The heavy steel door, now scarred by the Null-Entropy dissolution of its lock, groaned open just enough for Kaelen to slip through. The air on the other side was cold and lifeless—a vacuum of sensory input, completely different from the chill of the ash in the outer archives. Here, the Blight was dense, built up over centuries of psychic suppression. It felt less like dust and more like frozen water.
Kaelen pressed his back against the cool metal, gripping the the entropy shard until his knuckles turned white. The soul-seizure from his last use was peaking; the back of his mind felt scraped raw, like fresh surgical tissue exposed to air. He pressed his palms to his temples, trying to force the residual heat back, but the pain came with the tainted power, and it demanded payment. I traded my friend's face for three seconds of tactical advantage. What will the next second cost?
He heard scraping from the corridor outside—the Weaver of the Silent Chant testing the door. The Weaver didn't need to break the Null-Entropy field; he would use the Art of Woven Sighs to re-thread the psychic structure of the material until the steel remembered how to be whole.
"Scrivener Kaelen," the Weaver's voice was muffled but clear, filled with unnerving sincerity. "You are making this difficult for the Hieratic Dominion. We need your Affliction not for punishment, but for calibration. The Archon of Order demands structural perfection. Do not force an irreversible Knotting of Annihilation."
Kaelen ignored the threat. The word "calibration" confirmed his deepest fear: the Grand Priesthood of Cinders didn't want him dead; they wanted to harness The Scrivener's Cleft—to turn the chaos of cosmic truth into a tool for the Archon's totalitarian order.
He turned into the Crypts. The chamber was large, built from towering, shelf-like tiers of fused ash, black and inert, rising into a void where the ceiling should have been. The air was silent, with no echoes or sounds of movement, only the intense pressure of forgotten history. This was where the Hieratic Dominion stored the most dangerous Structural Remnants—the truths that could shatter the Cinder-Vow if exposed to daylight.
The aisles were lined with artifacts encased in clear, solidified psychic resin: the original texts of the Elder Scourges, the philosophical doctrines of the Abyssal Architects, and—most ominously—thousands of black, crystalline scrolls containing the extracted Memory Fragmentation of the first generations of the enslaved.
This was the source of the Blood-Tax of Memory.
Kaelen needed to find his father's final, encrypted warning. The archive map, which he kept because The Scrivener's Cleft prioritized coordinates over his own history, led him to the innermost ring, marked Vault of the Suppressed Vows.
He navigated the black aisles, his boots crunching on dust so old it felt like crushed glass. Suddenly, his inner core—the chaotic tremor that preceded a forced activation of his Affliction—flared.
Trap. Not physical. Not Weaver.
He felt a sudden spike in the surrounding ash. It wasn't the dull, cold suppression of the Archon's presence; it was a focused psychic construct—a ward of the Grand Priesthood. This was a Phantasm of Unmaking.
The air shimmered ahead, and a figure formed: a young woman, weeping, translucent, dressed in tattered remains of a Scrivener's uniform. Her face was blurred by psychic interference, but her grief was sharp and real.
An empathy defense, Kaelen recognized, forcing himself to breathe through the pain of the soul-seizure. It was designed to make the intruder stop, sympathize, and let the Phantasm force Stone-Sleep.
The Phantasm glided toward him, its voice a hollow echo of despair that resonated in the fragile parts of his mind. "Why did you forget us, Kaelen? Why did you forget my love? The Archon demanded silence, and you gave it to him."
Kaelen felt a real pang of loss—the Phantasm was targeting the exact emotional void left by his previous Memory Fragmentation. He instinctively tried to grasp the memory of the ally he lost, but the internal archive in his mind returned only a cold, data-heavy file: Ally: Coords available , Affiliation: Clockwork Heresy,
Emotional Value: Nullified.
He had to engage The Scrivener's Cleft immediately or risk being paralyzed by artificial grief. He closed his eyes, forcing his mind to split open. The pain was astronomical—the sensation of his consciousness tearing along the fault line of his genetic curse.
The darkness behind his eyes exploded with the Structural Remnant.
The Phantasm of Unmaking did not appear as a weeping woman. The Scrivener's Cleft showed him its true identity: a complex Knotting of Resentment—an enormous psychic loom woven from the despair of hundreds of souls subjected to the Blood-Tax of Memory. The Archon's priests had harvested not only their memories but their grief, weaving it into a sentient, defensive spell.
Weakness: The Thread of Self-Doubt. The Remnant data screamed the weakness in his mind: the emotional core of the Phantasm was tied to the self-loathing of the priests who wove it, centered on a specific temporal loop in the spell matrix.
