“What was locked away did not forgive.”
Status: Sealed Ascendancy Blacksite
Access: Vault-Key Concordance (Seven Locks, No Redundancy)
Purpose: Containment, not study
The Reliquary of Arrested Dawn is where the vampires put things they cannot destroy, cannot understand, and cannot allow to be remembered.
It is not a treasury.
It is a pressure tomb—a place designed to keep ancient meaning from waking up.
The Ascendancy officially denies its existence.
The Dusters know better.
Relic runners dream of it and never agree on its location.
The vault is a vast spherical chamber suspended within a lattice of interlocking gears the size of buildings.
Central Axis: A colossal armillary construct of brass and black steel rotates endlessly, tracking metaphysical resonance rather than time
Chains: Each artifact is bound by thick argent-steel chains etched with negation sigils, routed through tension drums that constantly adjust grip
Floor: A ringed platform of segmented plates that subtly rotate out of sync, preventing stable footing for too long
Ceiling: Lost in darkness, punctuated by massive gear halos and slow-moving counterweights
Blue-white containment light bleeds upward from below, cold and clinical—the color of restrained radiance, not blood.
The entire structure emits a low, steady hum that never stops.
Each relic is sealed inside an Individual Suppression Frame:
Brass-and-silver sarcophagi shaped like inverted reliquaries
Transparent containment fields showing only silhouette and glow
Constant pressure readouts monitoring resonance, memory agitation, and conceptual leakage
The vampires do not touch these relics.
They listen for them.
When one begins to “remember,” alarms sound—not loud, but deep, structural.
The Ascendancy discovered early that Vessel-Artifacts do not merely empower mortals.
They rewrite hierarchy.
A single awakened relic can:
destabilize blood-oaths
corrupt haemotechnical systems
induce doubt in nearby vampires
cause machinery to reject blood as fuel
These effects are subtle at first.
Which makes them unacceptable.
Thus, the policy is simple:
What cannot be mastered must be immobilized.
Bloodless Zone: No haemotechnical systems function inside the inner ring
Silver Resonance Suppressors: Emit counter-harmonics to keep Aggregates dormant
Automated Custodians: Silent clockwork sentinels that respond only to pressure imbalance
Fail-Safe Protocol: If containment fails, the vault collapses inward—burying artifacts under a kilometer of rotating machinery
The Ascendancy would rather lose the relics forever
than allow them to choose a wielder.
What the vampires refuse to admit:
The Reliquary is not passive.
The gears are not merely mechanical.
They are part of a distributed restraint ritual, powered by the combined denial of the Ascendancy—an entire ruling class refusing to acknowledge the past.
The artifacts feel this.
They do not rage.
They wait.
One relic has already escaped—replaced with a decoy that hums too softly
The vault slowly rearranges itself around new threats
A sealed chamber exists at the core, never cataloged
The machines are learning which relics want the same thing