The chamber is circular, its domed ceiling lost in shadow.

At its center stands an altar of white stone, unmarked by age or weather. Four pedestals surround it, arranged like the points of a compass. Three of them hold objects that glow faintly with inner light:

A silver quill.
A golden scale.
A green seed.

The fourth pedestal is empty. Its surface is scorched, as if something was burned away long ago.

Above the altar, suspended in nothing, floats a crystal shard. Small—no larger than your thumb—but unmistakably connected to the Purple Gem above. It pulses with the same rhythm, the same light.

And through that light, you feel her.

Seraphine.

“This is the True Shrine,” your ally whispers. “I thought it was a myth. A story the old priests told to comfort the dying—that the founders’ spirits watched over Eldermoor from a sacred place.”

“It’s not a myth,” you say.

The crystal shard flares.

No. It never was.

Her voice fills the chamber. Not in your mind this time—aloud, resonating from the shard, from the walls, from everywhere and nowhere.

You came. After three hundred years, someone finally came.

The light coalesces. Takes shape. A woman stands before the altar—translucent, made of purple luminescence, but undeniably present.

Seraphine the Wise.

She looks exactly as she did in your visions. Midnight blue robes. Silver-threaded hair. Eyes that hold knowledge of terrible things.

“You’re… real,” you manage.

Real enough. A fragment of what I was, preserved in the gem, waiting for this moment.

She looks at your ally, at the relics on their pedestals, at the empty fourth space.

We don’t have much time. He knows you’re here. He always knows. So let me tell you what I should have told someone centuries ago.

Let me tell you the truth.