The sky was heavy with breathless twilight. Somewhere below, the world continued—soldiers drilling, acolytes studying, the slow heartbeat of Aetherveil turning under torchlight—but up here, in the broken chapel tower, time stilled.
Caelum sat with his back against a moss-veiled column, hands cradling the old glyph-etched pendant Rheia had given him. It didn't glow, didn't hum, but when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the phantom pulse of it in his fingers.
Aetherveil had gone quiet.
Too quiet.
As if waiting for a word no one dared speak.
The parchment was still in his coat, the one with the phrase Serapha had read aloud in a breath that trembled: The Nameless comes.
He didn't know who—or what—it referred to.
But Serapha had known something. She always did.
He glanced sideways.
She wasn't here.
He didn't know if that comforted him or left him lonelier.
Meanwhile, on the lower slope of the old training grounds, Rheia stood barefoot in a ring of silver dust and bloodroot, clutching a dream journal tight against her chest. The pages inside were scorched at the corners—old entries, overwritten and struck through, but never thrown away.
It had been hours since the vision.
Since the dream.
But the feeling hadn't left her.
It wasn't her dream.
She remembered the garden of ash. The bone-roots beneath her feet. The sword-ringed child. The moment the sky shattered.
And the words.
Do you remember the stars, Rheia of Thorne?
She hadn't told Caelum.
She didn't want to scare him.
He already looked like a boy bearing a thousand secrets—and another secret might be the one that shattered him.
But she'd begun to wonder: why her?
Why show her that vision?
The answer, she knew, wasn't buried in the dream.
It was buried in her.
Serapha stood in the flooded mirror chamber deep beneath Aetherveil's eastern crypts, alone except for the flickering glyphlight cast by Weave-lanterns half-consumed with age.
She hadn't come here in years.
Not since she'd first been inducted into the Hollow Choir.
And even then, they'd kept her blindfolded.
But she remembered the sound.
The voice.
"This one will not sing."
A whisper in her memory. A sentence of exile.
Even back then, she'd known she wasn't like the others.
Not bound to the typical channels of Lucent or Aetherwork.
Not even properly synced to the Crown's first cadence.
She was an anomaly. A flicker between layers.
That was why they'd used her.
Why they'd sent her to retrieve the broken boy in the northern wastes.
She touched the dark mirror with her bare fingers. The water-ripple shimmer of the surface did not reflect her face.
Instead, it showed him.
Caelum.
Not now. Then.
Years younger, bleeding silver, kneeling at the center of a broken leyline.
And behind him—something vast. Something faceless. A Nameless hunger cloaked in spirals of forgetting.
Serapha pulled her hand away, heart hammering.
The Echo Crown didn't choose its bearers.
It remembered them.
And it never remembered the harmless ones.
When Caelum finally fell asleep that night in the high chapel ruins, his dreams were quiet.
Not empty—just quiet.
The sky above him was a different shade. Not the burnished violet of dusk, but the kind of blue that felt like silence given form.
And then a voice whispered his name.
Not his given name.
Not Caelum.
But something older.
Something he couldn't pronounce.
He turned, expecting to see Serapha.
But it wasn't her.
It was a girl he didn't know—eyes like cracked obsidian, a dress stitched from feathers and salt, standing on water that had no reflection.
"You're late," she said.
He stared.
"Who are you?"
She tilted her head.
"I am the scream you forgot. The hand you didn't take. I am the part of you that never fell."
Caelum took a step back.
"This isn't real."
The girl's mouth didn't move. But her voice echoed in his mind.
That's what makes it dangerous.
She reached into the air and drew forth a thread of light. Not mana. Not Aether. Something older. Something raw.
And then she was gone.
He woke with a start.
The pendant burned against his chest.
And the first words in his mind weren't his own.
Later, as the sun crept over the stone walls of Aetherveil, painting pale amber across the waking academy, Serapha found him again in the training yard.
Not training.
Just watching.
"Did you dream?" she asked.
Caelum didn't answer immediately.
"Yes," he said finally. "But it didn't feel like mine."
"Was she a girl in black? Pale skin, sharp voice?"
"Yes."
"I've seen her too."
Caelum's head turned slowly.
"She calls herself nothing. And everything. That's what makes her… hard to trace."
"Is she real?"
Serapha met his gaze.
"She's a memory shard. From something we don't have words for."
Caelum looked down at his hands.
"Do you think I'm going to become like her?"
Serapha didn't answer.
Instead, she stepped beside him and placed her hand over his heart.
"No," she whispered. "I think you already did. And now you're trying to become human again."
Elsewhere, deep beneath the collapsed eastern sanctum, a crack split open in the floor of the Weavecatacombs.
No one saw it.
No one heard it.
But a voice without a name began to hum.
And across the leyline map of the continent, one by one, glyph beacons began to flicker—