No one spoke for a while.
The ruined antechamber felt bigger without the Warden in it, but Elowen’s words packed the room tighter than any statue had. Permanent twilight. No more dawns, no more daylight. Just endless magical darkness.
Greg found himself staring at a chunk of broken stone, the image of Bart’s nephew flickering behind his eyes. Half-man, half-rat, grateful to die.
“Fuck,” Greg said at last, because his brain couldn’t decide between panic or sarcasm. “This is why I don’t take Quests.”
Violet made a small, strangled noise and rubbed at her face with ink-stained fingers. “I knew it,” she muttered. “I knew it was more than localized catastrophic magical fallout, but no, no one ever listens to the girl with the thesis taller than she is!”
Nars blew out a slow breath, leaning back on his hands. “Well,” he said. “On the bright side, if the sun falls out of the sky, we won’t have to worry about paying our bar tabs.”
Doran grunted. “Doubtful,” he said. “Barkeeps and bookkeeps alike thrive in darkness.”
Greg looked back at Elowen. She was still propped against the broken pillar, hair a mess, clothes torn and bandaged, hands limp in her lap. But her spine was straight. She didn't look away.
“No one knows for sure how many Vaults are on Aegis,” she said. “But few enough that the balance is already threatened.” She glanced up, eyes taking in the cracks and sigils around them. “This one is… important. A hinge point. If he succeeds here... it is why I came here.”
“Then we can’t let him reach the heart,” Violet said. “Obviously. Or corrupt it. Or whatever horrible verb he has planned. But we are also low on supplies, high on injuries, and standing in the middle of a collapsing magical disaster.” She jerked her chin toward the far archway, where the faint glow of the newly opened path to Depth Two pulsed. “We need to move. And then we need to stop.”
Greg blinked. “Stop?”
“Rest,” Doran translated. “Eat. Shit. Pray. Gather our strength before we push deeper.”
Elowen’s gaze softened slightly. “He is right,” she said. “I need to recover, if we are to have any chance of stopping him."
"Not to brag," Nars scoffed.
"I said we. But you will need me. Thankfully, so will Petar'l. Without me, he will be slowed down." She shifted, wincing. “I can walk. Slowly. If we’re going to move, let us do so now.”
Greg started to protest on general principle, then caught himself. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m carrying the heavy things.”
Violet snorted. “You are the heavy thing.”
Doran took point again, eyes scanning the walls. Nars skulked ahead, checking corners, prodding suspicious flagstones with the toe of his boot. Violet and Elowen walked in the middle, the halfling offering an arm Elowen pretended she didn’t lean on. Greg brought up the rear with his sword over one shoulder and an angel pleading with him to leave on the other.
Luckily, they didn’t have to go far.
Doran found them a side chamber off the main passage not long after the Warden’s hall, a low, broad space carved into the stone like an afterthought. No sigils glowed on the walls here, no faint hum of power. Just old dust, a collapsed bit of ceiling in one corner, and a narrow entryway that could be defended without too much imagination.
“This will do,” the dwarf said. “One entrance. No obvious murder holes.”
Nars swept through it anyway, checking for less obvious ones. He ran his fingers along the walls, tapped at the floor, peered up into the dim ceiling while Violet muttered something about “ambient corruption levels.” After a few minutes, he nodded once.
“Clear enough, for a decaying, haunted ruin,” he said. “If anything creeps up on us, it’ll have to come through the door.”
“Good,” Violet said. “That means I can put trip runes there. I usually prefer explosives for night wards but since we’re indoors…”
They set up something resembling a camp. It wasn’t much: bedrolls laid out on relatively flat patches of floor, a small fire built in a shallow hollow Doran scraped into the stone. Violet muttered a smokeless charm over it, and the little flame, coaxed from flint and shredded packing straw, burned low and steady without coughing soot into their lungs.
Nars rigged a few simple alarms in the corridor outside—bits of crystal tied to string, a loose stone propped just so; small, nearly invisible things that the average passing Skulker wouldn’t notice until it kicked them and announced itself in a clatter.
Elowen sank down onto a bedroll with visible relief, stretching her splinted leg out with care. The healing she’d done had taken the worst edge off the pain, but every movement still looked like effort.
“Sorry,” she murmured, smoothing the blankets with her hand. “I'm not the best company in the world right now. Rest is definitely a good idea.”
Greg dug into his pack and produced what passed for dinner: dried meat, hard cheese, a few sad travel biscuits, and something Violet had insisted on packing which might once have been fruit before being alchemically preserved into colorful bricks of vaguely sweet, tooth-chipping punishment.
