The days after Velessan passed like smoke through Kaelen's thoughts — shapes without weight, sounds without memory. She walked. She ate. She dreamed. But nothing stayed.
It was the third night after anchoring Velessan when the sigil began to pulse uncontrollably.
Not burn.
Not ache.
Pulse. Like a second heartbeat — low and slow and ancient.
Tareth noticed first. She had woken from another nightmare and found him sitting across the fire, staring not at her, but at her hand.
"You're glowing again," he said. "But this time, it's not reacting to a name."
Kaelen sat up slowly. Her wrist was lit with dark light, the spiral now fully threaded with three inner cores. But this was something deeper — a thread that wasn't part of the cities.
It wasn't trying to anchor something outside her.
It was trying to anchor her.
---
At dawn, they camped beside a river too narrow to be named. Tareth drew a shallow cut across Kaelen's palm — she didn't flinch. The blood that surfaced shimmered faintly.
And then it moved.
A spiral, thin as breath, spun out across her skin in crimson glyphwork.
Tareth cursed in Athrénn.
"That's a blood-sigil."
Kaelen blinked. "I thought those were myths."
"They are," he said. "Because the last one that ever appeared belonged to a bloodline erased from the Pattern entirely."
Kaelen looked down at the spiral turning in her blood.
"What bloodline?"
Tareth didn't answer.
Instead, he unrolled a parchment and carefully pulled a hidden layer free — a map written in Athrénn calligraphy, preserved in wax and old prayers.
He pointed to a space near the center. It was blank.
"No name. No city. Just this glyph."
And it was identical to the one spinning in her palm.
---
"She didn't give you away to protect you from the Hollow God," Tareth said at last. "She gave you away to protect the world from remembering what you are."
Kaelen's mouth was dry.
"What am I?"
He looked at her — with sorrow, not fear.
"You're not just an anchor. You're the heritor of a sigil-line that predates memory."
He knelt beside her. "They were once called the Khelevyn — the Spiral-Wardens. The first speakers of the Athrénn tongue. And the last to bear living sigils."
She tried to breathe.
"Then why did the world forget them?"
Tareth's voice was low.
"Because the Khelevyn let it. They erased themselves willingly. One by one. City by city. Blood by blood."
Kaelen's hands trembled.
"Why?"
Tareth's eyes gleamed in the firelight.
"Because remembering them opens the door to what ended them."
---
That night, Kaelen dreamt.
Not of the cities, or the Hollowborn, or her mother.
But of a stairwell.
Carved deep into the roots of a mountain, slick with moss, etched with names she couldn't read. Each step she took backward un-aged her. Her voice returned to childhood. Then infancy. Then silence.
At the bottom was a mirror of black water.
And in it — not her reflection.
But a newborn, held in a woman's arms.
A ring on the baby's wrist bore the Khelevyn glyph.
She didn't cry.
She simply looked up — and said a word no child should know:
"Remember."
Kaelen woke screaming.
---
By morning, the blood-sigil had faded, but the Spiral had changed again.
It now bore a fourth thread — not for a city.
For a person.
Kaelen.
Not the name she answered to.
But the name she had been born with — a name the world had not spoken in nineteen years.
A name she still could not bring herself to say aloud.
Tareth packed in silence. When he finally spoke, it was soft:
"There are six cities left."
Kaelen shook her head.
"No," she whispered. "There are seven."
He frowned. "We've already anchored three—"
"I wasn't counting the cities."
She looked at her hand.
"I was counting what I've lost."
---
Later that evening, as they reached the edge of the Ember Coast, Kaelen looked to the sea.
Across it, she could see the silhouettes of towers rising in the fog — a city no chart recorded. A city she had seen once in a dream.
The sigil pulsed once more.
Its voice — now unmistakably hers — whispered:
"Navareen."
"The city that remembers your father."
---