The world beyond the Hollow Tree was no longer the same.
Where once the skies had shimmered with constellations of hope, now clouds of ash clung to the horizon, dimming the sun and casting long shadows across the lands they once called home. The stars no longer whispered stories. The wind no longer carried songs. It all felt quieter—emptier.
Seren rode at the head of the march. Her hair was braided back, her cloak billowing behind her like a banner of mourning. Each hoofbeat of her steed echoed like the ticking of a clock—counting down to something no one dared name.
Kael rode beside her in silence.
Behind them, a column of warriors, mages, and lost souls stretched across the charred grasslands. Banners hung limp in the still air. Some of the younger ones whispered to themselves—reciting the names of loved ones over and over again, a desperate defense against being forgotten.
They had all felt it.
The vanishing.
Villages they had known since childhood were simply gone. Roads had shifted. Forests refused to answer their names. Even memories flickered—like candlelight in a storm.
Arlya walked barefoot at the rear of the column, surrounded by no one, accompanied by something unseen. Her hands glowed faintly. Where she stepped, flowers ignited, burned blue for a breath, then faded to ash.
She didn't speak. But she watched.
And the earth watched her in return.
---
By the third day, the silence began to feel alive.
The air turned colder. The grass lost its color. Birds no longer sang overhead. Their provisions began to spoil faster than they should have. Maps twisted themselves. North no longer pointed north. The world was folding inward.
Seren met with her captains under the hollow of a ruined tower—what once had been a watchpost from the Silver Age, now reduced to skeletal stone and vines.
"It's memory rot," Laziel said, laying the warped map across a cracked slab. "Magic is unraveling in threads we can't see."
Kael folded his arms. "Then we burn our path forward."
"That may be exactly what it wants," muttered Virea, dark eyes sharp. "We're being herded."
Seren's voice was calm. "Good. Let it herd us. Let it believe it can control us."
Everyone turned to her.
"I want it to see us coming."
---
That night, Seren couldn't sleep.
She stood alone at the edge of the encampment, watching the moon flicker in and out of a sky that no longer obeyed. It reminded her of her childhood—back when the Hollow Flame had first whispered to her. Back before she knew what pain really felt like.
"Do you regret it?" came a voice behind her.
Arlya.
Seren didn't turn. "Regret what?"
"Being the one the Flame chose."
Seren took a breath. "Every day."
Arlya came to stand beside her, hair drifting as if under water. "Then why keep going?"
Seren finally looked at her. "Because someone has to carry the fire."
---
The next morning, the first dead city appeared.
They came to its edge without realizing. One moment, they were marching through an open plain. The next, they were standing before a great gate carved from obsidian and pearl, half-sunken into the ground, the metal blackened and slick with frost.
There were no sounds. No footprints. No dust.
Just… emptiness.
They called it Thalen. It had once been the capital of the River Courts. Seren remembered visiting it once in her youth—colorful canals, wine stalls, echoing music in the market square.
Now there was nothing.
Not decay. Not ruin.
Just… gone.
Buildings still stood. Doors still hung. But everything felt like a painting — untouched and unlived in.
Arlya placed her palm to the city's gate. "It remembers nothing."
Laziel muttered, "Then we burn what it forgot."
Seren raised her sword and gave the order: pass through. And so they did.
---
The city was a maze of silence.
Shadows moved where no light touched. Echoes of voices whispered in alleys. Statues turned their heads when no one watched. Time bent — hours became seconds, and minutes became weeks.
Kael gripped Seren's arm. "We shouldn't stay long."
"No," she agreed. "But we need to find something—anything."
In the palace ruins, Seren found a mirror.
But it didn't reflect her.
Instead, it showed her Arlya, standing alone in a field of bones, her eyes black as void, her hands dripping fire.
Seren recoiled, and the glass cracked.
Arlya appeared in the doorway moments later. "It's not prophecy," she said.
"What is it then?"
"Warning."
---
On the fifth night, they camped just beyond the city's walls. The Hollow Tree's light—once faint—now burned stronger inside Seren's chest. It wasn't rage. It wasn't grief.
It was resolve.
They were not simply marching toward a battle.
They were marching toward the rewriting of the world.
And they had chosen to carry memory with them.
Arlya sat before the fire, murmuring names of forgotten queens and silent cities. Each word she spoke glowed on her tongue, then vanished into the smoke. Kael kept watch with sword unsheathed, though the wind itself had turned to knives.
They would reach the sea in three more days.
And there, something waited.
---
Far ahead, beneath the Forgotten Sea, in a place without light, the serpent coiled.
Its body stretched across continents. Its thoughts were storms. Its hunger—endless.
The woman in black stood at its heart, one hand on its scaled flesh, the other raised toward the stars.
"They come," she whispered. "The girl with the crown of flame. The knight of memory. The child of light."
The serpent did not speak.
It did not need to.
It simply woke.