The entrance to the underground Sanctum Vaults lay hidden behind the Grand Reliquary of Alsira, veiled by ancient illusion wards that twisted memory and perception. Few even knew how to bypass them.
But Elira did now.
Asher, Emilia, and Liaen stood at the edge of a sunken stairwell, newly revealed by Elira's ghostlight. The marble steps spiraled down into a darkness that breathed, thick with shadow.
"Once we go down, there's no turning back," Elira warned, her glow faint but focused.
Asher's grip tightened around his sword. "Good. I'm tired of waiting."
Emilia drew in a steady breath. "There's soul energy down there. Thick... fractured. The ground itself feels like it remembers pain."
Liaen slid soul-bolts into his crossbow. "Then let's make sure it remembers ours too."
The descent was slow and quiet.
As they moved deeper beneath the city, the air grew colder, denser. The walls narrowed, lined with soulfire torches—most long extinguished, a few sputtering weakly in the dark.
Then came the whispers.
Not from around them, but within.
"Elira… do you hear it?" Emilia asked.
"Yes," the ghost replied. "They're calling to the fragments below. Echoes of broken souls—devoured, bent, hollowed."
They rounded a bend in the stairwell and saw it: a shattered door, its soul-seal split, leaking tendrils of black mist into the corridor.
"This was a prison," Asher murmured. "Now it's a cradle."
The first chamber brimmed with relics suspended in crystal—soul-bound artifacts, cursed items, and even severed limbs from long-dead SSS-rank monsters. Each relic hummed softly, vibrating with long-contained power.
Emilia paused at a display case housing an ornate dagger. It pulsed faintly, responding to her presence.
"It's reacting to me."
Liaen narrowed his gaze. "Soul-bonded. Someone in your bloodline forged it. Take it."
She pulled it free. The glow surged. Blue threads of light curled up her arm, weaving patterns across her skin—patterns that shimmered like Elira's essence.
A shriek shattered the silence.
From the corridor ahead, a creature lunged—eight-limbed, fused from melted corpses, its eyes leaking shadow. A Soul-Warped Warden.
Asher met it head-on, steel flashing. Liaen fired radiant bolts. Emilia raised the dagger, channeling energy, carving glowing sigils mid-air. Elira surged forward, forming a radiant barrier to block the corruption spilling from the beast.
The fight was brutal—but they brought it down. The creature crumbled into wet ash.
They moved on—breathing hard, wounds fresh—into the final vault.
There it was.
Suspended in the air by ritual chains hung a shard of soulcore—obsidian black, writhing with power. Around it, four masked cultists stood chanting in a language that turned the air frigid. Between them loomed a skeletal throne, its bone surface pulsing with crimson veins, twitching in rhythm with every syllable.
One of the cultists stopped chanting. He turned.
"You," he hissed, pointing at Elira. "You should not be here."
She floated forward, face pale. "You. You're the one who shattered my essence. The one who tore me from peace."
The man removed his mask.
A face from the past.
Elira's breath caught. "Asher… that's Malric. Your old commander."
The name hit like a hammer—Malric Valen. A war hero. A Soulwarden turned traitor.
Asher's voice dropped, cold and deadly. "You died at the Siege of Dareth Hollow."
Malric smiled. "No, brother. I transcended."
Chaos erupted.
Liaen fired first—his bolt tearing through a cultist's throat. Emilia unleashed a burst of soul-light, fracturing the ritual circle. The throne let out a howl—a living, keening wail.
Elira and Asher launched forward together—one a burning ghost, the other a man driven by steel and grief.
Malric met them with a blade forged from his own corrupted soul—twisted, alive, unnatural. Their swords clashed, the sound ringing like a funeral bell through the vault.
"You should've joined me," Malric spat. "You would've made a god."
"I already have one," Asher growled—and drove his blade in.
Elira struck at the same time—her light piercing straight through Malric's chest.
He screamed.
The throne cracked.
And the soulcore fragment let out a shriek of its own—pure, raw pain rippling across every wall and bone.
Elira turned to the others, eyes blazing.
"RUN!"
They barely made it out.
The vault crumbled behind them. Seals ruptured. The throne shattered to dust. The obsidian shard melted into black mist. The remaining cultists were crushed beneath falling stone and soulshock.
Gasping for breath, they emerged into the city above—stumbling through a crumbling mausoleum.
"It's done," Liaen panted, lowering his weapon.
Emilia held the dagger close to her chest. Its light had steadied.
"For now," she said.
Elira hovered beside Asher, her glow fading. "One fragment is gone. But the others... they'll know."
Asher looked back toward the Hall, jaw clenched.
"Then we find the rest."