The trapdoor was buried beneath a layer of broken flooring and half a century of rot.
Torren found it first—his boot punched through weakened planks while sweeping for salvage. He cursed, hard, then knelt and brushed away splinters to reveal an iron ring set into the floor. It glowed faintly, runes warded to repel mold and moisture.
Evelyn recognized the same warding glyph as the one etched into her fever dream.
No one said it aloud, but they both knew: it wasn't just a cellar.
They waited until moonrise.
Better to open strange doors in the dark, Torren reasoned. That way, if something came out, it'd already be night. No need to be surprised when it was.
Evelyn didn't argue. She'd spent most of the day tracing the hearth's glyphs again and again, hoping for insight—or a warning.
What she found instead was resonance.
Each time she touched the central eye-sigil, her shard pulsed stronger.
As if it knew this place.
As if it remembered.
With one great heave, Torren pulled the trapdoor open. The rusted hinges screeched like a beast being gutted, and a puff of cold, dry air exhaled from the dark below.
No smell. No rot.
Just emptiness—and the soft flicker of glyphlight on stone steps.
Evelyn descended first.
She didn't need a torch.
The stairwell curled downward in a spiral, each step carved with precise angles. The walls bore faded murals: beasts with hollow eyes, flames shaped like hands, women with crowns of bone.
As they moved deeper, Evelyn began to hear the song again—low and steady, like heartbeat and thunder laced into wind.
It wasn't in her head.
Torren heard it too.
"I don't like this," he muttered. "Doesn't sound like corelight. Sounds like... breathing."
Evelyn reached the bottom and paused.
The chamber below was wide, circular—its center dominated by a crystal pool ringed with black stone pillars.
Above it, suspended in midair, floated a single, fractured core.
It pulsed in time with Evelyn's shard.
The shard in her chest began to burn. Not painfully—no. It was need.
The core above the pool thrummed in answer. Not alive. Not Echoed.
Not whole.
Yet not entirely dead, either.
Evelyn stepped toward it. One foot on stone. The air shimmered.
Torren grabbed her arm. "Wait."
She looked back. His face was drawn, sweat slicking his brow. "You're glowing again," he said.
She touched her chest.
Her shirt had grown warm, the shard beneath flaring golden threads through the cloth.
"I think..." she murmured, "I've been here before."
The pool rippled.
Torren drew steel.
The ripples weren't water. They moved against gravity, sliding up the air toward the suspended core.
And from within the pool, something rose—a silhouette, tall and robed in tattered silk. Its face was wrapped in black linen, mouth sealed with stitched gold thread.
No eyes.
But Evelyn felt it see her.
The figure bowed.
Then spoke—not aloud, but directly into her bones.
"You are not the First."
"But you are close."
Torren stepped forward, sword raised. "What the hell are you?"
It turned its head slightly, not at him—but toward Evelyn.
"Hers." The word rang like a bell of ash. "Daughter of Fire. She sang you into this world."
The core flared.
Evelyn couldn't move. Could barely breathe.
Memories not hers surged up—flashes of fire, of voices chanting in a lost tongue, of her mother standing on a cliff beneath a blood-red sky.
And in all of them... the song.
Torren shouted something, grabbed her shoulders.
The figure vanished.
The pool calmed.
But the core now hung inches from Evelyn's outstretched hand.
It was waiting.
Back in the chamber above, Evelyn sat in silence beside the hearth.
Torren paced. Cursed. Tried to sleep.
Neither could rest.
And down below, the fractured core still hovered.
Waiting.