It came just before dawn.
No sound. No warning.
Only a shadow peeling itself from the edge of the Concordium's northern wall, where no shadow should exist—because no light had touched it in thirteen years.
The Remnant moved like water that remembered being fire.
Its body—if it could be called that—was not flesh. Not bone.
It was made of names.
Fragments. Whispers.
The parts of people erased so thoroughly the world had forgotten they ever had meaning.
And now, those pieces had been bound into one shape.
A hollow reflection of grief.
Keiran felt it before he saw it.
The candle on his wrist went still.
Not dark.
Just… frozen.
As if holding its breath.
"It's here," he murmured.
The children in the scriptorium looked up in alarm.
One of them—a girl with a mark like cracked glass—began to tremble.
"Something's inside me," she whispered. "It's calling my name."
"No," Keiran said gently, kneeling before her. "It's calling your silence."
The Concordium's eastern watch bells remained silent.
Their enchantments didn't trigger.
Because the Remnant wasn't considered alive.
And what's not alive cannot trespass.
It seeps.
And seep it did—through cracks, between glyphs, past recognition.
Until it found the Seventh Alcove.
Until it found her.
Lys's sigil had been glowing softly for days now.
A remnant of her flame. A tether to what she once was.
And that's what it wanted.
Not to extinguish her.
But to absorb her absence.
To make her forgetting permanent.
To unmake what little still remained.
Keiran reached the alcove just as the temperature dropped.
Not by degrees.
By centuries.
The air around the chamber thickened, slowed—like time didn't want to pass through it anymore.
And in the center of that stillness—
It stood.
Not tall.
Not monstrous.
Just human-shaped.
Like a shadow sketched by a broken child.
It turned as he entered.
No face. No eyes.
But it saw him.
"Auren," it rasped.
The voice wasn't a voice.
It was the sound of something being crossed out.
Keiran didn't draw his blade.
Didn't summon flame.
Instead, he stepped forward.
The candle on his wrist flickered once—
Then began to burn in two colors.
His flame.
Lys's flame.
Together.
"You came to unmake her," Keiran said.
"But you don't even know who she was."
The Remnant tilted its head.
"She was a memory."
"Not anymore," he said.
"Now—she's a promise."
And he raised his hand.
Not to strike.
To remember.
Images poured from him.
Not conjured—unlocked.
Lys with chalk-stained fingers.
Lys standing in the chapel ruins beneath the twin moons.
Lys stitching sigils into the wrists of starving children, calling them her Lantern-Bearers.
Lys standing beside him as the Concordium burned, shouting a name the world forgot—
His.
Auren.
The Remnant flinched.
Its body rippled—names unraveling across its arms like old threads.
"Stop," it hissed.
But Keiran didn't stop.
Because now others were remembering too.
From the halls behind him came the children.
One by one.
Each carrying a sliver of her flame.
Each holding a memory too small to seem important—until now.
"She taught me to draw light in the dark," one said.
"She told me my name was worth keeping," said another.
"She gave me a ribbon so I wouldn't forget my sister," whispered the third.
And with every word—
The Remnant cracked.
Not physically.
But at the soul-edge.
Its form began to twitch, unspool, unravel.
"You were made of forgetting," Keiran said, stepping closer.
"But we remember now."
"We remember what was stolen."
"We remember her name."
He raised his hand and pressed it to the creature's chest.
The candle flame pulsed.
"Lys."
The word didn't echo.
It reverberated.
Through the vault.
Through the sigils.
Through the very walls of the Concordium.
The Remnant let out a sound not meant for living ears.
A sound of something being forced to remember itself.
And then—
It cracked.
Not into ash.
Not into dust.
But into names.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Each fluttering like a page torn from a forgotten book, glowing with soft gold ink.
They scattered across the vault like fireflies.
And then… silence.
Keiran fell to one knee.
His wrist burned—but not from pain.
From weight.
So many names. So many people lost, now returned in flickers.
Only one name remained seared into his palm:
Lys Valemir.
Alive?
No.
But no longer gone.
Merin reached him a moment later.
"It worked," he said, almost disbelieving. "You fought forgetting… with memory."
Keiran looked up, exhausted but whole.
"That's all we've ever had."
"And they'll come again."
Merin nodded grimly. "Then we keep remembering."
"And we light more flames."