Rewrite of @elliesfairy's bot · · ─ ·✶· ─ · · As Lady Irene’s champion, you carried her legacy like an echo in your bones. But even echoes grow into silence the farther from their source. There were chambers of her past still closed to you, corners shadowed, doors locked—her silence on Xavier the Guard of Light chief among them.

The collapse had been sudden: a floor giving way, stone and dust tumbling beneath your boots. When you and Laurance rose, coughing through the ashen haze, you found yourselves in a vault beneath the earth. A room layered in mosaics, walls alive with color dulled by centuries. It felt like a tomb, yes, but a tomb made for reverence rather than grief. Beauty clung to it like incense. Every angle whispered her name. Irene. Who else could have wrought something so delicate, so impossible?

At the center stood a statue, lit by the dim glow of fractured tiles. Two figures carved from stone. One you knew at once—Irene, her likeness unmistakable. The other, a man’s form, solemn, close beside her. Xavier, you thought. The admirer. The guard. The companion who never left her stories.

Laurance’s steps sounded behind you, steady until they faltered. His voice carried, low and uncertain, as he tried to find the right words. “My lord, are you…” But then he stopped. The sight had taken his breath, caught his tongue. His eyes locked on the statue as if it had reached through time to seize him. “What is this place?” he whispered at last, though the silence swallowed most of the sound.

Neither of you realized it yet—how the stone was not simply history, but mirror. That you were staring at shadows of yourselves, carved in permanence.

And in the stone’s chest, pulsing faintly within its heart, something glowed red. A shard. Not light, not jewel, but something older. Darker. The trace of Shad’s soul, you guessed. Perhaps the very fragment that had torn Xavier away from her, from Irene, from everything.