There is a silence older than death.
A hush that echoes not with nothingness, but with the potential of everything.
Beneath the scorched skies of the Great Obsidian Waste, past rivers of black salt and broken prayers, lies Cindervault—a forgotten cathedral carved inside the fossil of a dead god's skull.
No birds flew here.No beasts stirred.Only the dreams of once-gods whispered beneath the stone.
And now, Cael was coming to wake them.
They reached the Vault's entrance after days of silence. Not because they were cautious, but because the air demanded it.
Vyn touched the basalt steps first.
Her fingers trembled.
"I've never felt this many sealed names in one place," she muttered."It's like… sleeping minds pressing against a coffin lid."
Cael didn't respond.
He was watching the pillars.
Twelve in all. Each engraved with a word that did not belong to mortal tongues. But the threads in his blood translated it:
—Erasure—Grief—Memory—Fire—Echo—Thread—Hunger—Silence—Form—Desire—Loss—Birth
Each was a fragment of what once governed the gods.
"These are domains," Cael said softly."Not of current gods. Of forgotten ones."
And they were buried here. Chained beneath stone, cursed to dream until someone brave—or foolish—awakened them.
They stepped inside.
Cindervault did not look like a ruin.
It looked alive.
Veins of living obsidian pulsed faintly along the walls. Candles burned with no flame. Mosaics rearranged themselves, shifting between images of creation and carnage.
At the center stood a well—sealed by a lid of silver thorns.
As Cael approached, the threads around his body quivered.
Then the lid cracked.
A voice, low and ancient, drifted upward like incense from a funeral pyre:
"Who dares tread the Dreamless Depth?"
Cael stepped forward. His eyes were calm.
"A boy," he said, "who chose to rewrite fate."
The vault shuddered.
Stone wept. Statues cracked. A low moan echoed from deep below, like the exhale of something half-asleep and wholly furious.
"And what do you seek?" asked the voice.
"Truth," Cael said. "And the names of those who broke the world."
The voice laughed. Not cruelly. But with sorrow.
"Then drink."
The silver thorns uncurled like dying serpents.
Inside the well was not water.
It was liquid memory.
Cael bent, scooped a handful, and drank.
He saw everything.
The world before the Shatter.
The First Weavers—gods of thought and idea.
The betrayal. The one called No-Form, the entity that taught mortals to unmake gods.
The Hollow Prince. Not a villain. But a child of grief.
And at the center of it all—a cradle.
A place not marked on any map.
A place where the first thread was spun.
"You cannot undo what was," said the voice."But you may become what comes next."
Cael opened his eyes. They glowed with the light of the Pattern.
"Then I'll go to the cradle."
Vyn helped him stand. He looked pale, as if the truth had burned him from the inside out.
But he was not weaker.
He was becoming.
"Next stop," Vyn said, trying to mask the tremble in her voice, "we find the Cradle."
But neither of them saw the shadow that had slithered out behind them.
A silhouette with no face. No heart. Just hunger.
And it whispered…
"The Thread must not continue."