They crossed into the Shattermarch at dawn.
Nothing grew there.
No wind.
No birds.
Just stillness.
As if the land itself refused to move until the past had finished speaking.
Rohen kept his blade drawn. Seraya pressed her fingers to her temple every few steps, warding off the memories in the mist.
Kael?
He listened.
Because the Eleventh Fragment had stopped humming.
And something older had taken its place.
Tale: The Withered Pact
Bound not in blood nor bond, but in the refusal to die alone.
In the first age, there were three:
Virel the Flame-Eater,
Soltren the Dream-Eyed,
And Demael, Who Held the Quiet.
They hated each other. Not in the way mortals hate—petty, flammable, and loud.
They hated with purpose.
Each had tried, separately, to break the world.
Each had failed.
And in their failure, they realized something terrifying:
Alone, they were limited.
Together, they could end everything.
So they met, not in a council, but in a circle of silence.
And instead of striking, they listened.
And instead of war, they made a pact:
None of them would destroy the world…
Unless all three agreed to.
A fragile mercy.
A terrifying bond.
The world lived because three monsters feared each other more than they hated mankind.
And so the Withered Pact was sealed.
In breath.
In bone.
In regret.
In the center of Shattermarch stood a ruin that had no name.
Not a fortress.
Not a temple.
Just a scar made of stone.
Kael touched the pillar at its heart, and it remembered him.
Not him, precisely.
What he carried.
Three voices surged from the rock—rasped, broken, clashing.
One fire.
One shadow.
One silence.
"A bearer returns."
"We are incomplete."
"Will he listen?"
Kael closed his eyes.
"I will."
The voices surged:
"One of us still breathes."
Kael opened his eyes slowly.
"Which one?"
"The quiet one."
"Demael waits."
"And Demael remembers everything."
Seraya stepped beside him.
"Is this a warning?"
Kael shook his head.
"No."
He placed both palms on the pillar, and the stone beneath them shattered like ash.
"It's an invitation."
Far to the north, something stirred beneath the ocean.
A song older than any sun whispered through kelp and coral.
A voice that had not spoken since the Pact was made.
Demael opened one eye.
And the tide forgot how to ebb.
Kael turned to his companions.
"If Demael still lives, we need to find him."
Rohen frowned. "To stop him?"
Kael shook his head.
"To ask why he hasn't destroyed us yet."
Before they moved north, Kael stood alone beneath the sky that did not blink.
The Shattermarch had begun to whisper.
Not voices. Not memories.
But rules.
Something deeper than magic, older than gods.
The Eleventh Fragment pulsed slow and sure against his spine.
Listen.
He closed his eyes.
Remember.
Truth: The True Law of Fractures
Never taught. Only realized.
The fragments were not meant to be wielded.
They were not weapons.
Not keys.
Not thrones.
They were choices that refused to die.
Each shard broke from something whole—something pure.
Not out of anger.
But because the world chose to lie.
And the truth they carried could no longer stay silent.
The Law is simple:
What you carry, carries you.
What you choose, chooses you.
Every bearer becomes not the master of their fragment…
But its reflection.
If you wield a shard of wrath, it is because wrath already lives in you.
If you bear the shard of mercy, it is because you have broken once, and chose to bind instead of bleed.
Fragments do not grant power.
They mirror it.
Kael opened his eyes.
Seraya stood nearby, watching the sky with her hand resting lightly on her sword hilt.
"Did it speak to you again?" she asked.
"No," Kael said. "It reminded me I'm not the hero of this story."
Rohen approached, frowning. "Then who is?"
Kael looked at them both.
Then up—beyond the sky, beyond the stars, to where silence had weight.
"I don't think there's just one."
They camped near the edge of the Vale of Stillness, a region untouched even by birds.
There, Kael opened the old book he had taken from Gavreth's Hollow—one whose pages rewrote themselves when he bled on the cover.
It now bore a single line:
You are the vessel.
But not the purpose.
Seraya leaned over his shoulder. "Sounds like prophecy."
"No," Kael said. "Sounds like a warning."
That night, Kael dreamed.
Not of fire, not of war.
