Whispers Beneath the Hollow Sky
The sky over Nimruhl resembled a torn parchment inked with shadow. Clouds bled with streaks of crimson lightning, and the air hummed with a silence too deep to be natural. The world ahead was broken, wrong in the way a forgotten wound never quite heals.
Kael Valen stood on the fractured ridge, his gaze locked on the horizon where gravity had given up. Mountains floated in place. Rivers climbed toward the heavens. And beneath it all, the Veil pulsed like a second heart.
"This place remembers me," Kael murmured.
"Impossible," Elarin said softly beside him. Her dusk-born eyes narrowed, the shimmer of foresight dimmed by something even she couldn't decipher. "The Wardens fell a thousand years ago. No place remembers ghosts."
Kael didn't respond. His Shard—embedded deep within his chest—was no longer dormant. It whispered, not in words, but in feelings: hunger, familiarity... ownership. The corrupted light it cast flickered violet, like the last breath of a dying star.
Riven Thorne, ever the sentinel, sheathed one of his sabers. "Whether this place remembers you or not, it's waking up. We need to move before it notices we're here."
"And if it already has?" Maera asked, one hand gripping the haft of her spear, the other twitching with residual tension from the earlier fight. Her tone was calm, but her body betrayed otherwise.
"Then we make it regret remembering," Riven said.
They descended into Nimruhl.
The landscape rejected logic. Trees had no bark, only veins. Rocks hummed with memories not their own. A great spiral of shattered towers twisted toward the sky like a cry frozen mid-scream.
Kael felt time stretch and compress with every step. One moment they were crossing a ravine, the next they stood before a monolith—black stone, veiled in mist, carved with the language of the First Era.
He should not have been able to read it.
But he did.
> "Return the Vow. Or be unmade."
A jolt slammed through Kael's chest. The Shard flared.
He staggered.
"Kael?" Maera reached for him, her touch grounding. But as he looked up, her face shimmered—and changed.
White hair. Crimson eyes. A tattoo of the Veilbrand Sigil marked the collarbone of the stranger standing in her place.
And then she was gone, replaced once more by Maera's worried gaze.
"You saw her again," Elarin said. It wasn't a question.
Kael nodded slowly. "She called herself Aelith... in the dream. Said the Vow was never broken. Only buried."
Riven stepped forward, eyes narrowing. "You're not just bonded to the Shard anymore. Something inside it remembers you. Remembers her."
They turned toward the ruins rising ahead. A cathedral, or what was left of it, with its spires torn skyward like pleading fingers. Inside, the Veil pulsed—a heartbeat Kael felt in his bones.
At the altar's center, black stone bloomed with symbols long lost to men. Kael stepped forward, ignoring Elarin's warning cry, and placed his palm against it.
The world vanished.
He was falling—not through space, but through memory.
Fire.
Ash.
A crown of broken halos.
And eyes—so ancient they had no beginning—watching him.
> "Warden-Kin... Return what was stolen."
> "Return the Vow, or become the weapon we left behind."
Kael screamed as the Shard surged—its corruption consuming every ounce of light in his soul.
And then, silence.