The air within the vault had a taste of ages past—dry as abandoned tombs, with a metallic bite of ancient magic and something darker hidden below. Arthur's initial step made an odd echoing sound, the echoes muffled as if the room itself was resisting entry. Nyra's fires sputtered in the stagnant air, casting fitful light along walls inscribed with the same minute Zenith writing they'd found in the sanctum.
"Stay close," Arthur whispered. His scars throbbed with the underground energies of the vault, a rhythmic beat that seeped into his bones. "This place remembers its guardians."
The antechamber of the vault led to a gigantic circular room that was dominated by twelve pedestals placed in a flawless circle. Eleven were empty, their tops wearing a dull sheen of centuries' worth of dust. The twelfth contained a single item—a knife made from the same star-metal as the platform of the outpost, its blade inscribed with twirling patterns that stung the eyes to trace.
Nyra approached it automatically, her outstretched hand. "That's—"
"Don't!" Arthur clasped her wrist. "Look."
He indicated the ground between the pedestals. The rock was stained in eleven different patterns—tracings of bodies that had apparently dissolved into the rock itself. The twelfth tracing stood untouched, awaiting.
The parasite shifted restlessly. "The last wardens. They didn't leave their posts—they became them."
A noise from overhead held them both motionless—the far-off but unmistakable shriek of metal giving under overwhelming power. Kael was breaching.
Nyra's jaw clenched. "We need that sword."
Arthur approached the twelfth pedestal with caution. Close up, the dagger's engravings broke down into tiny copies of the sigils on the vault door—but these changed when looked at from various angles, reforming themselves into new designs. The hilt was made to his hand size and shape exactly, as if it were crafted for him and him only.
As his palm closed over it, the vault breathed.
There burst across his brain a cascade of images:
- Twelve Zenith soldiers who he was now standing where they were, each taking up a weapon
- A magnificent war fought not against fellow man, but something immense and dark that emerged from the core of the world
- The moment of treachery when Storm and Ignis troops turned against their comrades during combat
- The initial intention of the outposts—not to guard for intruders, but to hold what the Zeniths had assisted in imprisoning
The vision faded to show Nyra shaking his shoulder with urgency. "Arthur! Wake up!"
Another boom above. Closer still. Dust filtered down from the ceiling.
The dagger in Arthur's palm buzzed with power, its blade glinting with pent-up energy. He realized its name suddenly—the same term mentioned by the sanctum guardian.
"Truthseeker," he whispered.
Nyra's gaze jumped between the dagger and the oncoming sounds. "Will it halt whatever Kael's transforming into?"
Arthur had no chance to respond before the parasite shrieked in alarm.
They had hardly avoided as a bolt of tainted lightning destroyed the pedestal upon which Arthur had been standing. At the entrance to the vault, silhouetted by wallowing energy, stood Kael Dawnwrath—but dimly recognizable at best.
The Archon's plate had merged fully with his body, crystalline formations throbbing with usurped power. His eyes were emptinesses of churning shadow, his lips too far apart in a death's grin. Three voices blended as he spoke—his own, Hollowborn's rasp, and one older by far:
"Little Zenith. You possess what is not yours."
Arthur changed to a defensive position, Truthseeker buzzing in his hand. The weight of the dagger felt instinctive, as though he'd been holding it for years instead of mere seconds. "It was my family's. That makes it mine by blood."
Kael's laugh was the shattering of glass. "Your blood is what we desire."
He struck with unholy speed, his tainted blade clashing with Truthseeker in a spray of sparks. The force went through the shock up Arthur's arm, but the star-metal wouldn't shatter. Nyra swung left, her blackfire slashing at Kael's uncovered side—only to be soaked up by his crystal armor.
"His corruption's too deep!" she screamed. "Fire does nothing!"
The parasite scanned their opponent even as Arthur deflected another brutal strike: "He's attached to multiple shards. Unstable but potent."
Kael followed up with a blow that sent Arthur stumbling back. The Archon flung up his remaining hand, and the vault itself revolted—bits of stone exploded from the walls and flew their way with deadly accuracy.
