Greg hit the floor first, which felt appropriate.

  Stone slammed into his shoulder, then his hip, then everything turned to dust and noise and tumbling limbs. By the time he stopped rolling, he’d collected at least three new bruises and several more regrets.

  He lay there for a second, staring up at the hole they’d fallen through. Rubble still rattled down from the ragged edges, pattering against his taut, glistening muscles. Somewhere nearby, Violet was swearing in at least three languages, best that Greg could tell. Elowen’s ward still hummed faintly around them, its glow dimmed but present. Greg could hear Nars, too, coughing; Doran made a noise like a boulder being pushed uphill.

  “Everyone alive?” Greg croaked.

  “If by ‘alive’, you mean ‘about to kill you,’” Nars said, pushing himself upright. He had a cut across one cheek and dust in his hair, which somehow made him more handsome and more annoying. “What in all ninety-nine hells was that, Greg?”

  “I told you not to touch—” Violet broke off in a hacking cough, waving dust away. Her goggles were smeared, her curls full of grit. “You colossal, rage-drunk moron.”

  Greg opened his mouth, then shut it again. What was he supposed to say? Sorry, the Vault and I had a moment? There wasn’t a version of that explanation that didn’t sound like Hi, I’m a walking disaster. You should flee the human-shaped liability that is me.

  “I… lost it,” he said lamely. “I thought it was going to… I didn’t realize it was— I screwed up. I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry.”

  Doran pushed to his feet with a slow, deliberate motion, bits of stone tumbling off his armor. He looked at Greg for a long, heavy moment. No accusations. Just… a long measuring.

  “We made it,” the dwarf said at last. His gaze lingered on Greg another wary moment before he continued. “And before the stinking elves. Present company excluded,” he added with a nod to Elowen. “What’s done is done.”

  “Greg, you absolute ass-basket,” Violet muttered. “If we survive, I am building you a Barbarian-resistant shock collar.”

  “Later,” Elowen said quietly.

  There was a tone in her voice Greg hadn’t heard before: thin, strained, and threaded through with something like awe. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking past him.

  Greg turned.

  The Vault Heart was impossible to miss.

  It dominated the chamber: a vast crystal heart suspended in midair over a black, bottomless shaft. It wasn’t a neat, cut gem; more like some colossal piece of quartz that had grown in place, facets jutting at odd angles, veins of gold and silver threading through its core. Light pulsed inside it, slow and heavy, each beat sending a faint thrum through the floor that Greg could feel in his ribs.

  Around it, three massive rings rotated at different heights.

  The lowest ring was banded in gold, inlaid with Sun sigils that flickered and popped. The middle ring gleamed silver-blue, Moon glyphs burning bright and cold along its circumference. The upper ring was a patchwork of gold and silver plates bolted together, shards of both hammered in wherever they’d fit, runes crawling and stuttering like bad code.

  The machine looked more complex than any of them, even Violet, could truly fathom, but even so, it was obvious that something was very, very wrong with it.

  Thick Moonborn pylons jutted from the stone columns around the shaft, angling inward toward the core. Crunchy-looking rune clamps jutted straight into the Sun side, jagged metal teeth biting into golden lines. They spat threads of pale blue lightning into the rings, forcing them into a crooked synchronization that made Greg’s teeth ache just to watch.

  Below, the shaft breathed cold air and corruption upward, each pulse from the crystal sending a draft of chill, sour wind over their faces. Around the edges of the chamber, broken catwalks clung to the walls, some dangling from chains, others sheared off entirely. A few narrow maintenance ledges connected nothing in particular to nowhere safe at all.

  The whole room looked like a someone tried to jailbreak God’s flip phone.

  A soft chime blinked at the edge of Greg’s vision.

  New Location Discovered: Shattered Vault – Vault Heart

  0 Days Since Last Break-in.

  Violet let out a low whistle. “This is… suboptimal,” she breathed. “We’re lucky we got here first. This is going to take more than degreaser…”

  Greg resisted pointing out that he was responsible for their timely arrival, as it was more his fault than his idea. Even with Elowen’s damage ward active, they were still battered and bruised from the fall.

