The next quorum was supposed to be routine.
Just a formality.
A post-vote review. Discuss containment logistics. Ward sigils. Memory isolation sequences.
Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.
Except the seventh seat was no longer empty.
They noticed it at once.
The obsidian ring of the Council Chamber was precise—geometrically and magically. The six filled seats always formed a broken crescent around the vacant throne: the Seat of Absence, as old texts called it. No one sat there. No one even looked at it for long.
But today… it was different.
The seat wasn't occupied.
But it wasn't empty.
A single rune now glowed on its backrest.
Pale violet. Thinly spiraled.
And familiar.
Keiran's mark.
The moment the council entered, the room shifted.
Not visibly. Not physically.
But meaningfully.
Like someone had spoken a word they weren't supposed to know—and the space remembered it.
The temperature dropped by degrees.
Time, for a breath, forgot how to pass.
And Merin—the only one who didn't flinch—muttered:
"It's responding."
The First Luminary turned sharply. "To what?"
Merin didn't answer.
He was watching the seat.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
Minutes later, Keiran was summoned—not as prisoner, but as witness.
He entered the chamber with slow steps, his cloak pulled tight around him. He looked thinner. The mark on his wrist had grown more defined—now coiling beneath the skin like it was being written from within.
He stopped just outside the circle.
"You summoned me?"
"The seventh seat… accepted a mark," said the Luminary.
"Not offered," Merin corrected. "It chose."
"No one sits there."
"Not yet."
Keiran stepped closer.
And as he did, the rune on the empty chair brightened.
His wrist pulsed in time with it—like a twin heartbeat.
His mouth went dry.
"Why is it doing that?"
"Because it's not empty," said Merin. "It's remembering."
They told him what little they knew.
How the seventh seat had once been filled centuries ago.
How the records of that Councilor were lost in the Purge of Threads—a cataclysmic incident in the early Concordium era where a single initiate supposedly rewrote a year of history by collapsing a mnemonic vault.
The seventh was exiled.
Erased from Archive.
Not executed.
But bound.
The punishment wasn't silence.
It was forgetting.
"And now it responds to you," whispered one of the younger Councilors.
"Why?"
"Because I'm not the first," Keiran said quietly.
The others looked to him.
"You think you're inheriting their mark?" the Luminary asked.
"No," he said. "I think I'm waking up what they left behind."
A beat.
Then the spiral on the chair shifted.
The rune unwound once.
And behind Keiran, his own mark split.
A second symbol branched beneath the spiral—one that looked almost like a flame's reflection in water.
Not memory.
Not curse.
But return.
The lights in the chamber dimmed.
The walls trembled—not with force, but with weight.
And from somewhere high above, past the dome ceiling and beyond Concordium's highest tower—
both moons emerged.
Vaelen and Ashrah.
Not yet aligned.
But closer than ever.
Keiran turned to the seat.
It was no longer glowing.
But he knew what it meant.
"It's not a throne," he said.
"It's a keyhole."
And in the minds of the Councilors, a forgotten name stirred like dust in a sealed book—
A name no one remembered learning.
But all knew.
"The Tethered One…"