The spiral stairs opened without sound. A light wind rushed out as if escaping the horrors of down below. And the eerie darkness of below did not seem to be inviting in any way whatsoever.
No thunder, no grinding stone. Just a breathless yielding, as if the sealed Cathedral had been waiting for a fated one.
Rheia gripped Caelum's arm.
"Last chance to turn back."
He shook his head and grimaced. "Not this time."
The descent was different now.
Before, the shadows had felt old. Dusty. Dead.
Now they thrummed. Like heartbeats beneath the floor.
Rheia whispered as quiet as she could as they passed a crumbled echo glyph: "These were built for Resonancewalkers. Sixth Path channelers. They didn't cast spells like we do. They built loops—echo traps, fate snares. Dangerous things."
"What kind of dangerous?"
"Things that remember what they weren't meant to. Things that never forget."
At the base, the sanctum had changed.
The broken sarcophagus now lay open wide, the void-mirror cracked.
But in its place… was a door.
It pulsed with seven locks. And one was already undone—from when Caelum first touched the memory.
Rheia studied the symbols.
"Not just mana locks," she whispered. "These are soul locks. You don't unlock them with force. You unlock them by remembering what was taken."
Caelum stepped forward.
As he did, his sigil lit and flared again.
One lock turned instantly.
Rheia's eyes widened immediately.
"Another one. Just by being here."
"I'm connected to this place," he said. "To him. To Elarion."
And then something spoke.
Not aloud.
But behind their eyes.
"You returned."
Caelum gasped and spun around almost immediately.
The third lock shifted.
A voice, half-burned by time, unspooled around them like wind wrapped in prayer and devotion.
"Listen," it said. "Not with your ears. With your scars."
Caelum dropped to his knees and clutches his chest.
The world crumbed and fell away into ashes before him.
And he saw—not a dream, not a vision—but a fragment of the first Unwritten.
A boy, no older than Caelum, stood before the tower of white flame. Behind him, cities crumbled in silence. Above him, the Weave bled. The sky was the colour of nothing.
And in his hands—a quill made of memory.
He wrote in the air.
Not spells.
Rules.
And the world shifted.
Rheia saw it too.
"It's not magic," she breathed. "It's revision. He's rewriting the laws of causality."
The voice returned.
"We were not meant to be caged by what is. So I reached for what might be."
The fourth lock turned.
"But even possibility demands a price."
They awoke, sweating and shaking profusely. Shaken by what they had just saw they attempted to get up from their knees.
Caelum stumbled forward, touched the door with a finger.
The fifth lock cracked and crumbed into ashes.
Rheia steadied him. "Don't rush this please."
"I'm not," he said slowly. "It's just… I am this."
She looked at him. "Maybe. But remember, echoes aren't the same as truth. Just because something remembers you, doesn't mean you're only it."
He nodded, slowly and turned his head once again.
Then stopped.
The sixth lock refused.
Instead of turning, it burned.
A ward pulsed in the air. The space rippled.
And someone else stepped through it.
He wore black.
A student's mask.
But his presence was fire and void—wrong, like a thread twisted against the loom.
"You were told not to open this place," said the masked boy from Class Nine.
Caelum stepped back with light steps and a glared. "Of course, someone followed me."
"You left a trail," the boy said. "Echo-threads are not subtle when you burn as brightly as you do."
Rheia drew a ward-blade and aimed it at the masked student.
But the boy didn't attack and waited.
Instead, he sank into the air—resonance folding around him like water—and reappeared by the seventh lock.
"I don't want you to succeed," he said to Caelum. "But I need to see what he left."
"You don't know what you're doing."
"I know enough. I've read the Silent Chronicle. I've seen the sigils no one dares translate."
He pulled back his academy sleeve.
His arm bore a scar shaped like Caelum's sigil—but broken, fragmented.
"You're the echo. I'm the wound."
He touched the door with the scar.
And the seventh lock twisted open in a weird manner.
The door dissolved into nothingness.
Behind it, a narrow passage spiraled downward, etched in memory-glass and inkless glyphs.
The masked boy didn't wait.
He vanished immediately into it.
Caelum hesitated.
Rheia touched his hand and looked strongly in his eyes.
"We follow," she said.
And they stepped into the sanctum of Elarion.
At the same time, in the Outer Halls of the Arcanum, Instructrix Vale stood before the Headmaster of the Echo Order.
"He's breached the seventh threshold," Vale said.
The Headmaster's voice was dry as bone.
"Then the silence will break. We must prepare for war—not of armies, but of memory."
"And if he's not the true bearer?"
"Then the real one is still coming."