Kaelen opened his eyes and lunged to the side, ignoring the weeping image. He didn't aim for the Phantasm's core; he aimed at a large, resin-encased cylinder on a shelf to his right—a sealed record of the Hieratic Dominion's founding principles.
He smashed the entropy-shard into the resin casing. The Mechanism of Null-Entropy flared, and the resin, built to withstand centuries of psychic pressure, melted away instantly. The ancient scroll within, brittle and covered in the Blight, was exposed to the ordinary, tainted air of the Crypts.
The act was not destructive, but distracting. The Phantasm of Unmaking, woven from the psychic energy of the Hieratic Dominion, was momentarily shocked and diverted by the sudden exposure of a forbidden text. Its attention fractured, its weeping voice stuttered, and the psychic pressure on Kaelen eased.
Kaelen used that brief moment of confusion to race through the vault toward the inner ring. He had bypassed the guard, but the cost was imminent.
The soul-seizure demanded payment for this, his most difficult use of The Scrivener's Cleft yet. The Memory Fragmentation focused not on a person or a place, but on an abstract concept.
Payment: The meaning of Hope.
Kaelen stumbled, collapsing between two towering stacks of black scrolls. He knew that Hope was a desirable emotional state defined by the expectation of positive outcomes. He understood the word, the definition, and the context in which it was used. But the feeling—the irrational, warm confidence that something better might exist beyond the Archon's Order—was gone. The word was now hollow, an archived piece of data. He was left with only cold, functional resolve.
He pushed himself up, his mind now a fortress of facts and a wasteland of feelings. He had become less human, but more effective.
He reached the Vault of the Suppressed Vows. The chamber was small, sealed by a vault door that did not use a lock but an active psychic barrier: a wall of shimmering, red-threaded energy maintained by the continual input of the Art of Woven Sighs.
The Weaver is close, Kaelen thought. This is a live feed from the Hieratic Dominion's network.
He activated The Scrivener's Cleft one last time. The pain was so intense that he briefly tasted iron. The red psychic barrier was immediately overlaid with its Structural Remnant. It was a massive, flowing incantation—the Knotting of Obedience—designed to compel anyone to kneel and surrender.
The knot is fueled by the Archon's prison cell, the data flooded his mind. The power is immense, but the incantation is complex. It needs the Weaver's focus. Target the man, not the magic.
The external wall of the Crypts groaned, and the steel door gave way with a sound of ripping metal. The Weaver had re-threaded the door and was advancing. Kaelen had less than a minute.
He saw his father's final message in the Structural Remnant—a small, dark seam of Clockwork Heresy embedded in the metal of the vault door, hidden from anyone who didn't possess The Cleft. His father had left him a key: a pressure point that would redirect the Weaver's power away from the Archon's source and into the surrounding God-Blight.
Kaelen smashed the entropy-shard onto the hidden seam, using a force and precision that cost him the remaining stability in his right arm—a purely physical cost that was better than more soul-seizure.
The Mechanism of Null-Entropy flared again, not to dissolve but to divert. The Weaver's current of psychic energy, the lifeblood of the Art of Woven Sighs, was ripped from its source and dumped directly into the volatile ash surrounding the Crypts.
The result was cataclysmic. The dense dust reacted violently to the sudden infusion of raw psychic power. The black scroll stacks began to groan. A wave of intense static exploded outward—a shockwave.
The Weaver, now standing at the entrance to the main Crypts, was momentarily stunned by the backlash of his own redirected power. He stumbled, his disciplined form lost as the sheer density of the ash overloaded his senses.
Kaelen slipped through the Vault of the Suppressed Vows, the air inside stale but pure. He was safe, for now.
The soul-seizure hit him hard, forcing him to his knees. The internal voice of The Scrivener's Cleft demanded its final payment for bypassing the Knotting of Obedience.
Payment: The structural memory of the Cinder-Vow's flaw.
The crucial information—the exact loophole his father had engineered into the contract that enslaved the world—was violently excised from his immediate recall. He knew the Cinder-Vow had a flaw, but he could no longer remember what it was or how to exploit it. It was sealed behind a wall of protective oblivion, archived somewhere in the wasteland of his mind.
Kaelen was left only with the knowledge that his father's final warning—a small, encrypted metal canister—was hidden somewhere in the vault. He was one step closer to ending the Hieratic Dominion, but his mind was now a vast, Vitiated ruin. He lacked hope, crucial knowledge, and was rapidly losing the ability to reflect on himself. He was becoming the perfect weapon, paid for by the loss of everything he was meant to save.