was surgical. Blood and mirror and the metallic scent of a thing being unmade hung in the air, and for a heartbeat the room quieted, as if respecting the economy of death.
They were close enough now that the shard's hum dug into bone. Raal reached for it, threads singing across the pedestal, but the runes woke with a wet, code-like chitter and a wall of thin blades rose at the room's edge. The Vault did not only defend; it judged. A dozen voices, thin as wire, chimed in language no one spoke aloud.
Mael said nothing. He scanned the circle—positions, angles, breathing. The Phase Mark under his boot heated him for a second, the residue of geometry humming. A guardian rolled like a living wave toward Lirra; she staggered on the edge of a blade and a mirrored limb bisected her sleeve.
Kest moved first to brace her; the brute's gauntlet met metal and sang. The twins moved as a single unit — one taking the exposure while the other cut the line behind. Raal braided threads into the pedestal, trying to bind the shard before the Vault took it back. Sparks leapt and reflected in a dozen shards.
Someone made a sound then, not a cry but a small animal noise of surprise—Merely the boy's sphere, activated without intention, wobbling in the air and emitting a harmonic that half-stalled a guardian. It gave Mael the sliver of time he needed.
He did not take the shard. Instead, he leaned in and pressed his palm near it, feeling the pulse with his skin. The Aethern Dial under his sleeve vibrated like a heartbeat under the skin. He felt the shard's rule—small, stubborn, a single instruction buried under layers of script.
For one brief, terrible second their aims matched: the Ninefold reaching for the shard, the Vault reaching for its memory. Hands almost touched it at once.
And then the shard flared—not with light but with a sound that was like a lock clicking open somewhere inside their heads. The pedestal sang, and the chamber inhaled, like a throat closing against them.
Mael's eyes narrowed. He tasted the room's calculation and understood—this thing was not only precious. It was a node. Removing it would not just steal metal; it would silence a seam in Velith's architecture. That, perhaps, was exactly what they wanted.
He whispered, barely audible, "Hold."
Around him, the Ninefold froze in the hang of that single word, their muscles poising on the edge of motion. The shard hummed, patient and dangerous. In the rim of the vaulted dome, the runes pulsed a final time and a shadow uncurled—deeper, larger, a shape the light had not yet learned to name.
They had come for a piece of the city's heart. The heart answered back.
—