But of a table, long and black and empty.
Three chairs at one end.
One figure seated: robed in silence, face wrapped in ink.
Demael.
The last god of the Pact.
He did not speak.
He only watched.
But Kael felt it in his bones.
The shards inside him were beginning to hum in harmony.
A resonance of decision.
Demael raised a single hand.
And Kael woke screaming.
"Kael!" Seraya grabbed him. "What happened?"
He gasped, heart pounding like a war drum.
"He's waiting," Kael said. "Not to fight.:
Rohen narrowed his eyes. "Then what?"
Kael stood slowly.
"To see if I've already destroyed myself."
It wasn't marked on any map.
The Cradlecrack.
No one had named it aloud in five hundred years. Not because they forgot.
Because they remembered too well.
The wound that had once split the world—raw, trembling, never scabbed over.
A place where reality bent inward, like the breath before a scream.
They arrived in silence.
Even Rohen, always the first to crack a joke, walked with his head low, eyes wary.
The sky was still. Too still.
Kael felt it before he saw it.
A tug, not on his body, but on his memory.
Something was trying to rewrite who he'd been.
The chasm was not wide.
Only a few strides across.
But it fell forever.
You could scream into it and never hear the echo.
Because it didn't echo. It absorbed.
Kael approached the edge. The Eleventh Fragment pulsed, not violently—but reverently.
"Here," Seraya whispered, awestruck. "This is where the world broke."
"No," Kael replied. "This is where we broke. The world just followed."
Origin: The Wound That Binds
First memory. First fracture. First mercy denied.
Before the gods, before the dream of time, there was a unity.
Not perfection.
Not peace.
But wholeness.
Then one being asked a question:
"What if we are not enough?"
And that single doubt cracked the sky.
The answer did not come in words, but in splintering.
That doubt became a faultline.
A wound.
Not of flesh.
But of meaning.
From it fell twelve shards—each one a reflection of what was lost.
Courage.
Wisdom.
Hope.
Grief.
And one… unnamed. Still sleeping.
The Wound never closed.
Because the world never chose to forgive the question.
Kael dropped to one knee, reaching toward the abyss.
Not to fall in.
To listen.
And he heard it.
A voice without throat, carried on memory:
"If you wish to wield us,
Learn first what it meant to break us."
Then a second voice. Older. Cracked like cold stone:
"You carry the Eleventh.
But the Twelfth watches."
Kael's heart stopped.
"The Twelfth?"
"The shard without aspect.
The fragment of choice.
It sleeps still… at the wound's heart."
Seraya paled. "A thirteenth shard?"
"No," Kael whispered. "A twelfth that was forgotten. On purpose."
Behind them, the air shimmered.
Rohen turned sharply, blade drawn.
But it wasn't an enemy.
It was a memory, stepping out of time.
The same woman Kael had seen at the ruins of Varn—the Saint of Smoke and Gold.
But now her robe was black.
Burned.
Her voice was ash:
"You cannot bind the wound by power."
"Only by return."
Kael stood.
"You mean… go into it?"
She nodded.
"Not all of you. Only the part that still believes you were ever whole."
The Eleventh Fragment pulsed.
And Kael understood.
To reclaim what was broken…
…he had to offer what he feared to lose most.
The throne stood alone.
No court.
No banners.
No walls around it.
Just stone—carved into a shape that almost remembered what kings used to be.
They found it at the center of the Howlreach, where wind forgot how to leave and silence had claws.
A stone seat, wide enough for a god, empty enough for grief.
Not a single soul sat upon it in two thousand years.
Because this throne did not crown the strongest.
It crowned the most broken.
And to sit upon it was to bleed your truth into the world.
Kael approached first.
He didn't mean to.
His steps just kept moving, long after his breath had stopped.
Seraya whispered behind him. "Are you sure?"
"No," Kael said.
And he kept walking.
Myth: The Hollow Throne
Built not by kings, but by those who watched kings fall.
In the age of unmaking, when gods still quarreled over light, there came a time of endings.
Not war.
Not death.
But aftermath.
When victory meant holding the pieces of a world you could not put back together.
