Vespera's coordinates were a scar in the navigational charts. A world not just dead, but murdered. Its biosphere had been scoured away in a single, ancient cataclysm, leaving only a globe of grey dust and jagged rock under a cold, white sun.
The Wayfarer broke orbit over the designated continent. The Heartwell was not a hidden location. It was a massive, perfectly circular crater fifty kilometers across, its basin glowing with a faint, persistent amber light. At its center stood a single, stark structure—a spire of black stone that seemed to absorb the weak sunlight.
"No life signs," Ryn reported. "No energy readings beyond that ambient glow. It's… quiet."
"Too quiet," Leyla murmured, her ears flat.
Mira's spatial senses recoiled. "The space down there is… wounded. It's not twisted like corruption. It's thin. Like a scar over a hole that never healed."
Echo's new Death-Sense tingled. The entire planet sang a silent, single note of profound, final death. But from the Heartwell itself, he sensed something else. Not life. Not death. Memory. Impossibly dense, residual memory, soaked into the stone.
"This is the place," he said, his voice firm. "We go down. Stay sharp. The trap isn't in the environment. It's in the truth we find here."
They landed the Wayfarer on the crater's rim. The air was still and cold, carrying no smell at all. As they hiked down the gentle slope toward the central spire, their footsteps kicked up puffs of fine grey ash that had once been a world's worth of life.
The black spire loomed larger, an obsidian needle against the pale sky. There was no door. Only a dark opening.
From within, a voice echoed. Not a Shadow Operative's whisper. This voice was old, dry, and carried the weight of epochs. A voice that knew the taste of ashes.
"Enter, Child of the Schism. And behold the cradle of your sorrow."