Arius's amber eyes gleaming gold—Elara was still caught on that moment. The subtle shift in the guardian's expression when she spoke her grandmother's name, "Evelyn Casta." That flicker of emotion—neither quite sorrow nor relief—that vanished before settling, a trace of feeling from one who had lived eight hundred years. (Grandmother knew that person. Absolutely.) There was no proof. But it was the only explanation that made logical sense. The Arathun-related thesis Evelyn had submitted to the Solenia Institute of Measurement forty-five years ago, only to have it rejected. Arius's reaction. Two points were beginning to connect in Elara's mind. The rock beneath her feet was solid. As they approached the base of the Servatura Range—the spine that ran north and south through the Eldorian continent—the path increasingly became one of quartz-veined bedrock. The air was thin and cold. The exhaustion from yesterday's trial—the terrain manipulation in the Hollow Hills and her first dialogue with Arius—still lingered in both her legs. Orion walked beside her in silence. Normally he would have his notebook open, or be reciting observations about the terrain. But today his notebook remained in his bag, and he walked slightly behind Elara. She caught glimpses of his hand moving to the frame of his glasses—that habit repeating several times in her peripheral vision. He was searching for words. Elara understood that. He was carrying it too. The same weight of mystery, from a different angle. The silence flowing between them was not awkward. It was a quiet sharing between those bearing the same burden—and that was enough, Elara thought. If she put it into words, the quality of this silence would change. The cliff face at the mountain's base loomed ahead. Elara stopped. The wall surface appeared ordinary at first glance. Thin moss clung to it, several vertical cracks running down. But the earth-mark ink on her fingertips was responding faintly. Not the sensation of reading—of sensing the pulse of the earth's magic—but something more artificial, the presence of a designed concealment. Elara took a small vial of earth-mark ink from her bag. She spread it thinly across the fleshy parts of her index and middle fingers on her left hand. She touched the rock wall gently. ——Resonance. Through the medium of earth-mark technique, the patterns carved beneath the rock's surface responded. Artificial patterns. Deliberately designed, a layer of camouflage. As Elara's fingertips traced their contours, part of the rock surface began to glow faintly, its outer edges rising into relief. A doorway shape, roughly two meters wide and two and a half meters tall. "...Here it is." Orion stood beside her, observing the glowing outline. He pushed his glasses up slightly, his eyes tracing the rock surface. He brought his fingertips close, then stopped just short of touching. "Concealment through earth-mark technique?" "Can you tell if it matches Arathun architectural style?" "...The proportions of the outline and the type of stone—" He observed the rock wall for a while. She could see him turning over the knowledge he'd accumulated over two years in the Institute's archaeology department, working it through in his mind. "It matches. The characteristics of Arathun perimeter structures. The combination of quartz and basalt, the angle of the door frame—it all aligns with the ruins records in Solenia's archaeological literature." Tension threaded through his voice. He was trying to hide it, but Elara could tell. That tremor of "it's real"—when knowledge learned at the Institute stood before reality. Elara added more earth-mark ink and traced the outline once more. The door opened silently. ＊ The interior of the temple was dark, carrying the scent of ancient stone. The Threshold—Riemen Aura—she couldn't recall exactly when Arius had told her that name. But just as the name suggested, the moment she stepped inside, she felt it: this was a place standing between something and something else. She lit the torch. Light spread. Walls. All of it was text. Elara stopped involuntarily. The stone chamber was roughly twenty meters in both directions, and it continued deeper still. From corner to corner of those walls—from positions near the floor to the very ceiling—inscriptions were carved. The size and spacing of the characters were inconsistent, the orderly notation of ancient Arathun style intertwining complexly with the unknown symbol system she'd seen on the waymarkers in Episode Three, filling the walls completely. "...Can you read all of it?" "Not alone." Elara pressed her fingertips against the nearest wall. When she touched the patterns through earth-mark technique, residual information held in the stone—fragments of the intent from when it was carved—transmitted to her. But to read it as meaning, she needed knowledge of the corresponding language system. Orion opened his notebook. He was beginning the decryption from the academic side. The two began working, piecing together each other's fragments. Orion read aloud the sequence of characters, while Elara picked up the emotional context the patterns held through earth-mark technique. When one reached an impasse, the other would approach from a different angle and fill the gap. Time passed. Each time the torch flickered, shadows moved, and the wall's characters took on different forms. And gradually, the general meaning became clear. ——Arathun did not fall. Elara's fingertips stopped on a line of patterns. "This—" "Can you read it?" "...The council of Arathun elders decided. To become the vessel of the seal themselves, the entire city." Orion stopped writing in his notebook. "They sealed themselves, then." "They weren't destroyed from outside. They sealed something born within—a calamity—" The next section of the inscription recorded the price of the seal. Offering the city itself. All humans within