The infected droplet swallowed the heir whole, pulling them into its viscous darkness like a drowning man dragged beneath black waters. For one endless moment, they existed as nothing but raw consciousness, dissolved in the black-silver fluid that stank of burnt divinity and broken promises. The liquid burned where it touched their silver-threaded hand, searing through flesh to bone with a pain so absolute it erased all thought.
Then the void spat them out.
The heir collapsed onto cold stone, their newly reformed body convulsing as they choked on air thick with the scent of wet limestone and iron. The metallic tang of fresh blood coated their tongue, undercut by something sweetly rotten that made their stomach heave. They pressed their forehead against the damp floor, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
When they finally looked up, the heir understood why this memory smelled of death.
They stood in the catacombs beneath Mount Scripture.
Not the ruins they'd seen in other visions, but the intact burial chambers where Arcanthus scribes had interred their dead for millennia. The walls pulsed with faintly glowing runes, their blue-green light reflecting off the rows of silver sarcophagi lining the corridor. Each coffin bore intricate carvings of celestial laws, the inscriptions shimmering as if written with liquid starlight.
At the far end of the corridor, barely visible in the gloom, knelt Kaelion.
The heir moved forward cautiously, their bare feet silent on the damp stone. This version of Kaelion was younger than they'd ever seen him—no older than twenty, his face still soft with youth despite the hollows grief had carved beneath his eyes. The elegant robes of an Arcanthus scribe hung loose on his frame, as if he'd forgotten to eat for days. He crouched before a simple stone slab, his sister's body laid atop it. She looked peaceful.
That was the first shock. In every other memory, she'd been broken, bleeding, burning. Here, she might have been sleeping, her silver hair arranged carefully around her shoulders, her hands folded over the snapped remains of her quill. Someone had cleaned the blood from her face, had closed her eyes with coins of celestial silver. Only the unnatural pallor of her skin and the terrible stillness of her chest betrayed the truth. Kaelion wasn't weeping.
That was the second shock. He simply stared at her face, his breathing measured, his fingers tracing the edge of the slab with mechanical precision. The heir recognized that stillness—it wasn't calm, but the terrible quiet of a mind that had moved beyond grief into something far more dangerous. They'd seen that look before, in the moments before the Silent King passed a particularly brutal edict.
Then the whispering began.
At first, the heir thought it was the wind moving through the catacombs' endless tunnels. But the sound grew clearer, coalescing into words that slithered from the walls themselves.
"She doesn't have to stay dead."
Kaelion didn't react.
"You know what you are. What your blood can do."
His fingers twitched against the stone.
"The Hollow Crown was made for Arcanthus hands. Take it. Remake her."
The heir turned, searching for the source of the voice, but the shadows clung stubbornly to the corners of the chamber. Only when they looked back at Kaelion did they see it a faint silver thread, no thicker than a hair, winding its way from the darkness toward his wrist. It pulsed with the same rhythm as the heir's quill-bonded hand. Kaelion saw it too.
For a long moment, he simply watched as the thread coiled around his fingers. Then, with deliberate slowness, he reached into his robes and withdrew a folded piece of parchment.
The heir recognized it instantly—the page his sister had hidden in the vault, the one covered in diagrams and warnings. Even from this distance, they could see where Kaelion's fingers had worn the edges thin from constant handling.
The whispering grew frenzied:
"She lied to you. They all lied. The Crown doesn't bind it liberates."
Kaelion unfolded the page with trembling hands, his eyes scanning the diagrams, the warnings, the final plea written in his sister's tight script, Don't trust what it offers you.
The heir watched as his breath hitched, as his shoulders sagged under the weight of impossible choices. They saw the exact moment his resolve fractured—not in a dramatic collapse, but in the slight tremble of his lower lip, the way his fingers tightened on the page just before letting it flutter to the floor.
When he spoke, his voice was raw with disuse. "What do I do?"
The shadows surged forward.
Silver threads erupted from the walls like spider silk in a sudden breeze, wrapping around Kaelion's arms, his chest, his throat. They pulsed as they tightened, their light growing brighter with each beat until the heir had to shield their eyes.
When the light faded, the Hollow Crown hovered where Kaelion had knelt, its jagged points gleaming with reflected rune-light. And standing before it, his hand outstretched, was the young scribe who would become the Silent King.
The heir tried to scream a warning, but the memory was already unraveling around them, the catacombs dissolving into streaks of color and sound. The last thing they saw before the void reclaimed them was Kaelion's face eyes wide with terrible understanding as his fingers closed around the Crown's waiting thorns.