The Vault had long been considered the deepest place in the world.
But it was a lie.
Built to contain things too powerful to exist and truths too dangerous to remember, the Vault had always claimed the title of the final depth. Even gods once feared its name.
But Erik had known better.
Because beneath the Vault…something else had been buried.
Not sealed.Not broken.Just forgotten.
And now, Ilan and Aeris were walking straight toward it.
The entrance wasn't grand.
No pillars.No glowing symbols.No guardians.
Just an old fissure in a collapsed temple floor.
They stood at the edge, a long descent of crumbling stone stairs spiraling into black.
"You sure this is it?" Aeris asked, gripping the torch she'd lit with her necklace's flame.
Ilan nodded.
The glyph on his chest pulsed gently with each step toward the abyss. It didn't glow anymore—it breathed. A slow rhythm that matched the hum in the air around them.
"It's not leading me," Ilan whispered. "It's remembering the way."
The stairs twisted for what felt like hours.
Along the walls, ancient carvings passed in silence. But they weren't stories.
They were warnings.
Etched in a language neither of them knew, the shapes told of a door carved not with hands but with intention. Of a chamber not meant to contain—but to forget.
And then… they reached it.
A stone wall with no cracks. No handle. Just a smooth surface covered in moss and silence.
Ilan pressed his palm to it.
The glyph on his chest pulsed—once, twice—and then glowed a dull blue.
Lines lit up across the stone, revealing a circle.
A lock.
But not mechanical.
A lock of memory.
And Ilan… was the key.
The wall didn't break.It didn't slide.
It simply ceased to exist.
A soundless moment passed as the world shifted. The room beyond it was unlike anything they'd seen.
No walls.
No floor.
No ceiling.
Just space—held together by tension alone. Floating platforms of stone hovered midair, glowing slightly with fractured glyphs. At the center, suspended in a sphere of golden light, was a single coffin.
Aeris froze.
"That's not a body, is it?"
"No," Ilan said. "It's worse."
He stepped forward slowly, hopping from one floating platform to the next, the glyph on his chest growing brighter.
Inside the coffin was no corpse.
Just a book.
Bound in black iron. Sealed shut by seven glowing threads. Each thread carried a symbol Ilan recognized instantly:
The Seven Failed Futures.
One thread broke the moment he stepped close.
It vanished in smoke, and the glyph on Ilan's chest flickered.
The coffin opened silently.
The book floated toward him.
And as soon as his hands touched the cover—
His mind shattered.
Ilan stood in a war.
Not real, but remembered.
A battlefield of broken cities, skies raining ash, gods screaming, devils laughing, and people turned to nothing but dust and silence.
And in the center of it all…
Erik stood alone.
But not Erik as Ilan remembered him.
This one wore no soul.
No glyphs.
Just a look of absolute regret.
He turned to Ilan.
"I buried this future because it was mine."
"You lost?"
"No," Erik said. "I won. And that was the problem."
The skies above cracked.
"This book records not what happened—but what could have, if I chose differently."
Ilan turned the pages.
Each one burned with a different Erik.A different failure.A different cost.
"You buried this… so no one could see your weakness."
"No," Erik said, voice almost broken. "I buried it… so no one would try to repeat it."
And then he looked Ilan straight in the eyes.
"But now that you're here… it's your turn to decide."
The vision shattered.
Ilan gasped, falling to one knee.
Aeris rushed to him. "What happened?!"
He held up the book.
It no longer had a lock.
The threads were gone.
On its cover, the glyph burned—four parts now.
Flame.Feather.Key.And now… Mirror.
"I saw what Erik erased," Ilan whispered. "And now it's part of me."
Aeris swallowed hard. "Then what is this place?"
"A place that holds the cost of defiance."
He looked around the floating platforms.
"This is where the Lockbreaker became the Regretful."
Far above them, the Keeper stirred again.
It had remained where Erik stood—trapped in the threshold between rules and resistance.
But now, its form trembled.
Because Ilan had not only remembered what was buried—he accepted it.
The Keeper whispered in a language of dust:
"He is no longer an echo."
"He is a rewrite."
And Erik?
He sat again beneath the willow, watching the sky ripple.
He felt the book open.
He felt the fragment awaken.
And he whispered only one thing:
"Please, Ilan…"
"…be better than me."
Back below, as Ilan and Aeris prepared to leave the chamber, the coffin crumbled to dust.
The platforms sank.
And a single path forward opened—carved in silver stone, etched with a new symbol neither had seen before.
The Fifth Glyph.
Still faint.Still incomplete.But glowing with a strange intensity.
It had no name yet.
But Ilan knew what it meant:
The Acceptance of What Shouldn't Exist.
And for the first time, he didn't fear it.
He just turned the page in his sketchbook…
…and began to draw.