severing contact with the outside world. Once sealed, breaking it would mean releasing the threat to the world anew. Orion read the final passage aloud. Low and slow. After he finished, silence fell over the stone chamber. The torch flame swayed without sound. Elara did not remove her hand from the wall. Through the earth-mark ink on her fingertips, the inscription glowed faintly for just a moment. Not responding to Elara's earth-mark technique—but resonating with it. There was something more beyond the inscription. Something this wall did not speak of, sleeping deeper in the stone chamber ahead. Elara understood that. ＊ "Let's rest for a while." The two sat down in a corner of the chamber. They took out preserved food and a water flask. The mental weight was pressing down on their bodies as physical fatigue. Orion placed his notebook on his lap and tried to continue recording by the torch's light. He was copying down the content of the inscriptions. But each time the torch flame flickered, shadows fell across the characters. He rewrote the same line. The shadow fell again. He rewrote it again. On the third attempt, Elara spoke. "You should stop taking notes in the dark." "Then I'll keep it in my head." The answer came immediately. Orion closed his notebook and turned directly toward the inscriptions. "From the first passage to the seventh—" And he began reciting without hesitation. The content of the inscriptions the two had deciphered together, nearly word for word. Not rushing, never stumbling, just quietly, as if tracing memory itself. As Elara listened, she thought vaguely. (That's... similar to your older brothers.) The words came out after that. "...That's similar to your older brothers." Orion's voice stopped. A beat of silence. Elara realized only after speaking how much weight those words carried. What it meant for Orion when his brothers were mentioned—his reason for coming to the Institute, the source of his urgency—she knew all that, so why had she said it? "I didn't mean it in a bad way—" "Which is it?" "...I mean, I did mean you're similar, but not in a bad way—" "So you mean it in a good way." "Yes." "That my brothers have good memory." "Yes. So it's a good thing." "...I understand." Orion touched the frame of his glasses and turned back toward the inscriptions. The tip of his ear, visible from where Elara sat, had taken on a faint reddish tint. It might have been the torch light. But probably not. The two maintained solemn expressions, staring at the wall's characters. Beneath that awkwardness, there was certainly warmth—something neither of them put into words. ＊ Elara stood up after putting the water flask back in her bag. "There's a passage continuing deeper." Orion looked up. "I sensed it through earth-mark technique. Beyond this chamber's back wall—further past these inscriptions—there's a door or something." "We read the inscriptions." "We did." "The seal releases calamity. It was clearly written there." "I know." Orion stood up. He faced Elara. The blue-gray eyes behind his glasses were more direct than usual. "Elara. The inscriptions are a warning. That's not just a historical record—it's a message left by Arathun's council of elders telling us not to go further." "But there's something deeper." "That's why it's dangerous." "We can't protect what we don't understand." "You can protect it by not going deeper, without understanding the seal's mechanism." Orion's voice was calm. He was speaking logically, not emotionally. Because she understood that, Elara searched for words to counter. "Your recklessness might endanger the world." His voice was quiet. But within those words was something blade-like. Recklessness. Something trembled within Elara. Her grandmother Evelyn's voice echoed in her mind—truth is carved into maps, the earth speaks. Without knowing, what can you claim to protect? Authority over proof. Without accurate information, you cannot maintain a seal correctly. But what lay at the core of Orion's words couldn't be broken by such counterarguments. World-scale danger. The warning in the inscriptions. That was logically sound. Precisely because it was sound, it cut. Elara said nothing. Could say nothing. She turned her back and began walking toward the wall ahead. "Elara." His voice echoed through the stone chamber. Elara did not stop. ＊ The passage was narrow, the ceiling low. There was no room to bring the torch, so Elara spread earth-mark ink thickly on her fingertips and read the patterns on the ground as she advanced. The earth's pulse was fine and intricately tangled. The structure designed by Arathun's creators—designed in every way to reject those who entered here. (But I need to know. Without knowing—) Her feet stopped. The sensation beneath her feet changed. Not the resonance of earth-mark technique. Something else transmitted from her soles. Designed pressure—an ancient trap mechanism built into the structure as part of the seal. The floor stone Elara stepped on triggered something below. A dull thud came from beneath her feet. Something moved within the walls. The ceiling groaned. (This is bad—) She spun around. Running. The passage was narrow, her shoulders scraped the walls. The exit light appeared. Just before reaching it, ceiling stones began to fall. The exit would be blocked—or so she thought, when a figure flew in. It was Orion. He threw himself into the collapse point, positioning his body in the trajectory of the falling stone. Not directly in front, but angling his shoulder against the stone's edge to change its direction. The stone veered away from Elara's passage and crashed to the floor with a deafening roar. Elara burst through the exit. She nearly fell to the stone chamber floor, catching herself on her knees. She turned back. Orion was sitting with his back against the wall. His left arm was pressed against his body with his right hand. Red seepe