The temple walls no longer held prayers.
They whispered only warnings.
Elira stood beneath the ruined arch, her breath a plume of white mist in the cold air. The fires outside had gone out. The night had become too still, too watchful, as if the stars above were holding their breath.
"Kael?" she called softly.
No answer. Only the wind, crawling like fingers along the shattered stone.
Her bare feet crunched on old bones and fallen leaves as she moved into the courtyard. Where once there had been offerings—bowls of ash and moon petals—there were now smears of black blood, already drying, and footprints too large to belong to any human.
And then, a single word, etched into the ground with the point of a blade:
"REMEMBER."
Elira dropped to one knee, touching it with trembling fingers. The edges were fresh.
He had left her a message—but not to warn her. It was a plea. A command. Perhaps even a spell. The shard in her skin flared again, as if reacting to the word.
And suddenly, the memory came, unbidden and violent:
The past, buried deep…
Elira was seven.
She stood in a field of grey lilies, laughing as the moons shone overhead—three full, three pure. Her mother called her name, a voice like music.
And then the sky tore open.
Fire fell. Stars screamed. The moons shattered, except one.
The field burned. Her mother died in silence.
And from the broken sky, something reached down—a shadow with too many hands—and offered her a single shard of light.
"Remember what you are, Elira."
She gasped and staggered back. Blood dripped from her nose.
That memory had been locked. Hidden. And now it was open.
Not just a dream.
A truth.
In the woods beyond Duskmere…
Kael ran.
Branches clawed at his face, but he did not stop. He had seen something in the reflection of the well. A face that was not his. Eyes that burned with cold light. And then a voice—his own voice—whispering in his skull:
"She is not the girl you knew."
He didn't know where he was running, only that he had to leave the village, leave her, before whatever stirred inside her reached the surface.
But the forest had changed.
The trees no longer grew like trees. They spiraled, as if twisted by pain. The path vanished behind him. Time unraveled.
And then—he was not alone.
A figure stepped from the mist. Cloaked in shadow, its face hidden behind a mirror mask. It spoke not with words, but images, flashing through Kael's mind like knives.
—Elira with wings of glass, standing over a burning city.
—A throne made of bones.
—A child of flame, reaching out to touch the last moon.
—The world ending, again and again.
Kael screamed, fell to his knees, and then the figure said, out loud:
"You cannot save her. But you can still choose how she ends."
Then it vanished.
Back in the temple...
Elira knew she had to leave Duskmere.
The shard's power was growing. Her memories—true memories—were bleeding through. She had not always been human. Not fully.
In the mirror of the broken temple altar, she saw her eyes flicker with something alien—something vast.
"I need answers," she whispered.
And there was only one place left to go: the Hollow Spire, the ruin that touched the sky. No one who entered had ever returned. But she knew, now, that it was calling her. That it had always been calling.
She turned. The villagers stood in silence behind her.
Old men. Children. Wounded.
And they looked at her not with hope, but with dread.
"You bring the old gods back," one muttered.
"You wear the shard," said another. "Like the Ash-Born."
"I never asked for this," she replied.
"But you accepted it," Mother Keth said, stepping forward, holding a blade carved from obsidian moonstone. "And now, you must choose—will you destroy what you are… or become it fully?"
Meanwhile, far across the sea…
A warship burned beneath a rain of meteors.
The coast of Vael'Torria cracked, releasing ancient sigils into the sky. The Order of the Ashen Moon sent up flares. Across the continent, towers collapsed as the ley-lines surged.
And in a black chamber beneath a desert of glass, an immortal queen awoke from her slumber of two thousand years.
She whispered a single name: "Elira."
The world began to move again.
The road to the Hollow Spire was not marked on any map.
It wound between dead rivers and frozen time, through valleys haunted by echoes of gods who no longer answered prayers.
Elira left Duskmere before dawn. The village did not see her off.
Kael did not return.
Her only company was the whisper in the shard—no longer silent, no longer passive. It spoke in riddles, dreams, and at times, with her own voice from another life.
"One moon to bind, one blood to wake,
Three lies to break before the fate."
She repeated the words without understanding. A child's rhyme, maybe. Or a key.
She passed ruins swallowed by ash, statues half-buried in frost. And at the edge of a salt-sick lake, she met the first of the three trials.
The Sentinel of Eyes.
It emerged from beneath the lake without sound. No splash. No warning.
Seven feet tall, robed in woven shadows, its face a cascade of eyes—hundreds, all open, all blinking independently. Some cried. Others bled. Some were hers.
"You carry the wound of remembrance," it said in a voice made of wind across a tomb. "You must leave it here."
Elira stood her ground, though her knees shook. "I won't forget who I am."
"You never knew who you were."
The creature extended a hand, a single eye in its palm. "Show me."
And the shard in her wrist pulsed. Pain lanced up her arm. Images—too many, too fast—flashed across her vision:
—A blade buried in her own chest.
—Kael, kneeling before her, whispering "Forgive me."
—A mountain collapsing into a sea of screaming stars.
—A kiss beneath a blood moon.
The Sentinel staggered.
"You are farther gone than even the Hollow expected," it whispered. "You should not have survived the First Ending."
"I didn't," Elira said.
Then she touched the shard to its hand.
There was a sound like ice shattering inside her skull.
When she opened her eyes, the Sentinel was gone. Only a single silver tear remained, frozen in the air before falling and vanishing into the dust.
Meanwhile…
Kael stood at the edge of a memory not his own.
He no longer knew how he had gotten there. The forest had become a mirror of forgotten dreams—trees bending backward, sky that moved too fast, birds that sang in reverse.
He remembered Elira, but only as a blur, a wound that throbbed in his chest.
And he remembered the voice that had visited him again in the night, the same shadow-thing that now walked beside him without walking.
"You were made for her ending," it said. "You carry the fail-safe."
"Stop speaking in riddles!" Kael roared.
But the thing only smiled, or seemed to. "You loved her once. That will make what comes next possible."
Then it vanished again.
Kael wept, though he did not know why.
Back on the broken path…
Elira climbed through the jagged pass of Kezhar Ridge, where the sky cracked and time bled.
Above her, the Hollow Spire loomed now, faint but rising—blacker than night, taller than stars. The air around it shimmered like a fever dream. The winds grew harsh. The world resisted her steps.
She made camp beneath a leaning pillar carved with names in no known tongue. That night, her dreams were no longer her own.
In the dream…
She was seated on a throne of ruin.
Around her knelt a thousand soldiers with faces like masks. All chanted her name—not Elira, but something lost to ages.
"Vel'raeth."
She stood. Her hands dripped fire.
Then she saw Kael, bound in chains of bone, weeping at her feet.
"You swore you'd protect me," he said.
"I did."
"Then why are you burning the world?"
She looked down. Her fingers were burning—no, her skin was fire. Her eyes were stars. Her mouth opened—
And she awoke screaming, the shard searing in her arm.