They followed the tunnel past the gate in silence.
The stairwell led to a long, sloping corridor, wide enough for old transport trams but far too quiet for anything mechanical to still survive. The walls were lined with half-buried conduits and resonance coils long drained of power, their once-glowing bands now dark and flaking like dead skin. Water dripped intermittently from unseen pipes above, echoing like the tick of a forgotten clock.
Kazi walked ahead of the others, the pulse in her arm constant now, not painful, but tight. Like pressure building from the inside, urging her forward, deeper. Each step felt heavier than the last, like she was sinking into something that didn't want to let go.
Dakarai kept glancing over his shoulder. Once… Twice… Then a third time.
"Hey, do you feel that?" he finally asked, voice low and cautious.
"Yeah…" Kazi thought to herself.
"Like… something's remembering us being here before?"
She didn't answer Dakarai. Because the feeling wasn't déjà vu or a memory. It was a presence.
The corridor led them to a massive metal door, sealed tight and layered with the same scorched glyphs and charred script they'd seen above. But here, the markings had a different energy. Some had been etched in a differently, with less precise, almost frantic. Desperate.
Kazi stepped forward and touched one of the older symbols.
The world tilted and she began to see images, not visions, but…
Echoes.
A girl, younger than her. She was screaming. Her mark blazing too brightly, flickering with wild, untrained power. Men were shouting. They grabbed her and dragged her down a hallway bathed in cold white light.
A vault door slamming shut. There was silence and darkness for years.
Kazi snapped her hand back, gasping. Her head spun.
"I saw… someone," she said, eyes wide. "Another bearer. Younger than me. They locked her away down here. They were," she hesitated, "…Experimenting."
Rhazir stepped forward slowly. "You touched a memory echo. Burned into the surface. Some places remember more vividly than others."
"You knew this was down here," Kazi said. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to.
Rhazir met her eyes. "I knew something was left behind."
She stared at him, heart thudding.
"We should keep moving," he added. "If the fracture's linked to Luma's disappearance, we don't have long."
The door reacted to her mark. Lines of amber energy traced through the symbols, humming softly before the metal groaned and peeled open, retracting into the walls like jaws unclenching.
Beyond was a vast chamber, cavernous and cold.
Crates lay overturned across the floor. Scaffolding had collapsed in on itself. Terminals were burnt out; half-shattered and lined the walls, their screens dark, wires trailing like veins torn from the wall. The ceiling rose high above, supported by massive pillars etched in forgotten dialects.
And in the center stood a glass containment chamber.
Or what remained of it. Most of the glass had cracked or shattered, but the core base still pulsed faintly with bluish energy. A heartbeat with no body. A cage with no captive.
Dakarai moved first, crouching beside a blown-out panel. "It was monitored. Controlled. But whatever they were trying to keep here… it didn't stay."
Kazi stepped to the chamber's edge, placing her hand against the fractured surface.
Her mark flared. A ripple passed through the room, not seen, but felt.
The runes across the floor began to glow. Not all at once, but in a spiraling sequence outward from where she stood. Whispered voices filled the air, layered and fragmented, overlapping like echoes from dozens of conversations trapped in the same breath.
Then one voice cut through.
"Kazi…"
She froze. That voice came from neither Rhazir nor Dakarai.
She thought to herself, "Luma?"
But it was not like Kazi had ever heard before.
It was her voice… but stretched thin. Distant. As though it traveled through layers of something fractured and unstable.
"Did you hear that?" she asked, spinning toward the others.
Rhazir gave a slow nod. Dakarai's eyes had widened. His mark flickered beneath his sleeve.
"She's connected to the fracture," Rhazir said. "Or she's trapped inside it."
Kazi's fists clenched. "Then we're not leaving until we bring her out."
"We don't even know how to reach her," Dakarai said.
Kazi stared at the chamber, her heartbeat matching the low thrum beneath the floor.
"Then we figure it out."
Behind them, Rhazir stepped away from the wall. His back turned to them. His voice was calm.
"I'll need time," he said. "To analyze the symbols. The space here is unstable. One wrong action could bring it all down."
Kazi watched him carefully, her instincts crawling.
He wasn't lying.
But he wasn't telling the whole truth either.