The rift snapped shut behind them.
Gone was the shrine. Gone the sky, the cat's murmuring voice, even the weight of time itself.
Here, in the Scarlands, the world was wrong.
Gravity shifted in pulses.Rivers flowed upwards.Stone bled.Light bent in spirals.And sound echoed before it was made.
Jinryu stepped forward and immediately sank three inches into the ash.
"This is where it happened," Maeryn whispered.
She didn't mean the war.
She meant the shatter — the moment the First Core split, and with it, the memory of an entire age.
The ground beneath them pulsed.
And with it, visions emerged.
Not just ghosts — but living shadows of what could've been.
They walked among echoes:
A younger Jinryu, smiling, training beside a girl with violet eyes.
A version of Maeryn wearing silver robes, reading aloud from the Core Codex — unburned.
Dozens of Corebearers standing united beneath a banner that had long since been erased from history.
"This was us," Maeryn said, her voice shaking.
"No," Jinryu muttered. "This was who we could've become."
The Scarlands didn't just preserve memory.
They punished it.
Suddenly, a voice rang out — not from a memory.
"Only the broken come here."
The cat appeared, though its body flickered. Even it was being pulled apart in this realm.
A figure stood atop a cliff of inverted stone.
She wore a crown of fractured Core shards, her robes made of dust-stained silk, her hands glowing with glyphs long since banned.
"Only those who lost themselves."
Jinryu's eyes narrowed.
"The Tenth."
— The Tenth Glyph: Arashi of the Drowned Moon —
Once called the most stable among the Twelve Corebearers, Arashi had vanished after the Fracture. Rumors said she was dead, her glyph consumed by the collapse.
But here she stood, alive… or something close.
Her eyes held galaxies. Her smile held sorrow.
"You came for answers," she said. "But this place only offers mirrors."
She gestured — and the ash blew away in a spiral, revealing a circle of twelve Core thrones, each cracked in a different way.
Only three still glowed:
Jinryu's
Maeryn's
Arashi's
The rest pulsed faintly, as if sensing the approach of their future wielders… or their destroyers.
"Why did we fall?" Maeryn asked.
"Because we chose memory over unity," Arashi said. "We chose to carry pain — instead of sharing it."
"Then why are you still here?" Jinryu asked.
"To wait for the one who would rewrite the glyphs," she said.
She looked at Jinryu.
And then knelt.
"And you are him."
The air pulsed violently.
Ash lifted into the sky.
The Scarlands awakened.
From deep below, something stirred.
Not Core.
Not Spirit.
But the Root Memory — the first sin of the Corebearers.
A name Jinryu had never heard whispered into his mind.
"Vael."
"The one who shattered the First Core."
"The one who still lives."
Arashi turned.
"He knows you're here now."
"You must leave this place… before it remembers everything."