The summons was written in soul-ink—a language not meant to be read, but remembered.
No courier delivered it.
No words were spoken aloud.
It simply appeared, unburnt in a brazier that had remained cold since the Severance Cycle.
The figure who rose from the shadows of the shrine had no face. No voice. No visible body. Only a veil of white glass and the scent of scorched parchment.
He was the First Pale Priest.
And he had waited thirteen years to be summoned again.
Far below the Dominion's public halls, beneath marble temples and golden sigils of state, the Pale Order stirred.
They were not kings. Not mages. Not priests in the traditional sense.
They were removalists.
Their doctrine was simple:
"What endangers the world must be forgotten by the world."
And now, the world had remembered something that should have stayed buried.
The First Priest walked alone into the Ember Crypt.
A circle of thirteen stones, scorched black by the flame of memory.
Only six glowed now.
The others? Extinguished. Their wielders gone. Killed. Or worse—reawakened.
The priest knelt and placed one hand over the coldest stone.
It pulsed.
Faint. But not dead.
Then the voice came—not from the air, but from within the mark burned onto his spine.
"Auren walks."
"The Lantern is relit."
"The sealed year bleeds."
The Priest did not speak.
Instead, he bled.
A thin ribbon of silver-black ink spilled from the corners of his veil and dripped onto the stone. Runes flared.
And the response was written in the silence:
"Then he must be erased again."
Meanwhile, back at the Concordium, Merin had begun assembling the Lantern Record.
It was an old rite—abandoned since the last purge.
But now, it had to be done again.
Keiran watched as each of the seven children placed their palms on the pale-glass orb.
One by one, their flames responded.
Some were dim.
Some wavered.
One girl's flickered in three colors.
"That's not possible," a Pathfinder murmured.
Merin didn't look up. "It is, if her soul has been fragmented and sealed more than once."
"Twice sealed?" Keiran asked.
"Twice restored," Merin corrected. "And that means more pieces of the year survived than we feared."
As the ritual concluded, Keiran's own mark began to burn.
Not painfully.
But with pressure.
As if something—or someone—was trying to find him.
He turned toward the window.
The moons weren't out yet.
But the sky was red.
Like old ink spilled across stone.
That night, the first message arrived.
Pinned to the inside of the Citadel gate.
No one saw who placed it.
No one heard them come.
But the warding glyphs had all been inverted—not broken. Reshaped.
Keiran found it at dawn.
One slip of pale paper.
Written in soul-ink, just like the one the First Priest had conjured.
But this time, it bled the moment he touched it.
"You were erased for a reason."
"You are remembered for a price."
"We took Lys once."
"We will take her again."
Keiran clenched the page until it crumbled to ash.
"They know," Merin said behind him.
"Of course they know."
"They never stopped watching. They were just waiting for the fire to flare again."
Keiran turned to him, eyes dark.
"Then let them watch."
"And when they come—let them burn."
Elsewhere, in a sealed sanctum beneath the ruins of the Moonwatch Cloister, a second Priest performed an older rite.
A cruel one.
One outlawed by even the Dominion's blackscrolls.
He carved a name into a slab of bone.
Not Keiran.
Not Auren.
Lys.
The blood didn't drip—it floated, curling into letters.
Then he placed the name into a hollowed construct—a vessel of ash and breath.
A creature with no voice, no face, no memories of its own.
Only one instinct:
Find the Lantern. Snuff it out.
He named it The Remnant.
And it began to move.
Back at the Concordium, Keiran was preparing to descend again—this time into the hidden chamber beneath the Seventh Seat. The place where Lys once stored her sealed fragments.
But he paused.
His candle flared.
Flickered.
Then shivered.
A sign.
Something was coming.
Something that remembered her face—but not her name.
Something that was not alive.
And not quite dead.
"They've sent a Remnant," Merin said quietly.
"How do we fight it?"
"We don't," Merin replied.
"We outremember it."