  Elowen took a step forward, one hand pressed unconsciously over her heart. The light from the crystal caught in her eyes, turning them into twin reflections of the core’s pulse.

  “This is a Sun stabilizer,” she said in a hushed voice. Reverent. “Totth’s own pattern. The anchor that keeps the day’s path steady. And they…” Her jaw tightened. “These pylons are corrupted. They’re infecting the rest of the machine.”

  Doran flexed his fingers, then set his palm flat against the nearest support column. He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they were harder.

  “This is what’s been shaking the world,” he said. “Every beat out of rhythm rattles the stone for leagues.”

  Nars squinted up at the rotating rings, then down at the yawning drop below. “Love what they’ve done with the place,” he said. “Hate being inside it.”

  Violet walked toward the edge of the platform like someone approaching a holy relic and a psycho killer at the same time. The faint draft from the shaft tugged at her cloak; the light from the crystal turned the brass fittings on her satchel into tiny suns.

  “Careful,” Elowen warned, automatically.

  “I’m always careful,” Violet lied. She slid to a stop near the lip, goggles ticking as the lenses shifted focus. “Oh, this is bad. This is very, very clever, and very, very bad.”

  Greg joined her, keeping one big, sensible step back from the drop. From up close he could see the pylons, or whatever they were, better.

  They were ugly.

  Dozens of metal spears had been driven into the stone ringwork that supported the Vault Heart. Each one was a crooked spur of blackened steel, as thick as Greg’s arm at the base, thinning to a cruel hook at the end. Those hooks bit into the gold inlay of the lowest ring, pinching the Sun sigils like claws. Thick cables of silvered metal ran from the hooks back to anchor-plates hammered into the carved moon symbols on the walls.

  Where hook met gold, the metal blackened and flaked. Where the cables met the crystal rings, pale blue lightning crawled and spat, forcing the slow, graceful rotation into a jerky, arrhythmic stutter.

  “They look like claws,” Greg said.

  “They’re parasitic connections,” Violet murmured. “Couplers. Crude ones, but effective. They’ve latched Moon channels directly onto Sun pathways.” She jabbed a finger toward one of the black hooks. “See how it’s pinching the glyph? It’s not just siphoning the power. It’s altering the raw magic, corrupting it.”

  Elowen came to stand on Violet’s other side, her limp making her slower but no less intent. She folded her hands in front of her, maybe to keep from trying to tear the hooks out with her bare fingers.

  “These forms…” she said quietly. “The Sun ring is Totth’s design. I’ve seen fragments in temple diagrams. But those…” She nodded at the couplers. “Those are Velyar work. Old Moonborn engineering. Petar’l’s family specializes in it.”

  “So, he’s been here.” Greg’s hand tightened on his sword.

  Elowen shook her head, eyes never leaving the core. “No. Not yet.”

  Greg frowned. “How can you tell?”

  “The glyphs,” she said. “If he’d been here, they’d be messier. He improvises once he gets excited. These clamps are… textbook. Laid according to a pattern set somewhere else.” Her mouth tightened. “They’re not controlling this Heart directly… this is from outside.”

  “Wait, from where...” Nars muttered, his question unfinished as the realization dawned on him.

  Violet sucked air through her teeth. “From whatever Vaults you already helped him get his destructive little hands on,” she said. “Maybe from a central Moon altar. Maybe both. He’s turned them into transmitters.” She pivoted, pointing to where several of the silver cables vanished up into the ceiling and out through narrow shafts. “He’s feeding corruption in from above, not stabbing it in from here.”

  Doran’s brow furrowed. “Like using one forge-fire to heat many hammers,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Violet agreed. “Only instead of better steel, you get the end of the world.”

  “So, all… this…” Greg gestured at the shaking rings, the coughing crystal, the way the air seemed to vibrate with wrongness “…is what he did to other Vaults. We’re just feeling the splash.”

