Knight's Sacred Burden
"Don't open that door. If you open that door, the city will never be the same."
"We don't have a choice," Julian said, his hand trembling as he reached for the rusted iron handle of the heavy vault door. "If I don't open it, the city dies anyway."
He pulled.
The door gave way with a screech of tortured metal, revealing a chamber filled with a blinding, pulsing violet light that seemed to swallow the very air. In the center, suspended in a cage of twisted, obsidian-forged pipes, hung the Heart. It wasn't metal. It wasn't stone. It was a mass of shifting, living darkness, beating with a rhythm that felt like the pulse of the earth itself.