The world had remembered.
But remembrance, as ever, demanded its price.
The flames of the Circle, once raging and hungry, had dimmed at last into a hush of amber embers, glowing faintly like stars buried under centuries of stone. Where once divine fire had danced, now silence settled—a silence not of peace, but of tension. Brittle. Sharp. The kind of silence that came just before a storm or a breaking. Around them, the air pulsed with an ancient resonance, thick with memory and the invisible weight of magic too old to name. The Memory-Maker—the divine echo who had guided the Rite and ignited the Circle—was gone, vanished like a breath swallowed by the wind. And with her departure, the Crownless City held its breath.