  Nars tilted his head, gold eyes tracking one of the silver cables as it hummed. “So, if he hasn’t been here yet, this one’s still… mostly ours,” he said. “Less direct mangling than the others.”

  “Relatively speaking, yes,” Violet said. “Structurally compromised, metaphysically abused... but, not fully fucked. Yet.”

  “And if we break these… coupler things?” Greg asked. “Would that help? Or blow us up?”

  “That depends,” Violet said, “on whether we break them intelligently.” She pointed to the rotating rings. “The Heart is an engine. The Sun ring and Moon ring are meant to move in a precise ratio. Totth’s design bled off excess power into the ground, kept things stable. The Moonborn modifications are feeding momentum back into the system.” Her mouth quirked. “Think of it like adding dragon-engines to a wagon. Fast, thrilling, and likely to end in a screaming, fiery death.”

  “And the clamps?” Nars pressed.

  “Those hooks are dragging the Sun side into the Moon’s cadence,” Violet said. “Forcing resonance where there should be controlled opposition. If we just smash them, we risk snapping the entire pattern. Core explodes, we die, the Vault screams at the sky and the sky screams back. Bad.”

  Greg eyed the nearest hooked spear. “So, what’s the smart play?”

  “We uncouple them in a way that bleeds the Moon charge off, instead of letting it rebound.” Violet’s fingers twitched at her sides; he could tell she was already designing instruments in her head she did not currently have. “Interrupt the pattern, don’t shatter it. Force a reboot instead of a meltdown.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Elowen tore her gaze away from the Heart long enough to look at Violet directly. There was something like hope in it, thin but real.

  “Can we?” she asked. “Is it possible?”

  Violet hesitated.

  It was small—half a heartbeat of stillness—but Greg caught it. So did Doran. The moment lingered in the silence and the dark.

  “No,” Violet said at last. “Maybe? Maybe. Theoretically.” Her mouth twisted. “If we had a few of Elowen’s colleagues and maybe captured a Moonborn with some engineering knowledge. And no time constraints, and nothing trying to kill us.”

  “So,” Nars said, “in our current circumstance…”

  “In our current circumstance,” Violet said, “we improvise. We use what we have. We move fast.”

  Greg looked from the spinning rings to the couplers, to the dangling catwalks and spidery maintenance ledges.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “What we have is a barbarian, a half-elf, a dwarf, a wizard, and a cleric. And no ideas.”

  “And gravity,” Nars added. “Can’t forget gravity.”

  Elowen stepped closer to the edge again, this time bracing one hand on Greg’s arm as if the contact grounded her. “Petar’l is coming,” she said quietly. “If he anchors his own work here, adds direct ritual to what the couplers are already feeding in…” She exhaled. “We may not get another chance at this Heart. Or any of them.”

  Greg felt the crystal’s pulse beat against his ribs again, like a second heart out of sync with his own.

  “Then we fix it,” he said. “Or break it the right way. Whatever it takes.”

  A new quest line blinked into being.

  Quest Branch Unlocked: Interfere With the Vault Heart

  Objective: Disrupt the Moonborn corruption without damaging the Heart.

  Technically, there’s no fall damage from a bottomless pit.

  Violet followed his gaze up to the rings and the twisted ladders that led toward them. She bared her teeth in a feral smile.

  “Well,” she said, kicking a stone over the edge and waiting to hear it land; no sound came. “The good news is you’ll die of thirst long before you hit the bottom.”

  “Okay,” Nars said at last, dragging his gaze away from the churning core. “Let’s pretend we’re suicidal in a responsible way. How do we get to those not-at-all-ominous metal leeches without dying horribly?”

  The nearest of the added Moonborn contraptions hung twenty, maybe thirty feet out over empty air. Others were bolted to the underside of the rings, connected to the walls by taut cables and narrow maintenance ledges that had not been built with the survivability of henchmen, or pesky adventurers, in mind.