And so the Hollow Throne was shaped—not for conquest, not for dominion.
But for witness.
Only those who had known true ruin could sit upon it and remain themselves.
It does not grant power.
It remembers it.
And speaks only to those who lost everything… but still chose to keep going.
Kael stood before the throne.
Up close, it was even more haunting.
Etched into the arms of the seat were names—some in languages no longer spoken.
Some not names at all, but confessions.
He reached out a hand.
It trembled.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
Because deep down, something in him knew:
He was ready to sit.
Not because he had won.
But because he hadn't.
And still stood.
He sat.
And the world tilted.
The throne pulled nothing from him.
It offered nothing in return.
But it knew him.
Every broken piece.
Every lie he told himself to keep going.
Every small act of hope he still dared to commit.
The stone around him shifted, not physically—but spiritually.
It accepted his weight.
And in return, it whispered.
One word.
"Return."
Kael's breath caught.
"Return to what?"
"To who you were…
Before you learned to hide."
When he opened his eyes, the throne had carved something into his palm:
A mark in the shape of a spiral, broken at the edge.
Rohen stared, awestruck. "You… sat."
Seraya approached warily. "Did it speak?"
Kael looked at his palm.
At the symbol.
At the wound in the sky that was slowly beginning to close.
He nodded.
"Yes. And now I know where we go next."
Rohen frowned. "Where?"
Kael's voice was steady.
"To the City That Forgot Itself."
No road led to it.
No traveler spoke its name.
No book recorded its fall.
And yet Kael knew exactly where to go.
Because the mark in his palm burned brighter with every step north.
They passed through wastelands of silence, over ridges of bleached stone, until the air itself began to taste like ash and old paper.
Then—suddenly—there it was.
A skyline shattered like glass.
A city of towers twisted inward, as though folding to hide from itself.
It didn't ruin.
It recoiled.
Seraya stared, eyes wide. "What is this place?"
Kael's voice was hollow.
"It's where I was born."
Tale: The City That Forgot Itself
To protect a secret so heavy, even memory broke.
Once, this was a thriving city of scholars, stone-scribes, and wordsmiths—where every building held a story, and every child grew up fluent in myth.
Then the Eleventh Fragment arrived.
It did not fall.
It returned.
And when it did, the city tried to hold it.
But truth, when unfiltered, breaks the vessel.
One by one, the citizens chose to forget.
Not for survival.
But for mercy.
They gave up their names.
Their pasts.
Their purpose.
Until even the city forgot it had ever lived.
Only the stone remembered—and only in whispers.
Kael stepped past a crumbling arch.
The city pulsed around him, not with power, but with pain.
He remembered the street names.
The corners where merchants once laughed.
The library that had never burned, but which now stood in perfect ruin.
Seraya followed, blade drawn. "What are we looking for?"
Kael turned slowly, eyes dark with something older than grief.
"Not what. Who."
In the heart of the city stood a fountain with no water, only dust.
Kael approached it and knelt.
"Her name was Elien," he whispered. "She was my sister."
Rohen went still.
Kael ran his fingers over a cracked stone relief: a girl, arms outstretched toward the sky.
"She touched the Eleventh Fragment before I did," Kael continued. "But it didn't choose her."
He looked up.
"It burned her instead."
The wind shifted.
And the dust rose—not away, but toward the fountain.
It circled once, twice, three times…
Then shaped itself into a figure.
Not whole.
Not human.
But her.
Elien's face was made of wind and memory.
And she spoke.
"You came back late, Kael."
Kael's voice broke. "I didn't know how."
"You still don't. But you brought them."
Her gaze drifted to Seraya, then to Rohen.
"Good. You'll need them when you go to the Tower of Tithes."
Kael blinked. "What's there?"
Her voice turned sharp.
"The one who collects. The one who never forgets."
"The one who wears your face."
Kael staggered back.
Seraya caught him. "What did she mean?"
Kael's hands trembled.
"The next shard isn't guarded by a monster."
He swallowed hard.
"It's guarded by me."
Or rather…
The version of Kael who never sat on the Hollow Throne.