The scent of old myrrh still lingered in the chapel air.
Caelum stood at the edge of the broken altar, the hum of the Echo Crown still clinging faintly to his mind like the dying notes of a funeral bell. Serapha hadn't moved. She knelt in the half-light, her wings drawn tight around her shoulders like a shroud, the shadows curling unnaturally along the cracked marble beneath her.
The silence stretched.
He approached slowly, careful not to make a sound. The echo of his own footsteps felt too loud, too real, like they didn't belong here.
Not anymore.
"…Serapha?"
Her breath hitched, barely audible. Then came her whisper, soft and brittle. "It spoke to me again."
Caelum's throat tightened. "The Crown?"
She nodded without looking up. "It remembers."
He crouched beside her. "Remembers what?"
Her golden eyes turned to him—not burning, but hollowed by something ancient. "Names. Lives. Whole kingdoms undone. And something else… It called me by a name I've never known."
She swallowed, her voice smaller now. "It said, 'Welcome home, Maeraphiel.'"
They left the chapel as dusk fell, the last light slanting through shattered windows in weary reds and golds.
The Order's camp, stationed beyond the ruined city walls, flickered with torchlight. The wards had been redrawn. The Weave winds were calmer tonight. But the storm between Caelum and Serapha brewed in silence.
He wanted to ask what that name meant. Why the Crown had reacted to her. What she remembered.
But he could see how fragile she'd become. And in his chest, something else throbbed: a question of his own place in all this. The Crown hadn't spoken to him.
Not once.
And yet it had chosen him. Hadn't it?
Later that night, Caelum sat near the campfire, watching the embers swirl like lost stars. Lucien sat across from him, sharpening a blade with steady, practiced strokes. The steel whispered.
"You've changed," Lucien said after a while. "Since we left Kharavel."
Caelum blinked. "Is that good or bad?"
Lucien shrugged. "Neither. Just different. You don't look like someone waiting for orders anymore."
Caelum managed a dry laugh. "I'm still waiting for answers."
Lucien tilted his head. "And when you get them?"
Caelum hesitated. Then: "Then I stop waiting."
That night, he dreamt again.
But it wasn't like before—no shouts, no flames, no endless corridors of glass. This time, it was a memory.
Not his.
He stood on a battlefield blackened by ash, the sky rent open by spirals of burning light. A figure stood before him, cloaked in ethereal gold, wielding a blade woven of song and sorrow.
"You will forget," she said, her voice the same as Serapha's—but older, full of thunder. "But when the Crown wakes again, so too will the war."
Caelum tried to speak, but his body would not move.
"The Nameless stir beneath the skin of the world. The Hollow Choir sings once more. You cannot run from it."
Her face, so much like Serapha's, turned toward the horizon—where a city of crystal and bone burned silently beneath a broken moon.
And then—
He woke.
The morning came with too much light.
A scout burst through the eastern edge of camp, breath ragged. "Three riders approaching! No banners. One of them—glowing!"
The camp scrambled into motion. Caelum grabbed his coat, buckling the reinforced vambrace Serapha had repaired days ago. She was already at the edge of camp, her hand on the hilt of a blade that wasn't there when they left Kharavel.
An old weapon. Familiar. Not hers.
He joined her. "You recognize them?"
She didn't answer, eyes fixed on the dust rising in the distance.
Moments later, the riders breached the edge of the wards. The one in the center glowed faintly, her armor alive with flickering veins of energy that pulsed in time with Caelum's own heartbeat.
Then he saw her face.
"Ilvarra," Serapha breathed.
The woman reined in her steed, dismounted with elegance that only centuries could teach. She removed her helmet and stared directly at Caelum.
"You've come far, little Echo."
He stiffened. "You know who I am?"
Ilvarra smiled faintly. "I knew who you were before you were born."
Tension rippled across the wardlines. The guards were wary, weapons half-raised. The other two riders—one a pale man with a warhammer wrapped in chain, the other a silent, mask-faced figure in bone-draped robes—stood at Ilvarra's flanks, like judgment incarnate.
Serapha stepped forward. "You shouldn't be here."
"And yet," Ilvarra said calmly, "the Weave has summoned me. Just as it has summoned him."
She looked again at Caelum, her gaze piercing.
"The Echo Crown has awakened. And the Nameless will not stay dreaming for long. We have work to do. All of us."
Caelum stepped back, his hands trembling.
Serapha's voice cut in, sharp as the blade she hadn't yet drawn. "You were exiled. Cast out for what you did."
Ilvarra didn't blink. "And yet your kind still bear my glyphs in their wings, little one."
The air crackled.
Lucien was there now too, one hand resting on his sword pommel. He muttered to Caelum, "Friend of yours?"
"No," Caelum whispered. "Not yet."
But something in him stirred—an old recognition. Not from memory, but from instinct. From the Crown.
From something older still.
Ilvarra turned, walking toward the center of camp without invitation. "You want answers, Caelum? You'll have them. But knowledge has a price."
"And what price is that?" he asked, trying to steady his voice.
Ilvarra's smile was cold.
"Everything you are not ready to give."