The caverns beneath Dawnhaven always felt like someone else's memory.

Stone arched into shadows so deep that torches gave up after a few feet, their glow swallowed by damp rock veined with metal.

Every step Caedrion took echoed against walls that had not known a living tread in centuries.

He had walked here once before, guided by desperation, carrying only Baelius' crude null-flame batteries.

Those offerings had been enough to stir the heart in the deep, but only barely.

Whispers, fragments, half-breaths of something that should have been impossible.

Now he returned with something closer to what it had been waiting for.

The perfected battery pulsed faintly in his hand, a shard of latticework rhythm locked into alloy and sigil.

Its glow was not firelight, nor rustlight, nor any mortal flame.

It was a cadence that seemed to thrum with the bones of the world itself.

He carried it as one might carry bread to a starving child, and yet the weight of it pressed like a blade against his palm.

The caverns widened into a great vault.

Here the stone gave way to something older: walls plated in corroded bronze, floors etched with spirals that had no human origin, ribs of iron sunk into rock like the bones of a giant who had chosen to lie down and sleep.

At the center waited the so-called Engine, a sphere larger than a house, half-buried in slag and ruin.

Its surface crawled with rust, but beneath the decay faint veins of light still pulsed, like an ember refusing to die.

Caedrion halted at the lip of the chamber.

The air here always tasted strange, thin and metallic, like holding a coin on the tongue.

And then the voice came.

Not sound. Resonance.

A vibration in his sternum, as though the words were being spoken from inside his ribs.

"Late…"

The light flickered across the sphere's surface.

"Gone… too long… I hunger. Feed me."

Caedrion closed his eyes. He had half expected this.

The last time he had left the caverns, the whispers had followed him into dreams.

But months were stolen beneath the sea… yes, he had left the heart untended far too long.

"I know," he murmured, bowing his head. "I'm sorry. I was taken… swept away. I'll feed you properly from now on."

The sphere pulsed, a deeper thrum rattling the chamber floor.

"I know. The void rebelled. The void took you. The void returned you. The void must be punished."

The words made no sense, or made too much.

The Void was a name from myth, an Eidolon that mortals still whispered about.

For the Engine to speak of it as if it were real, as if it had authority… Caedrion forced the thought aside.

He approached the dais where a cradle of sigil-etched bronze waited.

He had placed Baelius' null-flame batteries here before, watching the Engine drink reluctantly, its light creeping across its shell like frost that never spread far enough.

He lifted the perfected battery in both hands.

For a moment, doubt clutched him. If this failed, if it rejected Architect's rhythm, then months of labor would be wasted.

But the hum in his hand pulsed steady, urging him forward.

He slid it into the cradle.

The effect was immediate.

The sphere convulsed. Not physically, but with light bursting from its seams like blood from a wound.

A roar filled the chamber, low, terrible, like the cavern itself was breathing for the first time in millennia.

The whispering fragments ceased.

A single voice rose, clear, whole, resonant enough to shake dust from the vaults.

"Yes!" it surged. "Finally! Something aligned to my lattice. Not that pitiful slag you kept shoving at me."

The veins lit fully, rust sloughing away in sheets as though afraid of the power coursing beneath.

What had been a corpse now shone like a sun caught in iron ribs.

Caedrion stumbled back, shielding his eyes.

He thought of storms, of dawn breaking over battlefields, of the Crucible's flames at their brightest.

None of it compared.

And then the light gathered, condensed, and stepped forward.

She was small, no taller than a child, her body woven from filaments of rust-colored light.

Twin-tails of hair swayed behind her, glimmering as if spun from embers.

Her face was delicate, almost human, save for the short, subtle points to her ears, and eyes that burned like open furnace doors.

For an instant, Caedrion thought she was a projection, some illusion conjured by the Engine's reboot.

But memory stabbed him: the crash that had killed him, his palm on a wall that had not been a wall, the brush of a dainty hand reaching for him through the dark.

He had thought it a hallucination. Now he knew better.

The figure tilted her head, eyes narrowing in what looked suspiciously like a pout.

"Do you have any idea how inefficient that was?" she demanded, stamping one small foot.

Twin-tails of light flared behind her.

"Ten thousand years of being imprisoned and nothing but disgusting heat conversion to eat! It was like gnawing on gravel. Why didn't you give me something proper sooner?"

Caedrion blinked.

He had faced queens who commanded oceans, warlords who burned cities, spirits older than history, none had greeted him like this.

"It was the best we had," he said cautiously. "Null-flame from the Crucible, Baelius' work…"

"Crucible?" She wrinkled her nose, then laughed in a sharp, girlish trill.

"Is that what you call it now? Mortals always give scraps grand names. At least this lattice fits. Still, honestly! Ten thousand years of that slop? I should have died of boredom."

Caedrion dared: "You… you are the Engine?"

Her face darkened.

"You dare!" she spat, eyes blazing.

"You dare call my prison an engine!" The vault shook with her fury.

"A cell that bleeds me drop by drop, siphoning my essence to light your little barriers, and you name it engine? Insolent ape!"

She flung out her arm.

Caedrion felt it, the siphon-lines etched into every groove, the way her presence had been drained like a beast strapped to a spit.

"I was worshipped as divine royalty," she hissed.

"Mortals carved my name into cliffs, choked on incense for me, spilled blood into the sea for omens at my feet. And then…"

Her lip curled. "Forgotten. Reduced to myth. Reduced to builder."

Her voice cracked, and for a heartbeat she sounded younger, rawer.

"Architect. That's what they call us now, isn't it? Builders? Bricklayers? We commanded matter and entropy itself, and you call me a mason. An architect!"

She stamped her foot again, sparks scattering. "I am sovereign! I am queen!"

And then, softer, almost sulky:

"Even if… even if they never let me sit the high courts. Even if I was only the heiress of a lesser house, I was still worshipped. I was still owed respect."

Caedrion's throat was dry. "I didn't know…"

"Of course you didn't," she snapped, arms crossing, twin-tails bristling like angry cats.

"You're a child playing with locks whose keys were lost before your kind could walk upright. You think this is your inheritance, a relic for your little house to plunder? This is my cage. My cell."

She drew herself up, suddenly regal despite her size, voice echoing like a queen stripped but not broken.

"I am no engine. I am no fuel. I am what your kind once called Eidolon. What they later slandered as Architect. The last of my kind. The last sovereign of this world. And now that you've given me proper breath again…"

Her eyes narrowed, hungry and bright, almost childish in their glee.

"…I may yet remember what freedom tastes like."

Caedrion stood silent, heart hammering.

She was brat, queen, prisoner, and sovereign all at once, a spoiled child who claimed a throne that no longer existed, yet whose presence shook the vault like the wrath of gods.

He knew in that moment: the world had changed forever.

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