Arthur rolled out of the way, shrapnel scraping his ribs. He met Nyra's gaze and pointed to the vacant pedestals. A plan coalesced—daring, but their sole hope.
She nodded once in recognition.
As Kael pressed forward, Arthur feigned left before dashing to the right, Truthseeker not at the Archon, but at the closest vacant pedestal. The star-metal blade struck true, producing a resonant pulse through the room.
Nothing stirred for a heartbeat.
Then the first warden stirred.
A face formed from dust and darkness—a ghostly Zenith warrior in armor of ages past, his eyes blazing with the same void-light as Arthur's wounds. Then another. And another. Before long, all eleven vacant pedestals shone with specter guards.
Kael faltered for the first time. "You don't know what you've done."
The wardens charged as one.
What came next was more an unraveling than a fight. The ghostly warriors strode in unholy synchrony, their ethereal swords slicing through Kael's defenses as if they were mist. Wherever they struck, his crystal armor darkened and shattered, the corruption within shrieking as it was cast out.
Nyra grabbed Arthur's arm. "Now! While he's occupied!"
They sprinted for a previously concealed archway at the back of the vault—a means of escape noted in the Zenith script as "The Watcher's Path." Kael's rage roars became screams of agony behind them as the wardens fulfilled their last task.
The tunnel ahead was steep and narrow, walls glazed with moisture. Arthur went first, Truthseeker's radiance their sole illumination. The cacophony of combat receded fast, and only the sound of dripping water and their own ragged breathing filled the air.
Hours seemed to pass before Nyra spoke up: "Those wardens. they resembled you."
Arthur did not require the parasite to tell him this reality. "Because they were my ancestors. The last guardians of the prisons."
The tunnel at last opened into a cave so large its ceiling disappeared into shadow. A lake lay below them, its smooth surface reflecting unreal constellations that could not be found underground. In the middle of it stood an island topped by one building—a flawless cube of black rock, its face completely unblemished.
The prison.
Nyra let out a sharp breath. "That's where we're going, isn't it?"
Arthur.'' Arthur.''
Before Arthur could speak, the water began to churn. Something enormous stirred beneath its glassy surface.
The parasite's warning came too late.
The lake exploded as a creature of shadow and crystal burst at them, its jaws wide enough to devour a man whole. Arthur barely had time to raise Truthseeker—
The dagger blazed with white light as it intercepted the creature's attack.
The impact flung Arthur backwards, his boots crunching furrows in the soft cavern floor. Truthseeker's sword smoldered white-hot where it had perforated the creature's crystalline hide, the injury spreading like cracks in thin ice.
The beast—some monstrous fusion of eel and scorpion—thrashed in agony, its tail barb whipping dangerously close to Nyra's head. She rolled aside, her blackfire instinctively flaring to life.
"Don't!" Arthur shouted. "It feeds on magic!"
Too late. The fires hit the creature's underside and were immediately absorbed, its injuries knitting back together. The parasite spat in Arthur's head: "It's a warden-beast. Tainted by the prison's bleed."
Nyra swore, unsheathing her mundane blade instead. "Then how do we kill it?"
Truthseeker throbbed in Arthur's hand, revealing to him glimpses—the monster's birth from seeping prison energies, its centuries of development in the darkness, the one weak spot between its third and fourth spinal plates.
"Distract it," he commanded. "I must have a clean hit at its spine."
Nyra didn't wait. She zipped to the left, shouting curses and sending sprays of water flying. The warden-beast spun its enormous head, attracted by the motion and sound.
Arthur was a liquid shadow, his superdeveloped muscles taking him up the creature's rolling side. Truthseeker homed in on its target—the small chink in the crystalline hide. He jammed the blade home with both hands.
For a dreadful instant, nothing moved. Then the cracks multiplied.
Light burst forth from inside the monster, cracking its body from the inside out. Its last scream was less noise than raw force, shattering stalactites from the roof of the cavern. Arthur just managed to grab Nyra and hide behind a rock outcropping as the beast blew apart in a shower of lethal splinters.
Silence descended, punctuated only by their harsh breaths and the soft lap of agitated water.
