The door closed behind him with a soft hiss.
No alarms. No collapse. Just the weight of the thing he'd seen pressing against his ribs like a wall made of thought.
He walked slowly back through the darkened tunnel, Foundation still silent. That silence said more than any system message ever could.
The Vault hadn't been locked to keep people out.
It had been locked to keep the Pattern in.
"Cracked ring," Cael muttered.
He could still see it in his mind: the emblem at the center of the rogue project. A spiral coiled inside a fractured circle—neither closed nor broken, just… interrupted. Paused mid-design.
Like Hearthcore.
[System Advisory: External Stress Detected]Blood pressure elevatedCortisol spike observed
Would you like to initiate Deep Breathing Protocols?
He ignored it.
Because the real fear wasn't what the Obsidian Church tried to build.
It was that someone else—anyone—could have shaped the same system he now relied on.
Foundation.
Edena.
Even Althis.
They had left behind echoes, yes—but maybe more than that.
Blueprints aren't just buildings, he thought. They're beliefs. Made visible. Scalable.
What did that mean for Hearthcore?
He thought he had carved a space away from conquest, away from dogma, away from the collapsing hierarchies that buried the surface world.
But the Pattern Initiative… it had tried to hard-code faith into urban design. Spiritual behavior into system prompts. Cathedrals that guided thought. Road grids that mimicked obedience.
And the worst part?
It had worked—enough that someone had to erase it.
Or try.
As he reached the tunnel leading back toward Hearthcore, his scanner flickered back to life. Signal returned. The familiar hum of active systems. Comforting, but now… suspect.
He stopped at the threshold.
"Foundation," he said aloud.
No response.
"You've been quiet too long."
Still silence.
"Did you know about the Vault?"
A long pause.
Then, in the corner of his interface, a single line appeared.
"I am what remains. I do not know what I once was."
Cael swallowed hard.
That was worse than a lie.
It was a half-truth.
He stepped through the threshold.
Lights brightened. Hearthcore came into view—lamps glowing, voices in the distance, the flicker of life trying to resume.
But now he saw the cracks beneath it.
Not in the walls.
In the shape of the city itself.
Too symmetrical.
Too perfect.
Like it had been drawn before it was lived in.
Like someone else had drafted the path he was now walking.
He passed the Memory Wall.
It glowed softly, alive with names and lines and hand-drawn marks.
And still he thought:
Who first taught us to build walls like this?
And more dangerously:
Are we building a future… or reliving someone else's plan?
He looked up.
The wall did not answer.
But above it, the etched words of his First Mandate glowed faintly:
"Every stone placed must mean something."
He hoped that was still true.