They watched from beyond the veil.
Above the shattered moons and hollow stars, in a realm where thought shimmered like flame and time folded like paper, they gathered—faceless, formless, infinite.
A flicker moved beneath their gaze.
A girl.
"She rises again," one murmured, voice like molten silver dripping into the silence.
"A spark from rotted kindling," another replied with disdain. "She means nothing. A shade born from failed bloodlines. We've crushed her kin before."
They watched as Ivyra stepped from the Dverhold gates, the sigil's heat still clinging to her skin, Lyxra trailing close behind. The beast's cosmic glow shimmered, dimmed, then flared again as if restless.
"She believes she has power," said a third, tone almost amused. "That she can tear down what we sealed in flame and stone."
"She believes because she remembers," whispered a voice older than the rest. The others stilled.
"You speak of the Flame-Binder."
"She walks again… in fragments. Her soul, unraveled and stitched into this mortal skin. You felt it too."
Silence reigned.
"She has found the Watcher's mark," another said slowly. "And awakened a sigil older than this cycle."
"And yet," a cold voice echoed, deeper than the dark between stars, "she is still flesh. Still bound to time and bone. She will die as all before her did."
For a moment, they drifted apart, each vision stretching through the folds of the world—seeing her again in the snow, her blade raised against the Ashen Beast, in the ruins whispering to memory, in firelight cradling the girl, Naia.
"She is not alone."
"She never was," said the first god, voice tinged now with something dangerously close to curiosity. "The beast beside her is not of this world. That creature is woven of starlight and breath. It remembers too much."
"She is a thorn."
"She is a warning."
Then the eldest among them spoke—a voice brittle with age and awe.
"She is a door."
A murmur rippled.
"To what?"
"To us."
They recoiled.
"She cannot reach that far."
"But what if she does?"
And in that silence, something cracked. Far below, Ivyra stumbled at the edge of a ravine, gripping Lyxra's fur, her breath shaking. Her vision flared—white and burning—and for an instant, she saw something looking back. Not with eyes, but with memory.
A tear fell from her eye, and steam rose where it touched the stone.
The gods paused.
"She sees."
"She shouldn't."
"She remembers."
Then the youngest among them, not yet shaped by the full cruelty of eternity, said with wonder:
"What if she was never meant to forget?"
---
Ivyra braced herself on the ravine's jagged edge, fingers curled into Lyxra's thick mane. The chill of the wind had teeth, but it wasn't the cold that made her tremble.
Something had looked at her.
Not watched—looked, like a weight pressing on her chest, curling around her ribs. Something vast and disinterested. Something that didn't need to blink to see everything she was.
Her breath misted before her, harsh and shallow. The sigil on her arm, barely faded from Dverhold's forge, ached with a slow burn, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
Lyxra shifted beside her, gaze snapping upward.
"What was that?" Ivyra whispered.
Lyxra didn't answer immediately. Her star-dotted eyes shimmered, distant and unreadable. She didn't look at Ivyra. She was listening.
Something had brushed against the veil between them.
Ivyra sank to her knees, the earth hard beneath her, the stone warm where her tear had fallen. She wiped it away without thinking.
It hissed. Steam.
That had never happened before.
Not even when her powers surged. Not even when rage took her bones and turned them into iron.
She clenched her jaw.
"Tell me you felt it," she muttered, voice low, raw.
Lyxra was quiet. Not still—but quiet in the way a storm is before it begins.
Inside her, the beast's mind rippled like the surface of a black sea. Thoughts fractured like constellations thrown to the wind. Her world was not one of words, not truly. It was sensation, echo, rhythm. It was memory that didn't belong to this life. It was stars burned out and still screaming in her blood.
She saw them, Lyxra thought. And they saw her.
That had not been meant to happen. Ivyra's memories—her pain, her strength, her rebirths—Lyxra had guarded them with claw and shadow, warding off what slumbered beyond the veil.
But they had pierced through.
And worse… Ivyra had felt it.
She's awakening too fast.
The words didn't come from a voice. They pulsed in Lyxra's bones, like ancient runes long sealed beneath her skin. She padded away from Ivyra, tense, eyes still fixed skyward.
