Kale met him at the landing, uninvited. He wore his training shirt backwards and carried a knife only half sheathed. "You expecting trouble?" Kale asked, cracking a smile as if trouble could ever be anything but on schedule.

Soren said, "You didn't have to follow."

Kale: "And yet, here I am. Which way's the rat maze from here?"

They moved through the dark in tandem, Kale's breath loud enough to count, Soren's hand never more than two fingers from the grip of his blade. At level three, the corridor pinched down to a ribcage's width, air cold and sharp with the bite of preservation salts. The torches here were replaced by sigil-lights, each one flickering a soft blue in a pattern that implied both surveillance and warning. Soren kept the ledger pressed to his chest and walked until the corridor made a forced turn left. The runes here were older, the kind that didn't just record history but threatened to rewrite it if you lingered.

At the final arch, Seren waited with her arms crossed, a ghost among ghosts. Her hair was bound so tight to her skull it looked like a crown of gold wire, and her eyes had the glassy stillness of someone who'd already seen what was down there and come back less than whole.

She watched them approach, then said, "You're late."

Soren: "We're not supposed to be here at all."

Seren only shrugged. Her eyes darted once to the blackout-wrapped ledger in Soren's hand, once to the lock on the antechamber door, then back to Soren's face.

The door was triple-barred, each with its own sigil plate. Soren set the lantern down, rolled back his sleeve, and pressed the scarred wrist with the embedded shard against the touchpad. The surface vibrated, then flared, painful and electric, like a wasp burrowing under the skin. The lock disengaged with a sound like a bent rib snapping back into place.

They stepped in.

The antechamber was smaller than Soren expected, only ten paces long and lined in the arcane equivalent of insulation: warded writing, each line etched in some alloy that shimmered between rust and wet bone. The lights here didn't flicker. They burned a steady, impossible red.

Soren's first thought was of a tomb. His second, of a confessional.

At the far wall, a table, stone, unadorned, and pitted with use, waited. On it sat three things: a half-collapsed suit of ceremonial armor, a pile of cracked containment vials, and a single, perfectly intact soul-vessel, the old Academy crest pressed into its waxen face.

Kale let out a long, low whistle. "Didn't know we still made those."

Soren ignored him, crossing to the table and setting the ledger beside the vials. He ran a hand over the ceremonial armor. The fabric beneath had rotted away, but the metal still held the gouges and stains of a real fight, not parade scratches, but the deep, hungry kind left by someone who'd meant to kill.

He looked at Seren. "You said this room kept a record."

She nodded, jaw tense. "Every failed attempt. Every commandant who didn't walk out."

Soren opened the ledger to the blue-tabbed page. The names glared up at him: Lira, Liane, Kale… Jannek. He traced the line under Jannek's entry: Voluntary Sacrifice. The words made him taste bile.

He scanned the table for clues, for anything that would rewrite what the ledger seemed determined to make permanent.

Kale perched on the table's edge, attention caught by the soul-vessel. He turned it, squinting at the rune that pulsed faintly just beneath the wax. "This one's still alive," he said, voice a hush.

Seren moved to Soren's side, her hand ghosting over the ruined armor. "If it's alive, it's waiting for something."

Soren picked up the soul-vessel. It was heavier than it looked—denser, like it wanted to cling to the world. He held it up to the lantern. The rune inside shifted, not with the steady pulse of containment, but with the twitchy, erratic beat of something waking up.

A chill ran up his arm, then through his gut.

'Jannek,' he thought, and the name rang like a warning bell.

He set the vessel on the ledger, just above the final entry. The light in the rune flared, then, for a split second, shrank to a pinpoint—before expanding, flooding the antechamber with a raw, unfiltered arcana glow.

Kale swore. Seren whispered, "You just woke it—"

Soren didn't hear the rest. The floor vibrated, a seismic thrum through the boots, and every sigil on the walls activated at once, their red light collapsing into a single line that raced around the room, converging at the vessel.

The rune inside the vial twisted, then broke shape, forming a word in a dialect Soren recognized from the old induction rites but had never seen written:

CONTAINMENT IS THE LIE.

The phrase burned itself into the glass, then leapt to the ledger, singeing the page and sending a plume of blue smoke curling into the air. Soren flinched, but didn't drop the vial.

A pulse went through his wrist, alive, insistent, and angry. The shard in his arm resonated, vibrating in time with the soul-vessel until it felt like his own bones were about to unspool. Soren gritted his teeth, riding the pain, until the vibration faded and the light in the room steadied.

He exhaled. The word still etched itself on his retinas.

Kale, standing as far from the table as possible without bolting, said, "I don't suppose there's a protocol for when the dead start talking back?"

Seren didn't answer. She stared at Soren, not at his hand, not at the wound, but at his face, her expression unreadable and suddenly, deeply wary.

Soren looked at the vessel. The rune was now inert, but the wax on the surface had split, a hairline crack running right through the old Academy crest. He set it down gently, careful not to let it roll off the ledger.

The silence in the antechamber was absolute. Even the wards had gone quiet, the blue lights outside now dimmed to a bruise-colored afterglow.

Soren pressed a thumb to the final line in the ledger. He felt the vibration, softer now, a memory of pain. He closed the book, picked up the soul-vessel, and looked at the others. "We need to leave," he said, and his voice was steadier than he expected.

They left the antechamber, sealing the door behind them. This time, the lock didn't fight him. The wards on the far corridor spun up, their hum now reset to a new, unfamiliar frequency.

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