Nyra stared at the receding light where the creature had been. "Don't let me get stabbed by your new plaything."
Truthseeker's light softened to a gentle pulse as Arthur surveyed the prison island. The cube remained unbroken, its geometrical precision unsettling amidst the cavern's chaotic organic shapes. "We have to get across."
The surface of the lake was unnaturally calm. Nyra skipped a pebble—it disappeared without a ripple. "No chance that's only water."
Arthur spotted the solution etched into Truthseeker's blade when angled just right—a pattern of stepping stones only visible under its light. "There. Follow my exact path."
The passage was terrifying. Every submerged rock moved beneath their feet, ready to drop them into whatever awaited below. Halfway through, the water started bubbling ominously, but they made it to the island just as the first wisps of dark energy broke the surface behind them.
Close up, the prison cube was unadorned—no doors, no symbols, no seams. But Arthur's scabs throbbed more fiercely the closer he got, and Truthseeker's whine turned nearly agonizing.
Nyra ran her hands around the building, tracing its edges. "How do we even—"
The cube responded to her touch. One line at eye level, pulsing with the same violet-black as Arthur's scars. And another, and another, until the whole face clarified into a huge Zenith sigil—the sign of binding.
The parasite voice was little more than a breath now: "Only a Zenith can open it."
Arthur laid his hand on the sigil. His scars blazed in sync with the markings of the prison.
With a rumble like a mountain exhaling, the cube started to unfold.
The unfolding of the prison cube disobeyed all geometrical laws Arthur was familiar with. Its black stone faces didn't so much open as unravel, every plane of the structure pulling back like the petals of some flower from another world to expose an inner room that shouldn't have been contained within the bounds of its walls. The air that swept out smelled of lightning and something metallic—like new blood on copper.
Nyra took an involuntary step back. "That's. not possible."
The room inside was comfortably three times the dimensions of the cube's outside, walls constructed from fluid planes that watered Arthur's eyes if he gazed at them for too long. In the middle floated a sphere of flawless darkness, supported in midair with no apparent anchor. Tentacles of purple power throbbed from it at random intervals, impacting the walls before disintegrating with a shattering crash.
Truthseeker's hum vibrated through Arthur's bones as they entered. The instant his foot made contact with the inner chamber floor, the walls of the prison flashed with ancient writing—Zenith warnings etched in light instead of stone.
"Here lies the First Betrayer's heart,"* the parasite interpreted. *"Bound in star-metal and sorrow. Touch it not, lest the chains weaken."
Nyra's fire died away to nothing as they drew near to the floating sphere. Close up, Arthur could tell it wasn't immaculate black—deep in the center swirled points of light like far-off stars, and something darker too, a watching presence.
"That's not a weapon," Nyra whispered. "It's alive."
The sphere throbbed as if in answer, the light-motes realigning to a shape Arthur knew from the carvings on the sanctum walls—the Primordial sigil they'd watched rent asunder in the visions.
Realization smacked him. "Not a prison. A tomb."
The parasite's presence wrapped itself further around Arthur's heart. "And a battery. The guilds have been draining its power for centuries."
Before Arthur's mind could catch up to this, Truthseeker shifted in his hold—not of its own accord, but at some deeper response. The point of the blade directed itself toward the sphere like a compass needle to north.
Nyra noticed it, too. "It wants you to. do what? Pierce it?"
A sound from beyond the chamber stopped them both—the unmistakable zizzle of tainted Storm magic. Distant and moving quickly.
"Kael lived," Arthur understood. The wardens hadn't done their job.
The warning of the parasite was clear and swift: "He seeks the heart's power. If he bonds with even a fragment—"
Arthur didn't let it go. He brought Truthseeker, the point trembling inches above the dark globe. The warning script on the prison blazed brighter, but other things occurred as well—the surface of the globe rippled where the dagger approached, not in protest but in recognition.
Nyra clamped her hand around his wrist. "Are you crazy? That creature just told us not to touch it!"
"Once," Arthur said. "To bind."
He piloted Truthseeker into the sphere.
The world detonated in silent light.