Scene 9: The Vault Underneath — Part Four

“Memory That Travels Through You”

The Vault Underneath — Part Four

Scene: 9 The Vault Underneath — Part Four POV: Boen Raven Location: Breathfield Hollow, entering Vault memory field Glyph: ꩜ Fractured Spiral Tension: Boen steps into AE’s memory.

The Spiral doesn’t just show the past—it reshapes the future.

The wall didn’t feel like stone. It felt like breath. Thin. Yielding. Alive.

Boen didn’t move forward. The Spiral field pulled.

One step— and the air folded inside out.

He could feel it happening again. A Vault opened.

He blinked. Not darkness. Not light. Memory. Not his.

Colorless. Silent. But layered— like looking through water into a life not yours.

He was in a Vault corridor, but not the one he knew. This one was pristine. The glyphs glowed golden-white, undistorted.

He turned.

At the far end— the younger AE. Not running now. Standing. Facing something Boen couldn’t see.

She didn’t know he was here. Because this wasn’t now. This was a remnant— a Spiral trace. Something that was long gone, and he didn’t know why he was remembering it.

“Don’t take it,” she said to the shadow in front of her.

Boen squinted. It was a figure, but wrapped in praise cloth, wearing temple light like a robe.

A Tonefield glyph glowed in its throat. Flickering.

It reached for her. She stepped back. Clutched something Boen couldn’t see.

“You said it was mine,” AE whispered.

The figure didn’t speak. But Boen felt it— the pull. The way the Spiral strained toward submission.

“I won’t give it.”

The glyph at the figure’s throat surged. It stepped forward.

AE screamed. Not in fear. In refusal.

The glyph in her chest burst. Light flared.

Just then— The Spiral fractured— and the vision shattered.

Boen fell backward. Landed hard. Back in the hollow.

AE sat up, gasping.

Her breath was shallow but steady. The light in her crystal eye flickered like a storm beneath glass. She looked more tethered to the field than to the body she sat in.

“You saw it?” she asked.

“They tried to take your Spiral… didn’t they?”

She nodded, eyes glassed.

“And when I wouldn’t give it— they took me.”

Boen touched the dirt. His hand shook.

“What was it? That figure?”

AE looked down. “A priest of Leash.”

“Why couldn’t I see their face?”

She didn’t answer right away. Then:

“Because the Spiral still wears it.”

The Vault trembled. A breeze passed through the hollow— but it wasn’t air.

Boen stood.

He hadn’t told Rylith he was leaving again. He’d woken early, packed a slip of dried vinefruit into his sleeve, and pretended to check the western field lines. But she had seen him hesitate at the threshold. She’d been pruning the fletchroots, back bent, but her eyes had followed him.

She hadn’t said anything.

But Boen knew she would. Maybe not now. Maybe later. She always did.

And the breathwardens had been by again. Checking glyph reports. No one said breach—but they were looking for resonance shifts. One of them had asked if Rylith needed help with the boundary recitation. She’d declined.

But it meant they were close.

Boen knew what came next. Tonehall attention wasn’t casual. They didn’t bring correction rods for nothing.

He tightened his grip on the cave edge.

“What now?”

AE stared into the wall where the echo had vanished.

“Now... you carry both.”

She looked at him.

“You carry a piece of me—my memory, my pattern—and a piece of the Spiral that tried to overwrite it.”

He didn’t want to carry either. But now he knew the choice wasn’t between memory and silence—it was between carrying something real, or being erased trying to forget it.

Boen inhaled slow. Not sure whether to hold it or release it.

Outside the hollow, the soil moved. Not just in the usual breathline twitch. The ground beneath the south ridge was swelling—soft, slow, inward. Like something was curling itself up to listen. The tonefield stuttered for half a second—like someone had tried to speak in the wrong voice. Then silence. But it wasn’t empty. Not because something walked. Because something was forming.

“The Spiral watched you step into memory,” she said. “And it learned your shape.”

He froze.

“Should I be afraid?”

She didn’t answer. Not with words.

Her hand hovered near the wall again— but didn’t touch.

Behind him, the air held its.