  Violet pointed with the hand that wasn’t busily rummaging through her bag of tricks. “Those collars there, there, and there,” she said. “If we can disable even one set, we might impede the corruption in the Heart, enough to stop the shaking. That would marginally increase our odds of not being obliterated in an unprecedentedly massive blast of ancient magical forces from before the creation of the universe, also.”

  “Problem,” Nars said. “We’re over here. Those are way over there.”

  “Surely there’s a better way?” Greg asked pointlessly. “Our solution to not exploding can’t be falling to our deaths. Can it?”

  Nars stepped closer to the rim, eyes tracking the broken network of catwalks and ledges spiraling the shaft. Rusted metal grated under his boot as he nudged a twisted railing with his toe. Below, cold air sighed up past them in slow, chilly breaths.

  He squinted, then nodded to himself. “Seen worse,” he said. “All right. There.” He pointed to a narrow stone lip that jutted from the wall a few yards down. It connected, via a run of half-intact catwalk, to one of the Moonborn clamps. “If we drop to that, then angle along, we can reach the first collar without having to grow wings.”

  Violet was already digging around in her satchel again. She produced a tiny, wicked-looking knife. “Watch the runes,” she said. “Anything that tingles. Old field conduits, Moon glyph residue: if it looks like it wants to interact with Greg’s… condition, we avoid it.”

  She did not look at Greg when she said “condition.” No one did. They all just… shifted their weight, almost imperceptibly, a collective adjustment that said we remember the last time you lost it, and we would like to remain three-dimensional.

  Greg folded his arms, then realized that looked sulky and unfolded them again. “You want me where?” he asked.

  “Back,” Nars said immediately. Then, seeing Elowen’s look, amended, “Not because we don’t trust you…”

  “I’m of two minds, at present,” Violet muttered.

  “…but because you’re heavy and the stone is old,” Nars finished smoothly. “You bring up the rear. If something cracks, you’re the one most likely to not die instantly. Also, the one most likely to drag the rest of us back up by the ankles.”

  Doran grunted. “I go first,” he said. “Test holds. Stone speaks truer to me.” He planted the butt of his axe, considering the drop with a professional eye. “If anything gives, I am... less top-heavy.”

  Elowen moved closer to Greg, her hand hovering near his arm without quite touching. “Stay on the solid sections,” she said quietly. “If you feel… anything tug at you—inside—say something. Do not try to muscle through it.”

  “You know that’s my entire skill set,” Greg said.

  Her mouth twitched despite everything. “Let’s work on that. You do not have to catch everything yourself.”

  Doran swung himself down first. The dwarf’s boots hit the ledge with a thud that made rock dust jump, but the stone held. He tested it with a few experimental bounces, then nodded.

  “Solid enough,” he called. “For now.”

  Nars went next, dropping lightly and landing with a grace that made Greg’s knees hurt on his behalf. Violet climbed down with less elegance but more enthusiasm, muttering a running commentary while proving a surprisingly powerful climber. Her strength belied her diminutive size, and she seemed very much in her element skipping off into the endless dark. Elowen hesitated at the edge. The shaft’s breath stirred her hair, tugging at her cloak. She swallowed, then stepped down, trusting Doran’s outstretched hand to steady her.

  Greg was last.

  He swung onto the ledge, the drop yawning at his back, the core humming in his bones. The stone under his boots vibrated faintly, as if the Heart were listening for him.

  Nars glanced up, caught the tightness in Greg’s jaw, and gave a humorless little grin. “Easy there, Stranger,” he said. “Let’s try getting through one dungeon chamber without you punching the floor into a new level, yeah?”

  “Worked pretty well last time,” Greg said.

  “Even a rusted compass points North sometimes,” Doran rumbled. “If we had any luck, that used it up.”

  “I have faith in you,” Elowen added softly. “But yes, please do not.”

  They turned their backs on the relative safety of the balcony and began edging along the ledge toward the first corrupted clamp, the Heart’s uneven pulse beating time in Greg’s chest with every careful step.

  The closer they got, the louder the Heart felt.

