They did not go back to the sealed corridor.
Devansh took Ira deeper.
Below the chambers she had already seen. Below even the halls that predated the city. They moved through a narrowing descent where the stone felt denser, less like architecture and more like something that had condensed under immense pressure.
"This is where the first alignments were anchored," he said. "Before there were laws, there were understandings."
Ira walked slowly. The heaviness in her chest had begun to respond long before they reached the bottom, tightening with a sense she had come to recognize.
Proximity.
The passage opened into a low, circular space with no markings on the walls. No symbols. No inscriptions. Only a shallow depression at the center of the floor, as if something had once been placed there and then removed.
Devansh stopped at its edge.
"This is where the city learned what it would become," he said. "Where the agreements were not inscribed… but impressed."
Ira stepped forward.
The moment her foot crossed the threshold, the air changed.
Not in temperature.
In tension.
She felt it immediately. A quiet density in the space, like a held note that never resolved.
Her chest tightened.
"This place remembers," she murmured.
Devansh watched her carefully. "It remembers because it was never allowed to forget."
She closed her eyes.
The heaviness within her shifted, spreading into something like contour. She no longer felt only weight. She felt edges. Faint boundaries where emotion had been taught to stop behaving like itself and start behaving like instruction.
She knelt slowly beside the depression.
When her fingers brushed the stone, the sensation did not surge.
It opened.
She saw nothing.
But she felt the first shaping.
Fear becoming framework.
Love being pressed into permanence.
Hope rearranged into function.
And beneath it all — a singular, defining intention.
Preserve what cannot be borne.
Her breath trembled.
"This is where the city decided," she whispered, "that it would rather hold suffering forever than let it move."
Devansh did not answer.
Because he knew.
She pressed her palm fully to the stone.
The heaviness in her chest answered.
Not outward.
Downward.
She felt something old stir.
An agreement that had not expected to be questioned.