The Rift closed behind them with a dull, organic snap.
Rael stumbled forward, hand braced on his knee, breath hitching from the flood of foreign memory. Elara caught his arm, steadying him as the Hollow Vault's residual glow faded into the mist.
They were back on the upper ridge of Kaer Thorne, an outpost long buried under Dominion scar-trees and corrupted airstreams. Above, the sky churned — a storm brewing between fractured clouds and shattered light.
"I can't… I can't shut it out," Rael whispered. "The Vault memory — it's still running in the background."
Elara tapped her Dominion HUD, the spectral interface flickering before her. "You've been Root-linked. That beacon didn't just give you access — it rewrote your permissions."
Rael looked up. "Say that again in human."
She exhaled. "Your Dominion Signature isn't just a key now. It's part of the system. You're being treated like a Nexaran architect."
Rael blinked. "That's… horrifying."
"Tell me about it."
As the Dominion winds howled over the high cliff, Rael sat cross-legged and tried to quiet the glyphs still shimmering across his arms. His Signature had become restless — new symbols manifesting like language desperate to be spoken.
He focused on one word the sentinel had spoken:
Root-breaker.
What was broken? What had he become?
"You should eat," Elara said, tossing him a sealed ration pack. "Can't decode the universe on an empty stomach."
Rael nodded faintly, peeling it open with one hand while his HUD pinged. A faint red thread blinked at the edge of his vision — a glyph-based tracker trying to triangulate something just beyond the mountain's ridge.
"Elara… you seeing this?" he asked.
She squinted at her own HUD. "I've got a ping. Directional. Looks like a Beacon fragment, high frequency."
"But that shouldn't be possible, right? Beacons don't just float around aimlessly."
She stood, brushing snow off her boots. "Unless someone turned it into a decoy."
Rael rose too, already adjusting his cloak against the rising wind. "A trap?"
"Maybe." She smiled. "Let's spring it."
The slope toward the signal was treacherous, littered with skeletal remnants of Orvannis trees — strange spires of calcified bark, once used to channel ambient Dominion energy in pre-Sundering times. Now they simply whispered. Literally.
Each gust of wind carried murmurs through their hollow bones.
"…Code incomplete… syntax severed… return the key…"
Rael kept his hands tucked close, afraid the glyphs would flare again and draw attention. Elara, more cautious than usual, walked with her blade already lit — the glyph-circuit across its edge glowing faintly blue.
They crested the final ridge.
The world changed.
A crater had split the valley below.
Not natural.
It pulsed with Dominion scarring — jagged fissures of red and purple energy leaking from the earth like blood vessels split open. At the center stood a figure.
Tall. Cloaked.
Unmoving.
Rael scanned it with his HUD — but the readings returned null.
"I don't like this," Elara said.
"You liked the Vault?"
"More than this."
They descended, cautiously, boots crunching across frost-laced stone until they were twenty meters away.
The figure turned.
Its face was covered by a mask — a half-plate of reflective obsidian carved with shifting glyphs. Its presence felt wrong — not hostile, not Hollow Legion, but something else entirely.
"Rael Kaizen," it spoke. Not asked — declared.
Elara bristled. "Who wants to know?"
"I am Gavran," it said, voice layered — like three people speaking in harmony. "Bearer of the Orvannis Thread. Custodian of Forbidden Code. I was waiting for you."
Rael narrowed his eyes. "I'm not on anyone's calendar."
"You are now," Gavran said. "The Vault has opened. The Lexemark has awakened. And you… have inherited a lineage you do not understand."
Rael's HUD pinged again. It wasn't just a Beacon reading — it was decoding the man's Dominion signature. Except it wasn't reading as one signature. It was reading as five.
"What are you?" Elara asked, stepping closer.
"I am a remnant," Gavran replied. "A poly-threaded entity — stitched from five Architects who chose recursion over death."
Rael's voice was low. "You're a ghost wearing skin."
"Yes," Gavran said calmly. "And I've come to warn you."
Lightning cracked overhead. The winds shifted — more violently this time. Rael's glyphs burned again, like a fever rising under his skin.
"You were not meant to survive the Hollow Vault," Gavran continued. "Your Dominion signature was flawed. Incomplete. But something changed. Something accepted you."
"I didn't ask for this," Rael growled.
"No," Gavran agreed. "But Velgrath did."
Velgrath. The word echoed again.
Rael turned. "What even is Velgrath?"
Gavran tilted his head slightly. "You still don't see it, do you?"
"Enlighten me."
Gavran raised a hand.
The valley beneath them shifted — the glyph-scarred stone flickering like code. For a brief second, Rael saw it not as terrain but as architecture. Towers buried beneath time. Pathways rendered invisible. This wasn't wilderness.
This was a city.
"Velgrath," Gavran said, "is the skin of Nexara — the overworld shell cast over its ruin. You walk daily over its bones and call it wilderness."
Rael took a step back, stunned. "We've been living on Nexara?"
"No," Gavran said. "You've been living in its shadow."
Elara's blade retracted slowly. "So what do you want, Gavran?"
"To offer guidance," the strange figure said. "You carry the Dominion faultline — a Signature with no Origin Beacon. That makes you dangerous. To the Choirless. To the Empire. To the Code itself."
Rael frowned. "You're saying I'm a glitch?"
"No," Gavran said, finally lowering his hand. "I'm saying you're a rewrite."
Suddenly, a new glyph exploded on Rael's HUD. A warning.
Multiple Choirless signatures detected. Vector: inbound.
"They found us," Elara muttered. "We need to move."
"No," Gavran said.
His hand shot outward.
A column of light erupted behind them — a Dominion firewall formed in pure code, fractal in shape, humming with glyphs.
Rael turned. "What are you doing?!"
"Buying you time," Gavran said. "The Choirless cannot breach my syntax. But only for a moment."
Rael hesitated. "Why help us?"
Gavran's mask tilted downward. "Because I remember what we were. And I fear what we've become."
The light intensified.
Gavran stepped back into the flame.
And vanished.
Rael turned to Elara. "We keep running into people who know more about me than I do."
"Welcome to legacy inheritance," she muttered.
He grimaced. "I didn't sign up for this."
"You did the moment your Signature burned through its first glyph," she said. "Now let's go before Gavran's firewall burns out."
As they ran toward the mountain pass, Elara spoke again.
"You know what I don't get?" she asked. "Gavran said you're a rewrite. But he never said why."
Rael looked up, the skies beginning to bleed.
"Maybe the Code itself broke," he said. "And I'm just the patch."