The Riftforged vault did not creak when it opened.
It unfolded.
Brass panels peeled back in perfect symmetry, unlocking in a pattern so intricate that Cassian instinctively stepped back. Not from fear.
From respect.
Whatever built this had not been a man in a workshop; it had been a mind too old or too broken to care for linear thinking. The locks responded not to keys, but blood, proximity, and resonance. His presence had activated something meant for him.
Inside the vault: darkness. Still. Clean.
Cassian held the lantern forward.
Three objects lay on a recessed stone table.
A crystalline vial sealed with a glyph.A folded diagram stitched onto human vellum.And a heart.
Mechanical. Still pulsing.
Cassian stared at it.
The heart wasn't allegorical. It was litera; part aetheric battery, part living core. Brass ribs formed a cage around glistening organic material. Tubes ran into its side, shivering with latent current.
It was alive. Or close.
And labeled, in tiny black lettering etched into the brass:C. VALE – PHASE 0.
He didn't move for a long time.
His mouth was dry. His mind, not panicking—cataloguing. Every detail. Every implication.
He picked up the vellum.
A diagram. Not of the heart. Of him. Bone structure. Nerve flow. Aether infusion at the cerebral stem.
The notes were dated nine years ago.
He was seventeen.
At the bottom, a line written in his father's angular hand:Subject stable. Memory wiped. Behavioral variance… tolerable.
Cassian sat.
Not out of weakness. Out of math. Out of the need to put the pieces in order.
He'd always been smarter. Faster. Healed from injuries that should've taken months. Could feel aetheric pulses without training.
He'd thought it was obsession. Willpower. Genius.
But it had never just been him.
It had been designed.
He wasn't simply the Duke's bastard.
He was the Duke's prototype.
Phase Zero.
The bird hopped down from the pedestal.
Its eye scanned him again. "Confirmation achieved," it chirped. "C. Vale. Project Origin. Consciousness unlocked."
Cassian looked up slowly. "What did he do to me?"
The bird made a whirring sound. Then played another voice recording.
"Cassian. If you've found this, it means you've begun to feel it. The way machines speak to you. The way magic moves through your blood without need for glyphs."
"You are not like them. Because you are not only them."
Cassian closed his eyes.
There was no rage.
Not yet.
There was understanding. A perfect line of logic finally snapping into place.
The nobles didn't just fear him because of his mind.
They feared what his father had hidden behind it.
The heart on the table pulsed once, then settled.
He touched it and something deep within him sparked.
Not memory.
Recognition.
He whispered into the dark, "How many more like me?"
The shadowbird's eye blinked once. Then again. Then it spoke—not in recording, not in imitation—but in its own voice, low and rasping, like old wires struggling to remember sound.
"There were four."
Cassian's breath held in his chest.
"Project Origin. Project Echo. Project Fracture. Project Silence."
He stepped forward, the heart's pulse now syncing; softly, impossibly-with the rhythm in his own chest.
"Where are the others?"
"Two are dead. One is missing. One… watches you."
Cassian felt the air shift. Not metaphorically. Literally like pressure in the room had changed.
The bird turned its head unnaturally far, one mechanical eye scanning him.
Then, softly:
"You were not just your father's work."
A beat.
"Your mother helped design the architecture."
Cassian's world stilled.
"My mother died in childbirth," he said, coldly.
"Your mother died giving birth," the bird corrected, "but not to you. To the seed."
The vial on the table glowed faintly now.
The crystal shimmered with a fluid that hummed when he stepped close; alive, reactive.
"What is that?" he asked.
The bird whispered, almost reverent.
"Her blood. The key. The last stabilizer. She knew it would kill her. She insisted."
Cassian didn't speak.
The lantern's flame flickered behind him, casting his shadow across the wall long, distorted, vaguely inhuman. The edges blurred and split where the heart pulsed.
His mother had been a Riftforger.
Not a lady. Not a casualty.
A co-architect of whatever he had become.
And she had died on purpose to give it life.
"Why would she do that?" he asked.
The bird's red eye dimmed, and its voice dropped to a whisper barely more than a pulse:
"Because she believed the Chain must break… and you were the only thing sharp enough to cut it."
Cassian's brow tightened. He stared at the bird as if it had misfired.
"…That doesn't make sense," he muttered. "She was a noble. She married into the Chain. Why would she want to break it?"
The bird remained still. Silent. Like it was weighing how much truth he could stand.
"My mother was a researcher," he said, more firmly now. "An archivist. She catalogued bloodlines and relics for House Vale. That was all."
"No," the bird said. "That was the cover."
The room seemed to darken around him. Not literally; but a pressure. A sense that something was closing in. Something long buried was beginning to stir.
"She was never part of the Circle," he said.
"She refused the Circle. Twice."
Cassian stepped back from the table, gaze flicking between the glowing vial and the Riftforged heart. "You're saying she built this? Helped design me?"
"She encoded the neural lattice. Chose your blood type. Crafted the bindings that kept your mind whole."
"I don't have bindings," he snapped.
The bird's eye gleamed. "You did."
Cassian went still.
"She locked away parts of you—fears, obsessions, compulsions. Emotions that would destabilize your structure." The bird's voice softened, almost regretful. "Until the day you were ready."
"And now?"
"Now the locks are failing."
Cassian turned his back to the pedestal. He paced once, twice, hands trembling at his sides.
His voice came low. Controlled. Fractured.
"She wanted a child."
"She wanted a weapon."
He slammed his fist on the wall—rust flaked off like old scabs. The lantern shook on its hook.
"I don't understand," he said through clenched teeth. "Why would she do this to me? Why would he allow it?"
The bird said nothing.
It didn't have to.
The truth wasn't in the word; it was in the math. The pieces were all there now. Lying quietly at the bottom of a vault designed to be found only when he was no longer just Cassian Vale.
He stepped back toward the table.
The heart pulsed once more.
His mother had believed the Chain needed to break.
And she had believed in him—not the boy. Not the mind. Not the heir.
In the thing he was becoming.
He just didn't know yet if that thing could survive what came next.