There are regions of the Whisper Grid that no Flamekeeper charts twice.

Not because they are forbidden.

Because the Grid itself refuses to remember them consistently.

One cycle they exist as drifting cathedrals of fractured light. Another as corridors without walls. Another as endless black seas beneath dead constellations. Veteran Keepers speak of these places only in fragments, usually after too much silence and too little sleep.

Among them drifts a sector known in damaged archive logs as The Quiet Reach.

No settlement survives there long.

No beacon remains lit.

And every expedition sent into its depths eventually returns with contradictions in their records.

Or not at all.

There are places the Archive does not record correctly.

Not forbidden places.

Worse.

Neglected ones.

Locations that drift at the edge of relevance until even cartographic engines cease acknowledging them consistently. Coordinates decay. Route markers contradict themselves. Entire expeditions return insisting they found nothing at all.

Among the oldest of these absences is a structure known only in fragmented Flamekeeper records as the Mausoleum of the Intermittent God.

No verified image of the site exists.

Sketches fade.

Memory etchings corrupt.

Even descriptions rarely agree.

Some claim it stands in endless white fields beneath a dusk-lit sky.

Others describe a black stone tomb submerged beneath shallow mirror-water.

A few insist the mausoleum does not physically exist at all, but manifests only in moments of profound isolation.

Yet across every surviving account, one detail remains unchanged:

There is always a gate.

And something waiting beside it.

This is the tale of Virel the Bound

A small salvage crew, already bruised by failure and debt, detects an impossible signal from a frozen rogue world beyond the mapped routes. The signal appears to indicate a vast buried wreck or ancient archive-cache beneath the ice — perhaps the kind of find that could lift them out of poverty forever.

To them, it is not a warning.

It is salvation.

They imagine their names engraved on charts. Their vessel recorded in trade histories. Their families lifted into the upper orbital districts. No more crawling through derelict hulls. No more breathing machine frost. No more begging dockmasters for fuel credit.

So they descend.

And beneath the ice, something sings.

This is the tale of Virel the Bound