They ate in relative quiet at first, the fire’s low glow pushing the Vault’s weird blue gloom back just enough to make faces look almost normal. The food was terrible, but it was food. After the day they’d had, Greg tore into it like a feast.
“So,” Nars said eventually, chewing on a strip of jerked something. “Turns out the quest is to save the world, go figure. We, uh, making a plan or… just winging the apocalypse?”
“Step one is not dying,” Violet said. “Step two is gathering information. Step three is figuring out how to kick Petar’l in the dick so hard his ancestors feel it.”
“I like step three,” Doran said.
“So, winging it,” Nars decided.
Elowen smiled, faintly. Greg stared at that smile longer than he meant to, but his thoughts were troubled. This food isn't real. We're bone tired and beat to hell, but when we close our eyes, we'll wake up instantly refreshed. And yet it all feels so real. He looked deep into her eyes. Is it? Fuck.
“We need to reach the heart,” she said, after a moment. “The central… machine. The power of the Sun and Moon are combined there like no other place in Aegis. That is what Petar'l is after. What he seeks to corrupt. If we reach it first, we might be able to… persuade it otherwise.”
“Persuade the machine,” Greg repeated. “As in… talk to it?”
“In a sense,” Elowen said. “Machine is a poor attempt to describe its divinity. These hearts were woven by the Gods, Totth and Veylun together, when the world was still new. They are the very hearts of Aegis. Their power, invested in physical form on Aegis, to make it real. The First Prayer.”
Real?
Violet’s eyes lit up. “A metaphysical engine,” she whispered breathlessly. “Layered on a physical chassis. Of course. That’s why the corruption bleeds upward instead of down; the structure is trying to re-balance, and it has nowhere to send the feedback.”
Greg nodded slowly, like that had made sense. “So, we get to the heart,” he said. “Then what?”
“Then we reset it,” Elowen said. “We restore the proper channels. We unhook whatever chains Petar’l’s masters have grafted onto it. That should bleed off the excess Moon aspect without tearing the world in half.”
“And if we do nothing…” Nars said, “if he succeeds?”
Her gaze darkened. “Then the world dims,” she said simply. “Slowly at first. Once the corruption here spreads? Longer twilights. Weaker harvests. People who turn to Velyun for warmth in the dark will find only corruption. The Vaults break entirely and everything that should have stayed buried claws its way up.” She paused. “All that was unmade in the light shall be reborn in the darkness and all things born in the light shall be unmade in the darkness.”
Silence settled again. The fire crackled quietly, as if it were listening.
“Okay,” Greg said at last. “Then we don’t let that happen. Step two-point-five.”
It came out more confident than he felt. Honestly, if it had just been him, his plan would have been “ride out the zombie apocalypse as long as you can.” Like most men of a certain age, he'd certainly prepared for the inevitability. But it wasn't just him.
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Elowen looked at him, studying his expression. “You speak as if you have a choice,” she said.
“I do,” Greg said. “Everyone in this room does. I did what I came here to do: rescue you. I didn’t sign up to save the Sun from the Moon or cleanse the world of corruption. But you did. And if you’re not going to stay saved, then I’ll just keep following you until you are. That’s the Quest I’m on.”
He meant it as a joke, but something in the words settled between them, a small anchor in all the chaos.
They drifted into quieter conversations after that. Doran and Violet argued companionably over the exact extent of the Vault’s structural damage. Nars recounted, with unconvincing modesty, a previous encounter with a “less impressive” Warden in a different ruin that had, believe it or not, also exploded.
Greg listened with half an ear, his attention drawn again and again to Elowen. She sat with her knees pulled up as much as her leg allowed, cloak drawn around her shoulders against the chill. The strange Vault light made the silver threads in her hair glint like captured dawn.
One by one, they settled into their bedrolls or their chosen corners, leaving the little circle of firelight less crowded.
Greg found himself beside Elowen, backs against the same stretch of wall, a comfortable arm’s length apart. Close enough that he could feel the heat of her and smell the faint incense-and-parchment note that clung to her even under sweat and dust.
He cleared his throat awkwardly and tried to remember how to talk to women.
“So,” he said. “Hi.”
She turned her head, that small half-smile flickering again. “Hello,” she said. “Again.”
“I just wanted to thank you again, for saving me in the tavern,” Greg said. “If I'd known... I understand what you meant, now. I should have stayed out of it.”
“Just a sucker for a pretty girl?” Elowen asked. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “I was looking forward to that drink. And to what you were going to say next.”
There was a pause. Not quite awkward, but not exactly smooth either. The kind of pause that could go anywhere.
"Thank you, Greg,” she said at last.
He blinked. “For what? You practically saved yourself, with that trick. We just smashed things. And shouted.”
