The clash began in silence.
The Red Lanterns did not scream.
The Hollowed did not roar.
They moved, like wind meeting stone, like storm hitting sea.
The valley erupted in flashes of fractured memory—visions hurled like blades, searing images from long-dead lives used as weapons. The Red Lanterns wielded forgetting like a sword: they hurled orbs that unraveled names, turned spirits into ash mid-step.
Nima's lantern glowed gold.
She ran forward, Morya at her side, the Hollowed forming a trembling wall behind her. Every time a Hollowed fell, its memory screamed through her bones.
And then she saw him.
The leader of the Red Lanterns—Caelir.
Tall. Scarred. Eyes like scorched parchment.
He once wore the seal of a Guardian-Priest, but the symbols had been burned away and replaced with red flame.
"You could've let them sleep," he said, voice like a cracked bell.
"You should have let them sleep."
Nima stood her ground.
"They were never asleep. Just forgotten. And that's the true violence."
He raised his hand—and the air bent. A blast of raw silence rushed toward her.
Nima raised her lantern.
"I carry all of them now. If you strike, you strike us all."
The golden light flared, meeting the red.
It didn't explode.
It sang.
A note so piercing and ancient that the Hollowed paused. The Red Lanterns staggered, clutching their ears as memories they'd buried returned uninvited:
A daughter abandoned.
A name erased to survive.
A brother lost to the first fire.
A prayer spoken once, unanswered forever.
Even Caelir flinched.
Then—he screamed.
But not from pain.
From recognition.
"You bear her light," he gasped. "The Keeper who broke the pact. Amira's blood..."
Nima's hands shook, but her voice was steady.
"I'm not her. But I carry what she gave.
And you… you're still afraid of what memory can do."
She turned the lantern skyward.
"Let them remember."
The gold beam widened—stretching over the valley like dawn piercing dusk.
The Hollowed straightened.
The names poured out, not as screams, but as songs.
They remembered not just death and loss—but who they had been.
A child healer.
A grandmother poet.
A guardian who died with a secret still trapped beneath her tongue.
The Hollowed wept.
And then, they began to dissolve, not in pain, but in peace. Freed by remembrance.
Caelir dropped to his knees.
"You… you ended them."
"No," said Nima, softly.
"I completed them."
But the light had done more than that.
It had broken a seal older than language.
Far below the valley, in the Vault of the First Silence, something stirred—not Hollowed, not Lantern, not mortal.
It opened its eyes—eyes made of ink and void—and whispered one word:
"Daughter…"