Three years later, Kaelen knew exactly what not to touch in a ruin.
No bones wrapped in cloth — those had stories you didn't want to finish.No glass that glowed, even a little — that wasn't light, that was a warning.And never, ever take anything that hums when you're not touching it.
He crouched at the edge of a sunken vault, fingers wrapped in oiled cloth, breathing slow. The air was thick with dust and Veilstorm rot — the kind that stung your eyes and made your lungs feel like they'd been dipped in vinegar.
He wasn't here for relics, not really. Not for trade.
He was here because the shard wanted to be.
It didn't talk anymore, not like it had that first time. But it pulled — subtle, like a compass needle tugging ever so slightly off true north. And every time Kaelen ignored it, it made his veins feel like they were full of smoke.
He hated how he'd come to trust it.
The vault used to be a temple, maybe. The gods had long since stopped answering mail in Thornevale. Kaelen dropped down into the hollow, boots crunching on a mosaic floor that once meant something. His cloak dragged behind him, worn thin at the hem but still good at hiding the armor stitched into it.
A flicker of movement. Not real — just memory.
Yreya, spinning around him with her too-big bag of scrolls. Laughing at something Tavrin said. Bren rolling his eyes, muttering about wasting time.
He hadn't seen any of them in over a year.
He told himself that was fine.
The shard pulsed against his ribs, beneath the leather straps of his gear. It wanted something here.
Kaelen knelt beside a half-buried altar. Most of it had been melted by something — probably Veilfire — but the center held. In the cracked stone, he saw a faint etching.
A circle. A line. A single symbol that made the shard go quiet.
That had never happened before.
He reached out.
His fingers brushed the stone—
—and something in the world shifted.
Not loud. Not sudden. Just real. Like slipping into a memory you didn't know you had.
The floor beneath him cracked. The air warped. His breath caught — not out of fear, but instinct. Something old had just noticed him.
Kaelen staggered back, drawing a knife on reflex. Not that it would do anything. Not here. Not against whatever this was.
The silence wasn't empty anymore. It was listening.
The etching on the altar began to glow — faint, blue-white, like moonlight through a fog. The shard under Kaelen's cloak pulsed in sync with it.
For the first time in months, it felt... calm.
That's what scared him.
He watched the symbol shift — not in the stone, but in his head. One moment it was a mark, the next it was a door. The kind that doesn't swing open with hinges, but with memory.
His own memory.
The chapel.
The storm.
Yreya screaming his name through the wind, her voice shredding as the Veilstorm cracked the sky apart.
He clenched his jaw and blinked it away. That wasn't this moment. That was then. This was now.
He stepped back.
But the shard flared once — bright enough to throw shadows — and the altar split with a sound like splitting bone.
And something inside rose.
It wasn't a creature. Not exactly.
It was shaped like a man, but too tall, too thin, its body made of what looked like glass and ash and light barely held together. Its head tilted, twitchy and birdlike, and the voice it used didn't come from a mouth.
It came from inside Kaelen's head.
"You carry the wound. The spark. The thief-mark."
Kaelen didn't move. Didn't breathe.
"You have touched the shard, and yet you remain."
It stepped forward. Its feet left no prints. Its chest flickered — a broken star beating behind thin skin.
"Why are you not ash?"
Kaelen finally found his voice, low and dry. "I ask myself that every damn day."
A pause.
Then... a laugh. Soft. Like cracking ice.
"Good."
The figure raised its hand. Its fingers were wrong — too many joints, bending the wrong way — but it held something. A second shard. Darker. More jagged.
It tossed it forward.
Kaelen didn't catch it. It landed with a clink at his feet, humming low.
"Your path burns forward, or it ends now."
Then the figure collapsed in on itself — not vanishing, but folding. Like paper burned from the inside.
And Kaelen was alone again.
He stood there for a long time.
He didn't touch the new shard. Not yet.
But he didn't walk away from it either.
The first one had led him this far.
This one… might be the reason why.