“For coming,” she said. “For doing... whatever you did.” She looked at his muscles. All of them. "For getting everyone together. For saving me. For staying." She watched his face, something cautious and hopeful flickering underneath. “For giving me hope back.”
Greg stared at the fire. “Damn,” he said. He didn't know what to say but he kept talking anyway. “I mean. You know.”
Her expression changed, growing more serious. “I did,” she said softly. “I just didn’t realize it yet.”
He frowned. “You’ve lost me.”
Elowen drew her cloak tighter, as if bracing herself against a different kind of chill. “This is going to sound…” She hesitated, carefully selecting the least embarrassing word. “Unhinged.”
“Have you met me?” Greg laughed. “I can roll with unhinged.”
She took a breath. “I saw you before you arrived,” she said. “I dreamt of you.”
He choked on absolutely nothing. “Do what now?”
“I didn’t know it was you,” she added quickly. “Not at first. I don’t want you to think I’ve been… fixating on some stranger for months. It’s not like that.”
“That would be weird,” Greg said weakly. His heart had picked up speed in a very unhelpful way. “Uh, what kind of dreams?”
Her gaze drifted toward the fire. “The kind that feel less like sleep and more like being… shown something,” she said. “Totth’s presence is… quiet, these days. Faint. But sometimes, the Sun pushes through in flashes. Warnings. Glimpses. Little… nudges.”
“Fuck me with a duck,” Greg muttered. “A prophecy.”
“I saw a man,” Elowen continued, unphased. “Standing at the edge of a ruined gate between the Sun and the Moon. Everything behind him was shadow. Everything before him was blinding light. He looked… tired. And angry. And very, very alone.” She smiled sadly. “He reminded me of myself.”
Greg swallowed. “And you think that was me?”
“No,” she said. “Not at first. The images were... fragments. A hand on a door. A silhouette with a sword. A voice, shouting something I couldn’t hear clearly. The more the Vaults shook, the more often it came. I thought it was a metaphor. Or a warning that I had made the wrong choice somewhere.”
“And then?” Greg asked.
“And then I felt you,” she said simply. “The day you arrived in Blucliffe, the balance… bent. Just a little. Like a weight had been set down on the other side of the scale. It was subtle. Most people wouldn’t notice. But when you’ve spent your life watching for the slightest flicker of sunlight in a world going dark…” She shrugged. “It stood out.”
Greg shifted, suddenly very aware of his own bulk, his own stupid, miraculous muscles. “I didn’t do anything,” he protested. “I showed up, and after the screaming died down and I found some pants to put on, I pretty much just hung out.”
“I noticed,” Elowen said. Her mouth quirked. “So, I waited. And you… pretty much just hung out. I thought about approaching you, but it seemed like you were avoiding me. So, I thought, well, he’s clearly no kind of Chosen One, but now…”
Nars woke up from his half-sleep long enough to roll his eyes without even opening them. “Oh good,” he murmured from his bedroll. “He’s Chosen. I was worried but now we’re definitely saved for sure, Greg’s here.”
Violet’s head popped up from behind a stack of notebooks. “Wait,” she said. “Back up. You ‘felt’ him? As in, his aura registered as an external perturbation in the Vault’s field? Unprompted?”
Elowen hesitated. “That is not how I would put it,” she said carefully.
“That is absolutely how I would put it,” Violet said, eyes gleaming. She scooted closer on her knees. “Describe it. In detail. I want to compare it to my notes. I’ve also been spying on Greg since he arrived.”
“I wasn’t spying,” Elowen said.
Violet waved this away as trivial. “Prophesizing, spying, whatever.”
Doran, sitting near the entrance with his axe across his knees, gave a small nod. “Strange times,” he said. "I feel it deep. A strange hero for strange times. Makes sense."
Greg scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, hang on,” he said. “I am not no Chosen One. Let's pump the breaks on that. I am Just Some Fucking Guy. I may be huge and kick a ton of ass, and I totally plan to get us out of this somehow, but no. Yeah, no."
“Expertly put,” Nars said dryly.
“I’m serious,” Greg insisted. He turned to Elowen. “You said yourself the prophecy’s fuzzy. Metaphors and shit. You could’ve dreamed anybody. Some legendary warrior. An actual hero. But not me.”
Elowen tilted her head, studying him. Her eyes were very calm. “I didn’t say you were the hero,” she said. “I said you were in the doorway.”
“Right,” Greg said. “Just as long as we’re clear on the expectations going forward.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But I do not speak of predestination. The Sun only shows possibilities. You could still turn around. Walk away. Sleep through this in a cave somewhere.”
