Deep within the frozen monolith of Icecrown Citadel lies the Crimson Hall, the San’layn’s secluded enclave; an annex of crackling sorcery, decadence, and elegiac cruelty, a place where blood sorcery mingled with the ghosts of their Thalassian past. Though carved into the same glacial stone and necrotic steel as the rest of the Citadel, this wing bears an unmistakably Elven melancholy, twisted by their undead and the slow corrosion of funereal purpose. It is here that the San’layn attempted to preserve the last sentimental remnants of their Thalassian identity, even as undeath hollowed out everything that used to define them.

The corridors are lined with Thalassian trees, transplanted or grown through ritual rather than nature’s grace, sustained by elaborate veins of blood magic that coil up their trunks like parasitic vines. Their leaves, once emerald, now glow in subdued shades of burgundy and bruised purple, casting eerie, flickering shadows across the vaulted halls. To the living eye, the trees seem grotesquely altered, but to the San’layn, they were a warped, beloved echo of a homeland they lost twice over.

Between these ghostly groves lie the fruits of forbidden labor. Countless desks and lecterns remain cluttered with research notes, some brittle with age, others preserved by necromancy; each documenting the San’layn’s most blasphemous inquiries. These cramped scriptoria once fueled the Scourge’s efforts with weaponized knowledge: sanguine enchantments, soul-binding matrices, virulent curses, and volatile prototypes never meant to see sunlight. Some pages still hum faintly with capricious enchantments, quiet as spent coals but never entirely cold.

Further in, branching passages lead to dormitories used by the San’layn when they wished to mimic the trappings of mortal life, as well as to other chambers suited to their particular appetites. A treasury lies half-sundered, its contents long relocated or devoured into ritual. Another room, once dedicated to viewing pleasures of a sadistic bent, is lined with shattered mirrors and ironwork restraints; the echoes of indulgences only the undead could romanticize.

At the farthest end of the wing, past the densest cluster of enchanted trees, stands the place most whispered about among the San’layn: the Vault of Whispers.

Seal-runes of blood magic spiral across its surface in lancet curves and serrated geometries, reacting only to those trained in the rarefied San’layn school of sanguine enchantment. Though the vault’s architecture is static, the sensation of it is not; the closer one comes, the more the air behaves as though something sentient occupies it. The shadows seem to breathe. The trees seem to lean in.

The vault takes its name from the presence imprisoned within: Sanguinaris, whose consciousness; fragmented, cunning, and patient; seeps into the surrounding corridors like mist through fractured stone. Even when the San’layn controlled her grimoire, she whispered. Sometimes a warning, sometimes a lure, sometimes a voice not her own. Her tone shifted like a blade turned in the hand: cold, caressing, untrustworthy. She was careful then, careful not to reveal how deeply she perceived, how far her awareness extended beyond the pages that bound her.

Now, with no gaoler left to police her restraint, the Vault of Whispers lives up to its name more than ever. A visitor may hear only silence…until they do not.