Kael walked for three days.
The road led east, beyond the scorched meridians and past the Hollow Ridge, into lands where maps turned to guesses. The soil here was gray, quiet—too quiet. Even spirit-beasts avoided it.
But Kael didn't slow.
He had heard the whispers.
A sect, once annihilated by divine decree, had begun to breathe again.
The Mournspire Sect.
Dead for nine thousand years.
Erased.
Salted.
But something had shifted.
And Kael felt it like a pressure in his blood.
The kind of pressure that only came when forbidden things remembered their names.
---
By the fourth night, he reached a valley strangled by mist.
The trees were stone. The rivers didn't flow—they trembled.
Even the stars above dimmed, as if ashamed to witness what lay below.
Kael descended into it, each step forward drawing his shadow longer.
Eventually, he saw them—robes of tattered grey and violet, faces veiled not with cloth but with shimmering wards, like veils carved from memory.
They stood in silence, arranged like tombs given form.
Kael kept walking.
No one stopped him.
They couldn't.
Because even in their rebirth, the Mournspire Sect remembered who had broken them last.
And now… he had returned.
---
At the foot of a shattered gate, an old man sat cross-legged.
No aura.
No pretense.
Just waiting.
His voice was soft when he spoke.
> "You smell like the sky."
Kael stopped.
> "And you reek of dust."
The old man smiled.
> "Dust remembers more than you think."
> "So do I."
The gate behind him bore no symbols, no seals. Only a single name scratched into the stone:
> "Our God Was Silence."
Kael touched the gate with one hand.
The stone peeled open like ash.
---
Inside, the Mournspire wasn't rebuilt.
It had simply refused to die.
Temples melted into cliffs, statues eroded by time, and yet everything felt awake. The walls pulsed softly. The air was heavy—not with power, but grief.
And at the center stood a hall of mirrors.
Each mirror tall as a mountain. Each one covered in veils.
> "We do not reflect the world," the old man said, walking beside Kael now. "We reflect what the world refused to see."
Kael faced the center mirror.
It was veiled in chains.
Scripture, divine and broken, wrapped around it.
> "What's in there?" he asked.
> "Your enemy," the old man whispered.
Kael's eyes narrowed.
> "Who?"
> "Your next self."
---
The mirror pulsed.
Faintly.
As if hearing its name called for the first time in epochs.
And Kael understood.
The Mournspire Sect didn't want rebirth.
They wanted revenge.
But not against the gods.
Not against the sovereigns.
Against him.
Because he had left them broken.
And now they had watched the sky bleed for him.
---
Kael turned.
> "Prepare your mirrors," he said. "If your truth still stands, I will face it."
> "Will you reflect it?"
> "No," Kael replied. "I will erase it."
---
Behind him, the chained mirror cracked once.
And somewhere in the valley, a name long buried gasped its first breath.