The journey to the Drowned Archive began in silence.
After escaping Nahl'Karai through a half-collapsed ley-arch buried in black stone, Orin, Mira, and Kaelen emerged miles from the Black Waste, in the salt-scorched lowlands that bordered the coast. Before them, the endless ocean shimmered beneath a fractured sky.
Their next destination: Vel'Serin, the sunken city of knowledge, lost beneath the Shattered Sea.
Orin stood on a rocky cliff and gazed out at the waves. "How do we get to a vault at the bottom of the ocean?"
Kaelen pulled a cracked medallion from his satchel. "This is a tidepass. Old Skyborn tech. It creates a temporary vessel—a kind of shell—that lets us breathe and walk beneath the water. But it won't last long."
Mira frowned. "How long is not long?"
"Two hours. Maybe three. If we don't reach the Archive by then…" He didn't finish the sentence.
At dawn, they activated the tidepass. A translucent film enveloped them—cool and humming with hidden power. As they stepped into the sea, the surface rippled and swallowed them whole.
The descent was otherworldly.
Fish with translucent fins and pulsing veins darted past them. Sunken ruins drifted in and out of view—fragments of once-great towers and ancient ships overgrown with bioluminescent coral.
And then, rising from the sea floor like a forgotten cathedral, they saw it.
Vel'Serin.
It was half-ruined, tilted at an angle, and overrun with strange currents that shimmered like ink in water. A great stone door, covered in glyphs, stood at the Archive's entrance.
Kaelen approached the door and placed his palm against it. The glyphs flared with light and twisted open, revealing a dark corridor stretching inward.
Inside, the Archive was untouched by time. Shelves of stone tablets, bound tomes sealed in crystal, and memory-spires floated silently above their heads. It was eerie, magnificent—and wrong.
Orin felt it immediately. A presence.
A voice whispered through the water:
> "Thief of breath. Flamebearer. Why do you enter the Vault of Knowing?"
They spun, blades drawn.
From the gloom emerged a creature of shifting form—part eel, part ghost, with a crown of coral and hollow eyes. It glided through the Archive, its voice dripping with ancient grief.
> "I am Seruin, the last keeper of Vel'Serin. I guarded the truth… until the sea took it from me."
"We seek the second anchor," Orin said. "We don't want to take—we want to restore."
The creature's eyes narrowed. "Then pass the Trial of Memory. Only those who face what they've forgotten may touch the Flame of the Deep."
Orin looked to Kaelen and Mira. "What kind of trial?"
Seruin raised a hand. The water around them swirled, and in an instant, each of them was pulled into a separate chamber—alone, surrounded by visions from their past.
Orin stood in a version of his childhood home—except it burned with silent flames.
His mother stood before him, her eyes hollow. "Why did you survive when the sky fell?"
"I… I don't know," he whispered.
> "Then find the answer," she said, "before it finds you."
As the illusion faded, Orin stumbled forward, breath heavy. A platform rose from the ground in front of him, holding a shard of glowing stone—the second anchor, waiting to be re-bound.