The Gallery didn't sleep anymore.
Even in the hours when the wind outside went still and the fires guttered low, something deep within the bone walls kept breathing. It wasn't sound—not exactly—but pressure. A slow inhalation beneath the stone, like a thing waiting for them to step wrong.
Kael stood near the lowest curve of the chamber, where the cracked pendant had once pulsed. His frost-veined hand still tingled from where it had hovered above the seed. Now, nothing remained but a smudge of ash, faintly blue.
Ilya hadn't spoken since the pendant broke.
She'd taken to sitting beside the half-shaped sculpture she'd begun the night before. She didn't finish the mouth she'd started. Instead, she reached for another length of slate and began again. This time: a spine. Not quite human. Not quite root. Every motion was delicate, almost reverent, as if she were carving something remembered rather than imagined.
Kael watched her a moment longer. She worked with the calm of someone who had surrendered to something larger than choice.
He didn't interrupt her.
Eris returned from scouting the outer fringe. The Cutclean emissary walked a pace behind her, barefoot despite the cold. Her mouth was smeared with ash, and her arms bore fresh scar-rings across her forearms—new offerings.
"They're watching," Eris said as she passed Kael. "Something's changed."
Kael followed her gaze. The far wall—once seamless—was beginning to split along an uneven seam. Roots curled from it, not reaching out, but drawing inward.
"It's opening."
The Chronicler stepped into the light, her ink-stained hands wrapped tightly around her scroll pouch. "Then it's time."
They gathered what little they needed. Kael, Eris, the Chronicler. Ilya stayed behind. She didn't protest. As they left, Kael glanced back.
She was still sculpting.
The spine was nearly complete—and now, the sculpture had something else tucked within its curve: a tiny, folded sketch Kael had lost two days prior. Draven's face—unfinished. Or maybe not Draven's at all. It was changing.
The corridor beyond the Gallery spiraled downward, narrow and uneven, as though bored through bone by something that pulsed as it moved. Frost lined the walls in webbed patterns. With every step, the temperature dropped. Their breath began to fog. Their silence thickened.
The air didn't just grow cold. It grew still. Like nothing here had moved in years—and something was listening.
Only the Chronicler whispered, now and then, to herself. Cataloging fragments of glyphs scratched into root-shell. Names long dead. Symbols twisted by time.
"I know this script," she murmured. "But I've never seen it."
Eris halted. "What does that mean?"
The Chronicler blinked. "I mean… I understand it. But I've never studied it before. Like I remember it from a dream."
Kael pressed his hand against a patch of root-wrapped stone. It pulsed once beneath his skin—a low thrum that wasn't his own heartbeat.
Not Mercy's voice.
Something colder. Older.
They reached a chamber like a lung.
Wide. Still. Roots curled along the domed ceiling like ribs. In the center stood a dais of petrified wood, cracked and laced with frost.
Upon it: a pendant.
Not like the others. This one was flat, ovular. Its surface reflected no light, and yet it glowed faintly—like a dying coal beneath black glass. The runes along its rim weren't carved. They seemed grown into the metal, like bone hardened by memory.
Kael stepped closer. The frost in his veins pulled toward it.
The Chronicler whispered, "This was left."
Eris moved beside him. "No. It was planted."
Kael didn't touch it.
He didn't need to.
The hum inside him aligned.
A voice—not heard, but felt—pressed against the base of his spine:
"This is not Mercy's grave. This is her echo."
Kael staggered back, breathing hard. He felt a chill spread through his ribs, threading through his nerves like ice laced with memory. A phantom weight pressed against his back, like a sword he no longer carried but still remembered.
Behind them, the tunnel groaned. The roots in the walls began to twitch.
The Chronicler took a step forward, then knelt, fingers brushing the floor beside the dais. She looked pale. "This… this is where the first witness died."
Eris jerked toward her. "What witness?"
"I don't know," the Chronicler said. "But the place remembers them. All of them."
She pointed at the walls. Shadows began to stir within them. Not images—impressions. Glimpses. A woman kneeling over a shattered blade. A child with silvered eyes staring at a mirror. A figure standing alone in the wastes, holding a sprout that pulsed like a second heart.
Kael's knees buckled. One of the shadows… it looked like him. But wrong.
His eyes weren't his. They were hollow.
A sound split the quiet.
Not a voice. Not a tremor.
A cracking breath—as though something had just inhaled after centuries of sleep.
From the wall to their left, something pushed forward.
A figure. Not a creature. Not a memory. A form made of roots and frost and dust. Its face was a mask of cracked white bark, and across its brow—etched so faintly it was nearly missed—a jagged scar.
Kael had that scar.
The thing took a step forward. Its limbs moved with jerks, like a puppet half-aware of its strings.
Eris raised her weapon, but didn't strike. "Kael," she said, voice low, "that thing…"
"I know."
The figure raised a hand.
And pointed—not at Kael.
At the pendant.
Then it fell apart—into root-dust and a breath of cold.
They stood in silence.
Kael felt hollow. Not numb. Not afraid.
Empty.
"What happens if I take it?" he asked aloud.
The Chronicler stared at him. "It's already yours."
Eris shook her head. "You already have."
He stared at the pendant.
He didn't reach.
He didn't need to.
The chamber around them breathed again. Dust fell like snow. The roots pulled inward, flexing like fingers curling into a fist.
Kael turned back toward the tunnel.
But something was rising.
Not the echo.
Something deeper.
Something beneath the hollow.
Aboveground, Ilya placed her finished sculpture at the Gallery's center.
It was not a spine.
It was a map.
Not of the world.
Of what remained.
She sat beside it and began humming—an old lullaby Lyra once sang in the dark of the cages.
Her hands glowed faintly.
The humming spread.