The path to Blackreach wasn't on any map.
It started in a canyon scarred by a Veilstorm ten years ago. Locals avoided it. Called it cursed. Said the echoes didn't stop after dark.
They weren't wrong.
Kaelen felt them the moment they stepped into the gorge — not sounds, but pressures. Emotions that didn't belong to him. Grief. Fury. Hunger without a mouth.
"The Veil doesn't just show you things anymore," he muttered. "It remembers."
Bren kept his eyes forward. "Then don't touch anything."
Yreya was silent. She always got quiet when the air got too still.
By the second day, the canyon gave way to old roads — broken stones half-swallowed by moss and ash. Monoliths jutted from the ground like jagged teeth, each marked in a language even the shards didn't seem to know.
Kaelen could feel them watching.
Not the stones.
The voices beneath them.
"This is older than the Choir," he said.
Bren nodded. "Older than the Veil, maybe."
Kaelen didn't ask what that meant.
He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
They reached the mouth of Blackreach just before sundown.
A sheer cliff face, flat and unbroken — except for one slit down the center, vertical, smooth, and humming faintly. Not a door.
A wound.
Kaelen placed his hand on it.
The stone pulsed once — and opened.
Not outward.
Inward.
Like the mountain was inhaling.
The tunnel beyond was black as pitch. Yreya lit a shardlamp. Bren didn't draw his sword — not yet — but his hand stayed close.
They stepped inside.
It was cold. Not just temperature — ancient. Like the air itself didn't know what century it was.
The walls weren't stone. They were something else. Smoother. Fused. And pulsing faintly with veins of dormant magic.
Kaelen walked ahead.
The Veil curled around his shoulders like a cloak.
And far ahead, something called to him.
Not a voice.
Not Ashra.
Not the Choir.
Something older.
At the bottom of the descent — maybe miles down, maybe deeper — they found the door.
Circular. Covered in runes carved from obsidian and something that pulsed like blood. A handprint sat at the center, carved into a spiral of what looked like bone.
Kaelen didn't wait.
He pressed his palm into the print.
The shards in his body ignited.
Light flared. The door screamed.
And then—
Silence.
It opened.
And beyond it was not a room.
Not a vault.
Not a place.
But a void full of names.
Every shard ever broken.
Every name erased by time.
Every soul twisted by the Veil.
They were all here.
And they were waiting for him.