Zalia flexed her hand, now very aware of an intangible feeling coming from the glove. The contradicting idea of a feeling she could not feel was somehow impossible yet the best way she could describe it.

Wanting to try out the ability immediately, she stood up from her rock and took a few steps away from the temple. Reaching out, she pushed her hand through something. A glowing amber outline grew from the empty air, wrapping around her hand like a hold on a piece of reality. When she pulled to the side, a gentle sound akin to wood groaning could be heard as an oval was cut out of the space in front of her.

The opening reminded her of the blurry portal she had seen when first discovering the rituals taking place in Endaria, back in the mine. The main difference was that this one didn’t look into the very hell she now inhabited but a bland room with untarnished white walls and rows of grey shelves.

She stepped through the portal and into the space beyond. The corrupting aura faded, though didn’t disappear entirely, and the sulphurous taste and smell to the air changed to clean and clear. She breathed deeply, having been completely unaware how much she missed breathing clean air until that moment.

She stepped back out.

“Hey Boreal, I just bonded with the glove if you want to come see what it does. Bring Delphi and Ro if they’re interested too,” she projected towards the room below.

With that done, she stepped back into the vault.

Looking around the small room, there wasn't really anything else to see. It was pretty basic, no lights of any sort yet a gentle light permeated the space and nothing but shelves. There were a total of ten shelves, each shelf having two shelves with five small half sphere shapes cut out equidistantly across their surface.

The two rows of five shelves lay to either side of where she had entered and she stepped up to the closest right side one, reaching out to touch the small indent. She felt a light tingle of energy run down her arm as she ran her fingers over the smooth surface. An understanding of what its purpose was entered her mind and she got out her map, her only other possession at that moment.

Touching the indent with her glove as she held the map, it floated out of her hand shrinking as it moved. Now fitting in the indent, it gently came to rest and a clear dome formed over it.

Boreal burst through the vault doorway with Delphi hanging on to her neck for dear life, Ro-ak flying through close behind. Boreal slowed down, checking out the vault as Ro settled lightly on top of a shelf. Ro-ak saw the map now protected by a dome and took flight again, leaving the vault.

“What do you think?” Zalia asked.

“Can eat?” Boreal asked.

“No, you cannot eat the shiny new vault I just got,” Zalia replied flatly.

“It will be a good tool for one such as you that needs to store many physical items,” Delphi admitted.

“Ahh, now, now oh high and mighty frog lord, he so ascended as to need nothing but the strength of his mind. This here vault can store more than just physical things,” Zalia said, a little happy she got to show off.

Before she got a chance to, Ro-ak flew back through the door with a shiny object in his beak. He dumped what she recognised as the damaged spoon at her feet, looking up at her with a cocked head.

“We are not using this as a storage for your shiny things Ro,” Zalia said.

Ro looked down at the floor and gently picked the spoon back up, turned about and started walking back out in a slow and dramatic fashion. Zalia rolled her eyes.

“Fiiine, give it here,” she said.

Ro spun back around and hopped over joyfully, dumping the spoon at her feet again. Zalia picked it up and walked over to the first left shelf and put it into the first spot there.

“Happy?” she asked.

Ro bobbed his head up and down in a gesture not unlike a nod.

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“Right, as I was demonstrating,” Zalia said, turning back to Delphi.

Unsure how exactly it worked but giving it a try, she touched the glove to the next open spot and focused on a memory. Thinking about the name of the Bathar city, Hetheir, a wispy stream left her eyes and flowed down her body, to her arm and around the gauntlet to accumulate in the indent. A clear dome grew over it and the mist swirled slowly within.

“It can store memories too,” she said proudly.

“Well, now I’m interested,” Delphi replied, a little bit of awe peeking through the usual scholarly tone.

“As far as I know, it can store them indefinitely too. Cool hey?” Zalia added.

“It is certainly a good tool for one unable to do this naturally,” Delphi said, blinking his eyes at Zalia.

“You’re telling me you have perfect memory recollection? What about the memories you said you’ve lost,” Zalia countered.

“Memories lost on purpose. The sheer volume of memories within the collective simply cannot be held with our current population. Every new thing we learn must have a space made for it if we wish to keep it. The memories even I hold would simply overwhelm this space's ability to contain them,” Delphi answered patiently.

“Yeah alright I get it, memories are your thing. Still, it could come in handy for me,” Zalia said, still happy with it.

She tried to remember the name of the Bathar city but it was simply gone from her mind. She knew that she knew the name, she just didn’t know the name. Focusing, the name popped back into her mind. Hetheir. As soon as she stopped focusing on it, the name vanished once more.

It was exactly like Delphi had explained to her previously about his knowing what the collective knew, just not knowing what that was exactly himself.

She touched the glove to the wispy memory and collected it, the mist flowing back into her eyes.

“Right, I’ll have to play around with that some more but it seems I can access the memories I store here even without collecting them back directly. It might be worth storing some of the more tedious things I learn here,” she thought out loud.

“Anything that has fine detail is good to keep within your long term memory storage, it will be less affected by your mind's ability to warp details that way,” Delphi explained.

“Like, maps for instance?” she asked.

“That would be a good example, yes,” Delphi confirmed.

Zalia walked to the back of the room and touched the first spot of the right hand shelf’s top shelf. Focusing on the map of Hetheir she had memorised, she pushed the wispy memory into the indent.

It was then that she noticed another wispy memory sitting on the bottom of the shelf a few spots in.

“Hey Delphi, come check this out,” she called.

Delphi hopped over and looked at what she was pointing to.

“A memory, you did not put it here?” Delphi asked.

“No,” she replied, eyeing the wispy dome, ”think I should absorb it?”

“That… would be a risky decision. I am interested as to what memory could have possibly been stored in here,” Delphi pondered, “tell me, where did you find this item?”

Rather than retell the story, Zalia simply played back the events before and after finding the glove in Delphi’s mind. Kind of like a fast forward mental movie beamed directly from her mind to his.

“I see. My best hypothesis is a memory placed in here by the person you saw laying on the desk. The one you brutally slaughtered, I might add,” Delphi said.

Zalia winced. While she felt it was a good deed to release the Bathar from their undead soul prisons, it did take a level of… disconnection or coldheartedness to do what she was doing. The ability to disconnect emotion from the kills she made came from a long time as a hunter. It was both a good and bad thing, allowing her to survive without guilt but saying that, she did also need to remain careful of walking that line lest she lose touch with her morality.

“Yes. You have seen me killing the other undead, why does this bother you more so?” Zalia asked, having not missed the slight anger in Delphi’s tone.

“The knowledge and memories that such a person would have held is invaluable. A Silver rank researcher and everything they knew is now just… gone,” Delphi said, anger turning to sadness.

“It is an unthinkable nightmare, what happened here. An entire city just gone. From what I’ve seen, it happened in just a few moments as well,” Zalia said.

Her vivid memory of the monster flying over the city returned, the feeling of panic at the strength of the corrupting aura it emitted. What would it feel like to experience the aura of even two of those beings? What about ten of them?

She shuddered at the thought.

“But saying that, the knowledge these people hold is already gone, Delphi. All except this one little orb and the few pieces of parchment preserved in the keep,” Zalia finished, looking at the stored memory.

“Despite that fact, I still think it is a great risk. We don’t know how someone else's memory will mesh with your brain when put in directly like that,” Delphi said.

“I’m gonna do it anyway,” Zalia told him.

“Yeah, I know,” Delphi replied.

Nodding, Zalia leant down and touched her hand to the clear dome with the Vault Gauntlet. She prepared herself as the mist trailed up her arm and entered her eyes.