Above them, nothing moved. No glow. No crack in the clouds. And yet it felt like eyes still lingered, slow to blink, reluctant to forget.
"Ivy," Lyxra finally said aloud, voice low, velvet, sharper than it had been in days. "You're shaking."
"I'm not afraid," Ivyra said.
"That's not what I said."
Their eyes met.
Lyxra stepped closer and pressed her head into Ivyra's chest, curling her tail around the girl like a living shield. Her fur prickled with energy.
"You need to rest," she said, "before you burn out again."
"I'm fine."
"No," Lyxra growled, soft and firm, "you're not."
And neither was she.
---
Deeper still, within Lyxra, something stirred. Not memory—something older. A moment she'd buried in the folds of time.
A flash.
A girl, not Ivyra, but her. A pale hand on a broken seal. The crack of thunder beneath a violet sky. A promise whispered from lips lined with gold blood.
Protect her. Even from me.
That voice. That vow.
It was not Lyxra's, but it lived in her.
Lyxra shivered.
"Ivyra," she said again, lifting her head.
"What?"
"If they come for you," she murmured, "you must not hesitate."
Ivyra frowned. "You think I would?"
Lyxra didn't answer. The truth wasn't about if.
It was about who she would have to face.
And whether Ivyra could bear it.
The silence after Lyxra's warning clung between them like wet ash.
Ivyra didn't move. Her fingers curled into the fabric of her sleeve where the sigil still pulsed faintly. She was trying not to look afraid, but the corners of her eyes betrayed her—distant, watching something invisible on the horizon.
"You say that like you've seen it happen before," she said at last, voice brittle.
Lyxra's ears twitched. "I have."
Ivyra turned her gaze to her companion. "When?"
"Before I found you."
The wind caught Ivyra's braid and tugged it loose, a few strands whipping across her cheek. "You always say things like that. Like you've walked this path already. Like you're older than you look."
"I am," Lyxra said, and this time her tone wasn't teasing.
Ivyra studied her. "Then tell me. All of it. No more riddles. No more half-truths."
A pause. Lyxra hesitated.
"I can't give you all of it. Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because some truths open doors you cannot close."
Ivyra's jaw clenched. "Then let them open. I'm tired of feeling like the last to understand."
Lyxra stepped closer, her beast-form graceful, tail low to the ground, voice as calm as a lullaby. "You are the last to understand. But that doesn't make you weak."
"I don't want protection if it means blindness."
"Then you're more dangerous than I feared," Lyxra said quietly, and for a moment, the stars in her fur dimmed.
Ivyra stood. Her limbs still trembled, but her spine had iron in it. "Do you think I'm not ready? That I'll fall apart?"
"I think," Lyxra said, "that you're already falling apart. And that's why I'm still here."
The words landed like a stone between them.
Ivyra didn't answer. Her breath caught—not in anger, but in something far more fragile.
Lyxra softened.
"I see the way you hold yourself together," she murmured. "Piece by piece. Flame by flame. Every time someone looks at you like you don't belong, you build a wall out of that pain. Every time you remember what they did to your mother, you twist it into power. You carry your wounds like they're weapons."
"They are weapons."
"And one day," Lyxra said, stepping close, "you'll cut yourself on them."
Ivyra blinked hard, but didn't turn away.
"I don't need to be whole," she whispered. "I just need to be enough."
Lyxra nudged her gently. "You've always been more than enough."
The stars on her flank shimmered, soft and slow. "But strength without mercy becomes something else. Something cold. Ivy… don't lose the part of you that still wants to heal."
That struck something deep. Something Ivyra rarely let surface.
She looked away, not in defiance, but in defense.
"I don't know if I have that part anymore."
"You do," Lyxra said. "You just don't trust it."
They stayed like that a long while—neither speaking, neither moving.
The mountains around them loomed, ancient and patient.
Then Ivyra whispered, "Let's go. Before the villagers send more questions."
Lyxra nodded. "There's a path south. Carved into the cliffside. No one walks it now, but I remember it. A place where even time has forgotten itself."