  Not sounded. Felt. The great crystal core beat in a slow, arrhythmic thrum that Greg could feel in his bones, a pressure that nudged at the same place his Rage lived. Every pulse made the metal under his boots shiver.

  The first corrupted clamp sat a little below them, bolted around one of the golden Sun-bands like a gross mechanical barnacle. Up close, it was worse than it had looked from the ledge.

  Three curved metal ribs, blackened and pitted, latched over the band. Along their outer edge, jagged Moon glyphs crawled in dull silver, pulsing in time with the Heart. A fat spine of metal ran along the top, stitched with cables that vanished into drill-holes in the stone. Wherever the clamp touched the Sun-band, the gold looked burnt, its glow sputtering.

  “Okay,” Violet breathed, crouching on the narrow platform opposite it. “That’s… spiritually gross.” She pushed her goggles down and whistled low. “The pylons or couplers or moonhooks, whatever, are definitely functioning like a parasite. I’d love to know more, after we stop it from killing us.”

  “Can you get it off?” Greg asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “We just have to drop the anchor ring into the abyss. Without dying.” Violet pointed with her knife. “Those three braces there? They’re feeding corruption in. That big spine is routing it back out. If I can flip the charge in the glyph array, it should seize for a second. Nars cuts the cables while it’s stunned. Then we kick it loose.” She tossed the dagger to Nars.

  He caught it, effortlessly. “And if something goes wrong?” Nars asked, eyeing the drop below.

  “Think positive,” Violet said. “Everyone ready?”

  Elowen hadn’t moved from the spot that let her see both the clamp and Greg at once. One hand rested lightly on the rail, the other wrapped tight around the sun-mark at her throat. “I’ll keep the wards up,” she said. “And if anything surges, I’ll try to redirect it into the ring instead of into us.”

  Her gaze slid back to Greg for a heartbeat. That same flicker of worry was there, banked but not gone. You do not have to catch everything yourself, she’d told him earlier.

  He focused himself. As long as nothing goes wrong, everything should be fine. As long as you don’t go wrong. “Tell me where to stand.”

  Violet pointed him and Doran to either side of the clamp, braced against the ring and the wall, as counterweight. Nars clung to a narrow gusset above the spine, knife in his teeth until Violet hissed, “Do not put that in your mouth, it’s enchanted.”

  “Comforting,” he muttered, shifting his grip so he could snatch the blade cleanly when she gave the word.

  Violet knelt by the clamp’s base, balancing on the edge of the maintenance ledge with the casual disregard she generally paid to physics. She dug a pick out of her kit and pried a panel open, revealing a tangle of glowing sigils etched into the metal, half Moon-script, half something older.

  “Alright, parasite,” she murmured. “Let’s see what color your blood is.”

  Violet’s fingers danced through the air over the glyphs, not touching, just tracing. Little sparks jumped between sigils as she whispered under her breath, nudging the pattern, coaxing, then twisting.

  “On three,” she called. “One… two…”

  She triggered it on two.

  The clamp convulsed. Moonlight flared along its ribs, then stuttered, the flow reversing for a heartbeat. The glyphs along the spine spat a shower of sparks.

  “Now!” Violet shouted.

  Nars moved. His knife flashed down, severing three thick cables in quick succession. The corrupted light inside them vomited out in arcs, spattering the air with ghostly afterimages. The clamp shuddered, its grip on the Sun-band loosening.

  Doran grunted, bracing harder as the ring lurched under their feet. “It’s letting go!” he barked.

  “Good—good, that’s good, keep it from spinning,” Violet said through her teeth, both hands now pressed flat to the metal. “Just a little more—"

  The next pulse came out of rhythm, a hard THUNK that made the entire chamber flinch. The Sun-band jerked, trying to snap back to some ideal alignment, while the remaining clamps and anchors fought to hold it in its distorted orbit. Energy snarled across the gap in a visible ripple.

  The spinning Sun ring careened out of control, its wild trajectory unpredictable.

  You do not have to catch everything yourself… except this time, I guess.

