Chapter 69 - Ashes Beneath the Scales

July X786 — Same Day

Location: Western Annex, Ky'run Sub-Chambers

The Vault had sealed itself behind her. Teresa didn't look back.

Beyond the core, another path revealed itself — not through force or spell, but through something older. Recognition. As though the Vault no longer saw her as an invader, but as a final witness.

The corridor sloped downward, spiraling into older strata. The stone shifted under her steps: no longer smooth and humming, but jagged and claw-marked. The runes here weren't simple arcane warnings — they were deep carvings, looping in language she only knew by instinct.

Draconian.

She paused before the first mural that had survived the centuries. A dragon — wings unfurled, eyes closed — surrounded by twelve robed mages. Their weapons pointed downward, not as threat, but as reverence.

Beneath the carving, a line of Draconian script. She couldn't read it, but her senses pulsed with its meaning like a shiver down her spine.

This wasn't the Vault's foundation.

It was its grave.

She pressed on.

A chamber opened ahead, filled with fractured scrolls frozen in crystal. Diagrams splayed across tables: anatomical sketches, ether lattice patterns, sigil-coded blood theories.

She stopped at one fragment — a series of core implants running down a human spine, six intact, one splintered. The name scrawled beneath it was lost, blurred by time. But next to it, a crest still glowed faintly in the dark: a half moon paired with double wings.

A memory surfaced. A whisper from Council archives, a name almost too dangerous to say aloud.

Irene.

A faint echo scraped against the far wall. Metal on stone.

Teresa didn't hesitate. She slipped forward, blade ready. "Phantom Step" carried her beyond a fallen arch before the sound could turn into an ambush.

Two figures bent over a crystal console, fingers weaving spell threads. Their equipment was old, the design archaic — not Voldane's frontline, but remnants. Custodians or cultists, perhaps, still guarding a secret even Voldane didn't own.

She moved like breath in winter.

"Silken Nerve Control."

Her blade passed in one silent arc. The first fell before his lips formed a spell.

The second tried to turn, obsidian blade half-drawn.

Too late.

She disarmed him with a sharp twist, finishing the strike in one smooth pivot. He collapsed wordless, his blade clattering into the shadows.

She turned to the console.

A flickering projection rose above it — not a map of land or convergence points.

A map of bloodlines.

Names crawled across its surface, most unfamiliar. Until one line pulsed under her gaze:

Belserion Line — Ancestral Drift: 3.4% residual resonance.

Beneath it:

Subject 72 — Null designation — Unstable harmonics.

A sharp breath caught in her chest. "Null."

She had seen that word before, long ago in a different world. In files written in blood and numbers. Nulls weren't failures. They were the ones no one dared to finish. Too divergent to control, too dangerous to replicate.

Her fingers hovered over a blackened seal on the console. The glyphs recoiled as if recognizing her touch — then parted, welcoming her.

Inside, a small stasis chamber.

A wing bone.

Pale gold, enormous, webbed with threads of magic so old they seemed to weep rather than glow.

Not whole.

Not pure.

Harvested.

Beside it, a single word pulsed weakly in a data glyph:

Animar — Phase I.

She let out a slow, careful breath. Edolas? No. Too archaic. Older even than the earliest parallel worlds. A precursor experiment. A betrayal stitched into the marrow of history itself.

Above ground, Voldane's scouts returned with shards from the broken chambers. One laid a shimmering dragon scale on the table.

Voldane stared. His jaw tensed, fingers drumming the table's edge.

"That's real."

The scout nodded once. "The Vault went deeper than we thought. She found it."

Beside him, an old man cloaked in torn sigils leaned forward, eyes hollow.

"She walks too close to the ancient breath," the man rasped. "If she goes further… she will not remain human."

Voldane didn't respond at first. He just watched the scale catch the lamplight. Then, softly:

"Let's hope she doesn't have to."

Deep in the Vault's annex, Teresa turned her back to the stasis wing.

She sealed the chamber behind her, fingers steady, face unreadable.

Not for the Council.

Not for Fairy Tail.

Not even for the world.

For balance.

The past wasn't resting in these halls. It was rotting — slow and hungry. And rot didn't vanish. It spread.

She would not let it.