"A ruin?"
"Worse. A sanctuary."
Ivyra raised a brow. "That sounds backwards."
Lyxra didn't smile. "Sanctuaries are just cages with softer walls, if you look long enough."
And so they went—into the winding path that slipped away from Dverhold's edge like a secret unspoken. Ivyra's cloak whipped behind her, the sigil on her skin still pulsing. Lyxra walked beside her, quiet, alert, her thoughts still tangled in the fragments of a voice not her own:
If she awakens fully… will she even need me?
Or worse…
Will she still want me?
---
The cliffs narrowed the deeper they walked.
Blood-colored leaves rustled above them like murmured secrets, and the air grew colder, thinner—as though the path they followed had slipped beneath the skin of the world. Lyxra's paws made no sound on the stone. Ivyra led, silent but not alone.
Naia was the first to catch up.
She didn't say anything at first. Just walked beside Ivyra, her hair braided tighter than usual, her knuckles white around the hilt of a borrowed blade. Her skin still carried the faint shimmer left behind by the celestial strike in Tennel's Hollow, like stardust that refused to fade.
Serren arrived next, her cloak dusted with ash from the forge halls. "The dwarves wouldn't follow. Said the path's cursed. Said the trees here bleed when cut."
"No surprise," Lyxra muttered. "They still believe stone is the only thing that remembers."
Serren glanced at her. "You're sure this place is safe?"
"No," Ivyra said flatly. "But safety hasn't been our companion in a while."
They continued without further word.
The path twisted, folding into itself. Moss clung to ancient roots that stretched across the cliff walls like ribs from a buried beast. Strange symbols—faded, etched in no tongue Ivyra recognized—spiraled along the stone. They didn't glow. But they breathed.
The deeper they went, the more the wind thinned. And then, suddenly, even Lyxra halted.
"Do you feel that?" Naia asked.
"No birds," Serren murmured. "No leaves moving. No… air."
They had entered the hush of the sanctuary.
Before them, carved into the mountainside like an eye half-open, lay a structure—neither ruin nor temple, but something that hovered between. Pillars of polished bone-white stone rose in quiet symmetry. Vines as red as wine curled around them, pulsing faintly.
Ivyra took a slow step forward.
The sanctuary responded.
Not with sound—but with a shift. A breathless exhale beneath the earth. The way something old might notice them.
Naia shivered.
"It's awake," she whispered.
Lyxra lowered her head, ears pressed back. "It's always been."
Serren touched one of the pillars. Her hand recoiled instantly.
"It's warm."
"They were gods once," Ivyra murmured, her voice a ripple against the stillness. "Or maybe the things gods left behind."
The air tasted metallic now. Every step echoed inside their bones.
As they entered the sanctuary's heart, the world did not follow.
No sky above.
No wind behind.
Only the hollow breath of memory and the slow closing of a door that had been open too long.
And something within… waiting.
---
They stepped into the sanctuary's heart.
A vast circular chamber stretched before them—vaulted and domed, its ceiling twinkling with specks of light like constellations trapped in stone. But they did not map stars. They moved.
Naia stared upward, her mouth slightly open. "They're watching…"
"The gods?" Serren asked, half-joking.
"No." Naia shook her head. "Something older."
Pillars surrounded them, carved from a material that looked like bone but hummed like crystal. Ivyra felt her skin prickle, her own heartbeat slowing as the walls seemed to breathe with her.
She stepped forward. The moment her boot met the center tile, a low vibration trembled through the floor—gentle, like a memory surfacing. Then—
A whisper: not heard, but felt.
"Ivyra."
She froze.
Naia spun to her. "Did you hear that?"
"I—" Ivyra turned, slowly. "Yes."
But no one else had spoken. The name had come from the walls, or the light, or maybe something beneath the floor.
Lyxra moved closer, now in her larger form, wings folded, fur shimmering with distant cosmos. "This place knows us," she said. "It knows you."
Serren was circling the chamber's edge, her hand trailing near the symbols etched low along the walls. "Or it's been waiting."
