The room under the Cathedral of the First Record was not a room. It was a staging ground.
Cael found it two nights later, after the A-rank had given him access codes, patrol schedules and a name for the woman at the Fracture. Lisen Vaal. Mid-level guild operations director. Unremarkable on paper. Very remarkable in the hours she kept and the people she met in sealed Fracture sites. The second A-rank group had been embedded in the guild's northern district operations for at least three years, running extraction teams, siphoning rift crystals, preparing the original Fracture site for something that required six units of fresh crystal and a calibration timeline measured in days.
The Cathedral's interior was the same vast darkness he remembered from the Trial, the same weight of something an
