Time passed.
Years rolled into decades. Decades drifted into centuries.
To the Thirteen, it was barely the beginning of a long breath. But to the humans below, whole civilizations had risen, split, and scattered like sand beneath the tides.
They stayed hidden — mostly. The pact held. The Oath was remembered.
But here and there, without meaning to, without even trying, the Legion of Thirteen left behind pieces of themselves.
And the world called those pieces legend.
I. The Star Map of the Cave-Walker
They never saw her face.
Only the glow of dim firelight on the walls of a narrow cave, where constellations had been carved centuries before they were understood.
The tribe that found the cave was small. Nomadic. The winter had driven them further into the cliffs than usual. They were chasing warmth, but they found something stranger.
The walls were etched with delicate lines — stars, patterns, cycles of the moon. One wall even seemed to predict an eclipse that wouldn't happen for another thousand years. It wasn't made by human hands. It wasn't made by any hands they knew.
They left an offering at the entrance: stones, wrapped in grass, painted with ochre dots. Then they left. Quietly.
Lyanna stood at the top of the ridge the next morning.
The tribe was already far away, no more than specks on the horizon.
She hadn't meant to lead them there. She hadn't meant to show them anything. But it happened anyway. And now, the cave — her cave — was part of something larger than her.
She didn't mind.
"Let it live," she whispered. "Let them find more."
She turned back to the hill, sat down, and began carving a new constellation — one that didn't exist yet.
One that she'd seen in a dream.
II. The Blade in the Stone
Merrick worked in silence. Always.
He forged for the act of it. Not for purpose. Not for conquest.
It was how he calmed his thoughts.
The forge was deep underground — the entrance hidden beneath layers of collapsed tunnels and dead roots. He'd built the bellows by hand. Carved the anvils from ore he pulled from the base of the mountain himself. No one helped him. No one knew where it was. Except Nolan. And Vela.
Even they didn't come often.
This time, he was trying something new.
A blade folded over itself more than a thousand times. Tempered in starlight, quenched in mountain ice. A hilt carved from fossilized coral. It was meant to be perfect — sharp enough to split atoms, strong enough to kill even one of them, if it ever needed to.
But it wasn't.
He drove the blade into his own palm.
Nothing.
Not a scratch. Not a bruise.
He growled, not in rage, but in quiet frustration.
He left the forge. Walked for days, carrying the blade with him. Until he came to a valley with a single stone jutting out of the ground like a broken tooth.
He slammed the blade into the rock, burying it to the hilt.
Then he walked away.
He didn't return.
Years later, a group of warriors would find the blade and declare it divine. They couldn't pull it free. Not one of them. But the stone shimmered with strange warmth when touched.
The legend grew. The blade became known as the Sword of Kings. Eventually, someone would give it a name:
Excalibur.
III. The Pillars of Wind and Weight
Luke and Daniel rarely spoke when they worked.
Not because they didn't care for each other — the opposite. Their connection was so deep, it made words unnecessary. Where Luke built for strength, Daniel built for beauty. Luke laid the bones. Daniel made them sing.
Together, they built monuments in places no one had ever walked.
Massive stone circles in deep valleys. Towers carved into the side of cliffs. Bridges that led nowhere but hung, impossibly, in the air without support. Entire cities of smooth marble and dark metal that vanished under vines before the first great empires even rose.
They didn't do it to be remembered.
They did it to see what could be made.
One night, a storm broke above one of their earliest towers — a structure with curved wings, tall like a needle, that hummed in the wind.
A small group of hunter-gatherers stumbled into its shadow, shivering and lost.
Inside the tower, there was no wind. No cold. Only stillness.
They stayed for two days. Lit a fire in the middle of the floor. Left a symbol etched in ash when they departed.
Later, when others came, they saw the symbol and left their own.
The tower became a place of pilgrimage.
Then, myth.
Then, silence — as it collapsed into time.
But the ashes stayed.
And the bones of the building stayed beneath the forest that swallowed it.
IV. The Fall of Teal
He didn't speak about what happened. Not even to Nolan.
But the mountain still remembers.
It wasn't a battlefield. Not really. Teal had gone searching, as he often did. He never liked staying in one place too long. The solitude gnawed at him worse than it did the others. So he roamed — up the mountains, across the rivers, into the snow.
He wasn't looking for a fight.
But one found him.
An alien species — something with a hunting instinct and technology just sharp enough to be dangerous. It hit him when he wasn't looking, a hard blow to the ribs that sent him crashing through the cliffs, through stone, through soil, into the depths of a cavern below.
There was a spring there. Hidden. Glowing faintly with minerals no one had cataloged.
His blood filled it.
It wasn't a lot. A trail, more than anything. But it was enough.
Something in the water changed. It shimmered. Thickened. Vibrated with a hum that didn't make sound but still echoed in the skull.
Teal didn't die. He rose. Bleeding, yes. Bruised, yes. But alive.
The alien that struck him didn't live long enough to see the result.
Teal walked away, silent as ever.
The spring remained.
Centuries passed. The cavern collapsed around it, sealing it off from the sky.
But the water stayed warm. And glowing. And strange.
Eventually, a man would fall into it. Dying. Broken.
And he would rise whole.
The spring would get a name.
Lazarus.
The Thirteen never claimed these legends.
They didn't write them down. They didn't take credit. They didn't tell each other everything that happened.
Some of these myths, they never even knew existed.
But time kept them.
The earth remembered.
The sky whispered.
And somewhere, in the dark beneath stars that no longer knew their names…
The Legion watched.