As if in answer, one of the pillars pulsed—and a panel slid open with a breath of dust.
Behind it: a mirror.
But no reflection greeted them.
Only an eye. Single. Glowing. Watching.
It blinked once.
And vanished.
Naia staggered back. "What was—?"
A voice rose from the mirror's absence. Male, ancient, low.
"You carry a wound not yours, child of no star."
Naia gasped. "That's not me. That's not… how do they know?"
"Because it's not speaking to you," Ivyra said quietly. Her hand drifted to the pendant at her throat—something her mother once gave her, before the exile. The stone had cracked long ago. Now it glowed faintly.
The sanctuary had seen it.
Serren stepped away from the wall, unease tightening her jaw. "This place isn't just watching us—it's showing us things. Feeding us what it wants us to see."
Then—
A sudden wind swept the chamber.
Cold, ancient.
The constellation lights above flared, rearranging… until they formed a single symbol.
A flame, enclosed in an eye.
Naia whispered, "That's the mark from the Dead Vale."
Lyxra's voice was quieter than usual. "We're not alone in here. There's something still living in the stone."
Ivyra narrowed her eyes. "It's not alive. It's remembering."
And then the floor shifted.
Beneath their feet, a hidden platform began to lower.
The chamber fell away around them, like layers of the world peeling back.
Into deeper dark.
Deeper memory.
Deeper truth.
---
The descent was slow, yet the air thickened with every passing second, until even silence seemed to press against their ribs.
The platform stopped.
Before them stretched a corridor, endless and veiled in blue light. Its walls shimmered with moving etchings—scenes that didn't remain static but twisted and changed as if the stone recalled and rewrote its own past.
Naia hesitated. "This place remembers everything."
Serren's voice was barely audible. "Then we should be careful what we let it remember of us."
Ivyra stepped forward first, Lyxra close behind, her massive body now veiled in ghostlight. As they moved down the corridor, the scenes along the walls began to shift—growing more personal.
A child stumbling through ash. A silver-haired woman shielding her. A mark burning into a young girl's back as a crowd turned away.
Ivyra stopped.
That girl was her.
She turned to the others—but no one else had reacted. They hadn't seen it.
Only she had.
She kept walking.
Ahead, the corridor opened into a new chamber. Round. Hollow. Quiet.
At the center: a dais of black stone, and resting on it—a crown. Simple. Cracked. Burnt.
Lyxra's voice trembled in her mind. "Do you recognize it?"
Ivyra swallowed. "No… but I feel like I should."
Before she could step closer, something shimmered behind the crown.
A figure emerged. Cloaked in star-thread, faceless and tall. A god? A watcher? It didn't speak. It only looked.
Ivyra met its gaze—and was pulled under.
---
Flashback – Unknown Character's Memory
A battlefield of white fire. Screams echoing across the sky. Two celestial beings stood locked in fury—a man wreathed in radiant chains and a woman of smoke and moonlight.
They fought not as enemies, but as kin betrayed.
"You shouldn't have left her," the woman whispered.
"You made her too much like you," the man replied.
"She is the balance. And you fear her because she remembers."
Their weapons clashed. One scream split the heavens.
Then darkness.
And from it—a cry. A newborn's cry.
"She will forget," the voice faded, "but the world won't."
---
Ivyra jolted, gasping. The chamber returned.
The figure was gone.
The crown remained.
Serren touched her shoulder. "What did you see?"
Ivyra didn't answer.
She couldn't.
Not yet.
Naia reached toward the crown. But before she could touch it, the chamber shook.
A voice rumbled from beneath the stone:
"The eye watches. The seal cracks. What once slept begins to stir."
The wall ahead split open, revealing a new path—descending farther, lined in gold-veined obsidian.
Lyxra stepped forward, head low, fur bristling. "We shouldn't keep going."
Serren unsheathed her dagger, eyes scanning the shadows. "We have to."
Ivyra said nothing.
Because she had seen that battlefield before—in dreams she never remembered upon waking.
And the faceless god had whispered one last thing, just before vanishing.
"You're not the first Ivyra… and you won't be the last."