  For a split second, his vision went white at the edges. The Rage inside him howled, delighted at the sudden surge, seizing on it like a live wire. His hands tightened on the rail.

  “Greg, don’t—” Elowen started.

  He shifted his stance, broader, digging his boots in. The ring tried to twist; he hauled on the metal, muscles screaming, forcing it down. His might alone wasn’t going to be enough. The band’s wild wobble dampened, but the Heart’s erratic, pounding rhythm was still getting worse.

  “I think I have to! I think—I’m supposed to.”

  PRIMAL RAGE – ACTIVATED

  New Status: Unintended Conduit (Greg ? Heart Engine)

  Effect: This idiot is now load-bearing.

  Check. Your. Damn. Journal.

  Pain lit up his arms and spine, sharp and electric. Beneath it, he felt everything—the strain on the other clamps, the drag of corrupted power trying to find a new path, the way the Vault itself shivered around them.

  “Greg!” Violet snapped. “Let it go, you’re overloading it!”

  “If I let go, we go for a ride,” he grunted. His fingers would not unclench. The Rage had sunk its claws into the connection, refusing to release, thrilled at the current pouring through him.

  The loosened clamp made a horrible shrieking sound. Elowen flung a sheet of golden light between it and the Heart, catching the worst of a wild discharge. Doran leaned his weight into the opposite side of the band, adding a solid dwarf’s worth of stubborn strength.

  For one, precarious heartbeat, everything held.

  Then the clamp lost purchase entirely, wrenched sideways by the conflicting forces. It tore off the Sun-band with a squeal and spun, cables snapping, before tumbling into the shaft below in a spray of dying sparks.

  Corruption Channel A – DISCONNECTED

  Engine Stability Level: No.

  The Heart lurched again. With the clamp gone, the Sun-band tried to re-center; the remaining corrupted fixtures yanked it back out of place. The mismatch sent a shiver through the crystal, lines of fracture-light skittering across its surface.

  The resonance in Greg’s bones went from “unpleasant” to “eldritch horror”.

  A low, grinding groan rolled up from the depths, as if something much larger had just shifted below them. The light in the chamber flickered, gold and silver strobing out of sync.

  Elowen whispered something Elven that sounded like a curse to Greg. “You stabilized the band,” she said. “And destabilized the entire system.”

  “Yeah, well. Don’t everybody thank me all at once,” Greg managed.

  Doran unpeeled Greg’s white-knuckled hands from the rail, one finger at a time. The sudden absence of current made his muscles spasm. He sucked in a breath that tasted like hot metal.

  “Next clamp, we do not let you touch anything,” the dwarf said. It was half joke, half vow.

  “Next clamp,” Violet said grimly, staring up at the quivering Heart, “we don’t touch it, either. Not like this. We pulled one parasite loose and the patient almost flatlined.”

  Nars let out a breath he’d been holding. “So, we can’t just knock them all off and hope for the best,” he said. “Terribly unfair.”

  “There must be something else, something we are missing,” Elowen said, eyes distant as she traced the Heart’s pulses with her mind. “A central interface. Totth wouldn’t leave something this delicate without a way to reset the balance. If we keep tearing at it blindly, we’ll finish Petar’l’s work for him.”

  She pointed across the abyss, toward a cluster of machinery half-hidden behind another ring: a dense knot of stone and metal, thick with glyphs and dangling conduits.

  “There,” she said. “The primary focus. We reach that, we may be able to ease the Heart back into its proper course instead of ripping it apart. Assuming no more surprises...” she trailed off, leaving the accusation there but unspoken.

  A new notification slid into Greg’s vision, crisp and unhelpful.

  Objective Updated: Reach the Primary Focus Or Die, Dooming The World

  Greg swallowed, staring at the distant controls, the shaking Heart, and the sliver of ledges and chains that would get them there.

  “Cool,” he said. “Love a nice, calm, low-stakes challenge.”

  Behind him, stone dust rained from above as the Vault gave another warning shudder, reminding them how little time they had.