The vault smelled of old metal and something faintly like seaweed that had been kept too long in a chest.

Caedrion's boots whispered across stone that remembered hands long dead; light from the cradle painted his face in rust light.

The perfected battery had gone home.

Now the aftermath hummed through the ribs of the cavern like a distant pulse.

She moved inside that pulse, small filaments of rustlight twining and snapping with impatient grace.

Even within the barrier she tested distance and limit, gliding to the lattice and letting her strands strike it as if testing glass for give.

She could not cross the shimmer that had hung over Dawnhaven for generations.

She could pace it, circle it, work the space inside it like a cat in a window. Free in a room. Trapped in a world.

"This is dull," she murmured after a moment, voice like chipped bell.

Then, with the tilt of someone affronted at being kept waiting: "Why did they bury me so carefully? Why did they think to put sand in me until I was a ghost?"

Caedrion watched her and felt a slow tightening behind his ribs, not fear at first, but a cold recognition that went to the core of a life he had not known he was leasing.

"You were never meant to be a toy," she said, not accusing but stating, as if reciting a fact she had learned from the lattice itself.

"This, this cradle, this lattice, was left. Before your fathers dug their city here, before they called us names, and worshipped us as gods...."

He stared at her.

A hundred old lessons in loyalty and ward-making collapsed into a new geometry.

The rust light shimmer above Dawnhaven, the ward that folk had thanked gods for every winter, had not been forged as shelter first and foremost.

It had been a device set in place before history, and House Ferrondelm, or their predecessors, had raised their city within its light.

They had lived millennia believing they were covered; they had never thought to ask whose comfort came with the utility of their lives.

"You mean it wasn't built to keep us safe," he said slowly, trying the phrase like a key in a lock. "It was meant to..."

"To hold me," she finished for him.

She sounded tired in a small, childlike way then.

"I don't remember the day I went under. I remember lullabies. I remember hands that called me princess and gently cradled me to sleep. I remember being warmed by voices and then waking in there, in the place I sit now. I do not know how it came to be a cage. It has been too long. Names blur. Time thins."

The filaments around her flickered as if a nerve had been touched. Caedrion swallowed. That admission, not of accusation but of amnesia, felt worse than blame.

It suggested there was no clear villain left, only a long, terrible sleep and the slow engineering of her life into utility.

"They fed me," she said. "Not enough to let me die. Not enough to let me wake. A drip here, a stitch of power there. My hands grew thin. My meanings shrank. Your fathers thought the shimmer a mercy. It lit your streets and churned your wheels and made your ovens burn. They took the light and called it blessing."

Her voice tilted now, a childish indignation undercut with hurt. "They never expected I would keep remembering."

His palm went to the artifact beneath his shirt as if he could steady the memory beating there.

The battery's hum under his skin felt suddenly like a string and he a puppet on his own life.

The implication unspooled in his head with a pressure that made his breath quicken: the ward was not a shield only; it had been a siphon.

The city's comfort and the Engine's hunger had been braided together until one fed the other.

"They believed it protected us," he said, the words slippery with old loyalties and fresh shame. "My father… all of them..."

"They believed what they wanted," she cut in, not unkindly.

"Belief is warm. It is a bed. Easier to sleep in a bed than stand watch. They made bargains with memory and ritual. They wrapped the lattice in names they could say at breakfast. That's how empires soothe themselves. It is not murder to be practical, Caedrion. It is how folk survive. Or should I call you Zachary when we are alone?"

The way she spoke to him, the way she used his name, the one he had nearly forgotten. The one had had been given in his previous life. It stirred within him memories he thought buried.

"You remember me," he said haltingly. The confession felt like a prayer. "From before. From the road."

She cocked her head, twin-tails chiming faintly.

"Of course... I waited ten thousand years for someone like you to appear naturlaly in the halls built above my cage. And he never came... So I was forced to get creative... Patience was never my strong suit after all."

She tapped a filament against the lattice, and the delicate light shivered.

"I mustered what little strength remained in my frail state and projected an image of myself into that other world of yours. I didn't mean to take you then and there, I wanted to lull you with promises of grandeur, of wealth, prosperity, of love that this world could give you, and your other could not... Unfortunately I miscalculated, and ended up in your path. You crashed and died... And I could only sweep your soul back with me."

The shards of memory that had always hovered at the edges of sleep came clattering into order.

A road laden with autumn leaves.

A flash of rust light hair.

The jerk of a steering wheel and then darkness....

"You took me," he whispered. The phrase was heavy, terrible in its simplicity. He felt a small, sharp betrayal like a burn.

She considered him with the unblinking frankness of someone who had slept through centuries and now had all her senses jammed back on at once. "

I took what I needed," she said. "That is not the same as what you mean. I was not thinking of you as you understand thinking. That is the cruelty of being half-starved for ages. You act and then remember the form you harmed later."

Her voice softened strangely.

"If you think me monstrous, consider that I have been made monstrous in part by what was done to me. I don't know how I ended up here, or what happened to my family, to my people. All I know is I have been a prisoner for far longer than any being can reasonably endure. Through no fault of my own mind you...."

Panic rose under Caedrion's skin, quick and animal. His brain was being flooded with thoughts faster than he could think them through.

And some escaped his lips before he could properly contain them.

"Why me?" he demanded, the question splitting the air. "Why did you keep me? Why did I wake in a different life?"

She gave a small, grudging smile, exactly the kind a spoiled child reserves for a gift she did not regret.

"Because I needed someone capable of building that little battery of yours. I was starving... I never lied abotu how hungry I was, even if I was in a dazed state, not capable of fully expressing myself. Sooner or later I would be dead. And in ten thousand years, your house never produced a single being capable of honoring the legacy my kind left behind."

The implication sank like lead.

He had been useful, chosen for talent and temperament and not for consent.

Rage flared, bright and fierce, then ebbed into something colder.

"You could have told me," he said. "At least given me a choice."

She shrugged, the gesture petulant. "I tried... But you reacted... poorly, and spun out into your own death. I could only salvage what remained. Your spirit, your body was utterly broken by your own hand."

Caedrion's throat closed.

In the shadow of that admission he understood the terrible complexity of their binding: not pure malice, not pure benevolence, but a braided deal where both parties had been maimed by history.

Even as he loathed the theft, he could not deny the battery's hum under his palm and the way the Engine had flared when it tasted proper energy.

The thing would live now in a way it had not for millennia. That fact had consequences.

"What do you want now?" he asked, voice low, steadying.

She stepped back from the lattice, and for the first time he saw hunger that was not merely appetite but memory reaching for fullness. "

To be large," she said simply.

"To wake. To remember without edges. And not to be a lamp for others' comfort. Teach me to feed without bleeding. Teach me to take the lattice apart and make of it a doorway, not a lid. And if you are clever, if you are loyal, I will teach you things long forgotten to the darkness of history."

The bargain glittered between them like a sigil.

He looked at the artifact over his sternum, felt its small, steady pulse.

Outside, Dawnhaven went on unaware. Ovens spit, boots tracked ash, children fought over small toys.

Inside, the vaulted heart had reopened its eyes after ten thousand years.

The choice lay with him now, raw and simple: to be the hand that wound the cage tighter, or the hand that unlatched it and let the hunger out.

Either way, the cost would be paid in futures.

He set his jaw. "Then teach me," he said.

She smiled, small and terrible and perfectly childlike. "Try not to bore me," she said, and the twin-tails behind her flicked like a promise.

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