The Vault of Chains had gone silent again—but not with emptiness. It was a silence that breathed, deep and alive. Not a void, but a presence—ancient, patient, and watchful. It pressed against Selena's skin like invisible hands, cold and inquisitive. It seeped into her lungs, thick as fog, clinging to every breath like dust stirred from the pages of a book long closed. She had known silence in battlefields, in the long corridors of shattered temples, even in her own dreams. But never like this. This wasn't the absence of sound. This was the presence of something that remembered.
It was the hush of waiting gods. The inhale before judgment. The pause in a prayer that no one had dared finish.
