I. The Visitor
It was rare for strangers to come to Saint Erina's.
Rarer still that they came alone, with no caravan, no company, and no real reason.
But that morning, just before the sun rose high enough to burn through the chapel's frost-covered windows, a tall, pale man arrived at the front gate, cloaked in threadbare robes stitched with old religious patterns that no one used anymore.
He had no name, or at least none he gave.
Only a scroll tucked into his belt and a silver coin pressed into Sister Olma's hand.
And eyes—unblinking and pale blue—that didn't move the way normal eyes did. They didn't follow movement. They listened.
Kai noticed him from the upper balcony, peering down through the cracks in the old wood.
The man never looked up.
But Kai's shard pulsed once, faint and cold.
He stepped back.
Olma greeted the visitor with distant politeness and led him inside the chapel.
He didn't speak much.
Didn't eat the tea and bread she offered.
Just unrolled the scroll on the altar and showed it to her in silence.
Kai caught a glimpse as he crept around the back of the room, staying just behind the tapestry curtain.
The scroll was filled with glyphs.
Spirals. Inverted scripts. Fractured divine tongues.
He didn't recognize them.
And somehow, he did.
Olma's voice was tight.
"There are no relics here."
"And no one with that name."
The man tilted his head slightly.
Not in confusion.
In amusement.
Then rolled up the scroll and walked out without another word.
II. The City Below
By midday, the stranger was gone.
Aren insisted he had stolen from the chapel.
Lina said he hadn't blinked once.
Kai said nothing.
He just kept thinking about the symbol carved on the scroll's end—a spiral with a single eye in the center.
It burned behind his eyelids even now.
To distract themselves, the three went down to the city with two older teens sent to trade for supplies.
Lowridge Market wasn't far—just beyond the ridge trails, down where the sky was thick with smoke and the air smelled like oil, bread, and old prayers.
Kai liked the noise of the city.
It made his thoughts quieter.
But not today.
They were halfway through the square when it happened.
A relic merchant was showing off a cracked mirror fragment he claimed once belonged to a "sky angel." The usual crowd of skeptics laughed and tossed coins at his feet.
Until the mirror lit up.
Bright.
Gold.
Alive.
And then screamed.
The sound wasn't heard—it was felt. It split into the spine and twisted behind the eyes.
People dropped to their knees, hands clutched to ears. Pigeons burst into the sky in a storm of feathers.
Kai didn't fall.
Neither did Lina or Aren.
But the shard in Kai's chest began to burn.
He turned—and the mirror was pointing at him.
"Kalai…" the voice whispered.
"You walk again…"
III. The First Confrontation
Without warning, the fragment detached from the stall and launched across the square.
Aren tackled Kai to the ground just as it embedded into the wall behind him, sending sparks and dust everywhere.
Lina grabbed a metal pole from the nearest stall and swung it toward the fragment.
It shrieked—a sound like static through memory—and shattered into glowing shards.
People screamed and ran.
The two older teens with them were nowhere to be seen.
"What the hell was that?!" Aren yelled.
Kai sat up, vision spinning.
The shards of the relic were still pulsing—small, rhythmic lights that beat in time with his chest.
"I think…" he whispered.
"I think it recognized me."
"Or who I used to be."
A merchant ran toward them, eyes wide.
"You three! Come with me! Now!"
It wasn't an order.
It was a plea.
"They'll come back. If you don't move, they'll come back!"
IV. Shelter and Questions
They ducked into the merchant's back storeroom, lit by faint glyphlight.
The man was thin, hunched, with ink-stained fingers and a glyph-tattoo running from jaw to collarbone.
"That relic was inert. Dead. I've had it for five years."
"It's never moved. Never responded."
"Then you walked past it and it woke like it missed you."
Kai stared at the floor.
Lina sat beside him, face pale.
Aren paced.
The merchant lowered his voice.
"The last time I saw that glyph burn like that… was in the war vaults."
"Before the gods went silent."
"Before we started pretending they were never here."
He looked at Kai.
"Who are you, really?"
Kai didn't answer.
Because he didn't know.
V. The Shard Speaks
That night, back at the orphanage, Kai stood alone beneath the fig tree.
The shard in his chest hadn't stopped pulsing since the incident.
It didn't burn.
It… hummed.
Like it was thinking.
Or remembering.
"Kalai," it whispered again. A voice deep and distant, like it came from the roots of the world.
"Return."
He pressed a hand to his chest.
"I don't want to remember."
The shard went silent.
But only for a breath.
Then—
"You already have."
VI. Lina and Aren – Still Here
Later, in the chapel's shadow, Kai found Aren and Lina waiting with a stolen loaf and half a bottle of sweetroot wine.
They didn't say anything.
They just sat on either side of him and passed the bread.
After a while, Aren muttered:
"Whatever you are…"
"You're still Kai to me."
Lina nodded.
"And whatever's coming…"
"We're not letting it take you alone."
For a long while, they just sat like that.
Three kids.
One secret.
And a future waking up faster than any of them could run from.