Violet snorted. “He couldn’t, even if he wanted to,” she said. “Even if he wasn’t determined to follow you around like a puppy; his aura is tied into the Vault now. Every time he rages, the corruption stutters. I can measure it.” She poked Greg experimentally in the bicep. “You’re like a big, angry tuning fork.”
“Please stop saying that like it’s sexy,” Nars muttered.
“I’m not walking away,” Greg said, ignoring them both. He met Elowen’s gaze again. “Not anymore.”
A long, quiet look passed between them. The fire popped, sending a tiny arc of sparks into the air. One landed near Violet’s notes; she yelped and stamped it out without breaking eye contact with Greg’s aura.
“I know,” Elowen said softly. “That’s why I told you.”
It did something awful and excellent to his chest.
He cleared his throat, desperate for a less emotionally compromising topic. “So,” he said. “Ancient world machines. Magical engine hearts. Resets. How are we doing that, hypothetically? Asking for a friend.”
Elowen’s expression shifted, grateful for the pivot. “Each Vault is different,” she said. “But they share a pattern. Sun channels, Moon channels, and a central regulator. When the balance tips, it adjusts, drawing a little more here, a little less there. Over time, the system remains stable. Unless someone starts jamming extra power into one side.”
“Like Petar’l,” Violet said. “Bracing the Moon channels open and choking the Sun’s.”
“Exactly,” Elowen said. “If we can reach the regulator, we might be able to… uncouple his additions. Restore the original pattern. At least here. That would weaken the effect on the larger mechanism.”
“And what does that look like?” Doran asked. “This regulator.”
Her eyes grew distant. “In another Vault,” she said slowly, “we reached a heart that was still mostly intact. It looked like… a sphere of interlocking rings. Sunmetal and Moonstone, turning around each other without ever quite touching. Light poured off it in sheets. It hummed. Like a choir.” She smiled faintly at the memory. Then her face soured. “Petar’l pried it open and filled it with his filth. I could not stop him. That time.”
“And this heart?” Nars asked. “Here.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Elowen admitted. “But I can feel it. Can you not? Heavy. Off-kilter. Resetting it will not be… subtle.”
Violet was practically vibrating. “Do you have any idea how incredible it’s going to be to stand next to that thing?” she said. “From a purely academic standpoint. The readings alone…”
“Try not to get vaporized while you’re taking your readings,” Greg said. “There's no telling if it's safe, even once we... save it.”
She gave him a sharp, quick grin. “You’ll just have to protect me then, Chosen One.”
They fell into a more comfortable quiet after that. The worst of the explanations had been aired; the shape of the problem was, if not manageable, at least comprehensible. The fire burned low. Doran kept his vigil at the doorway, still as carved stone, only the occasional flicker of his eyes showing he was awake.
Violet eventually stopped scribbling and curled up beside her notebooks, cloak wrapped around her like a disgruntled cocoon. Nars lay on his back with his hands folded under his head, staring at the ceiling and losing himself in thoughts he did not share with the others.
Greg’s own exhaustion crept up on him in slow, heavy stages. His vision blurred at the edges, the events of the last… however long… trying to catch up all at once.
“You should sleep,” Elowen said quietly.
He looked over. She was watching him, head tipped slightly, expression softer than he’d ever seen it. The light from the fire traced the line of her cheekbone, the curve of her mouth.
“You should sleep,” he countered. “You exploded.”
“I mostly exploded,” she corrected. “Greg, of all the... random fucking guys who could have shown up, I'm glad it was you.”
He shifted, adjusting his bedroll so he was lying not too far from her, but not so close that anyone (Nars) could make comments. The stone was hard and cold through the thin padding. His muscles complained about every position. His brain refused to shut up. He wanted to say something smooth. Something that would make her smile again, really smile, not just a polite laugh at a stupid joke. Instead, all that came out was, “Good night, Elowen.”
"Good night, Greg."
Her hand moved, a small shifting of fingers on the blanket between them. For a second he thought he’d imagined it. Then he felt the lightest brush of her fingertips against the back of his own. He didn’t move, didn’t dare to. Just let the contact sit there, small and steady and real, until the fire turned to embers and his eyes finally slid shut.
Somewhere far below, in the unseen depths of the Vault, something vast turned in its sleep, gears of light grinding against chains of shadow.
Elowen lay awake a little longer, feeling the faint hum of the Vault under her bones and the warmth of Greg’s hand under her fingertips. She whispered one last, quiet prayer, not to the distant, dying Sun, but to whatever stubborn, ridiculous light had decided to take shape in this man beside her.
Then she closed her eyes.
The fire guttered lower, painting the walls with the last, flickering memory of the day, and the Shattered Vault wrapped itself around them like a held breath as the five companions, for the first time since Blucliffe, truly rested.
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