Seravyn felt it first — the voice that was never truly gone.
It came not as thunder or flame, but as a soft warmth beneath her ribs. Her hands, already sunk into the radiant earth of Elyndris, froze mid-creation. Light pooled between her fingers, swirling like liquid dawn, responding to something deeper than her will. She lifted her head toward the endless horizon, her golden hair trailing behind like ribbons of sunlight.
The air trembled.
A ripple spread through the sky, gentle at first — like a breath across still water — then growing, spreading beyond the borders of her realm. It was not merely sound. It was memory awakening.
"My light endures… even where silence sleeps."
The whisper threaded through her bones. It was neither loud nor distant; it was inside her, as if her blood remembered a rhythm older than her birth. Her lips parted. The rivers she had carved froze midstream, reflecting the aurora sky above.
"Father…" she breathed, her voice trembling with something she could not name.
Around her, the crystalline towers she had shaped pulsed softly, answering the whisper like living organs responding to a heartbeat. It was as if Elyndris itself — the realm she had made — had turned its face toward the whisper, listening alongside her.
The light thickened, warm and infinite. She felt no command, only presence. A reminder: she was not alone. She never had been.
Far away, beyond the radiant skies and beneath the deep folds of the Veil, another felt it too.
Nyxara stirred in the stillness.
Her realm, Nethralis, was a quiet world. Silver mists wound like ancient serpents through colossal obsidian halls. Rivers moved in silence, lit only by faint veins of silver light running beneath their surfaces. Here, sound was sacred. Every echo meant something.
When the whisper came, it did not disturb that silence. It became it.
"Even stillness is light slowed to rest…"
Her breath caught. The mist shifted. For the first time since her awakening, Nyxara felt warmth seep through the cold marrow of her silence. She turned her gaze toward the unseen ceiling of her realm, toward the unseen figure who had spoken without speaking.
"Father," she whispered back, though her voice was no louder than the movement of mist.
The silver veins in the walls of her temples brightened, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Her world, which had been serene but distant, now listened. She walked barefoot through the quiet halls, every step causing ripples in the mist. With each step, she felt the whisper follow her — not as command, but as trust.
A faint smile touched her lips. For Nyxara, whose nature was silence, the whisper was everything. It was permission to breathe.
Far below, in the mortal realm, a man in white robes stood before a cracked altar. His name was Alven, once a high priest of the Old Sun, now a lost soul wandering through temples half-consumed by weeds.
For days, he had prayed to a god who no longer answered. His faith had been built on rituals and light, but lately, only darkness had come. He had seen the sky split weeks earlier; he had heard the roar that was both angelic and terrifying. It had shaken his bones.
Tonight, beneath the fading stars, he whispered a final prayer — not to the Old Sun, but to the unknown.
And the unknown answered.
Warmth touched the back of his neck, like the breath of something vast and patient. His hands trembled. The cracked altar before him began to glow faintly — not the harsh gold of the Old Sun, but a soft, pulsating light that reminded him of something buried in childhood: comfort.
"I have always been here…"
He fell to his knees, tears spilling freely. It was not terror that broke him. It was recognition. A part of him — buried beneath years of doctrine — knew this voice. It was the voice that had whispered to him in dreams before he had words.
His fellow priests would call it heresy. But Alven felt no heresy. Only home.
The mountains rumbled.
High above mortal lands, shrouded in mist and auroral light, the Veilspire Peaks stirred. Vareth opened his eyes.
He had been still since the day the sky split — his colossal body coiled beneath ancient stone, wings folded like monuments. Around him, hundreds of Veilborn dragons lay in silent slumber, their bodies threaded with veins of gold and silver.
But now, the Blood Veil inside them pulsed.
It was not a sound. It was not light. It was blood remembering its god.
Vareth uncoiled slowly. His wings spread, shaking the cavern with a low, resonant groan. His eyes glowed — molten sigils, ancient and sharp. The air grew heavy. One by one, other Veilborn began to stir, scales glimmering faintly in the darkness.
"My blood does not fade… it waits."
The whisper rolled through the cavern like wind through hollow bones. Vareth bowed his massive head low, claws scraping the stone.
"He speaks," he rumbled, his voice like distant thunder. "The Father calls through the Veil."
Roars followed — deep, echoing, reverent. The sound climbed the peaks and spilled into the night sky. Clouds tore. Stars blinked through.
And the Echo continued to spread.
The roar of the Veilborn rolled like thunder down the mountains, shaking the clouds loose from their ancient perches. Snow fractured from the peaks and scattered into the sky like shards of light.
Vareth stood at the cavern's mouth, his massive wings unfurling until they eclipsed the stars. Beneath his scales, the Blood Veil glowed faintly — gold on one side, silver on the other, as if Seravyn's dawn and Nyxara's silence had both laid claim to him.
He inhaled, and the night inhaled with him.
"Guard what is not yet built," the whisper moved through him, calm and vast. "Shape the gate. Prepare the path."
Vareth lowered his head. Around him, the Veilborn dragons gathered — hundreds of them, some smaller, some nearly his size, all marked by flowing veins of gold and silver. They turned their eyes toward the heavens, toward the faint shimmer in the sky where the Celestial Passage once blazed.
"Begin," he rumbled.
The Veilborn moved like architects, not beasts. Their claws carved symbols into stone; their wings shaped wind into spirals; their roars aligned the night itself. From the heart of the Veilspire Peaks, two colossal beams erupted — one gold, one dark silver — lancing into the sky. The air shook, bending around them as reality itself remembered the Twins.
Where those beams met, a circle formed — faint at first, then solidifying into a whirling wound of light and shadow: The Gate of Two Suns.
The mortal realm, far below, saw it as a sudden aurora unlike any they had known. But to the Veilborn, it was the beginning of a covenant.
In the southern plains, a soldier named Daros watched the sky from a broken watchtower. His armor was dented, his sword dull. He had survived the wars of men but had no faith left in gods.
When the beams rose from the mountains, he stood slowly, hand resting on the stone wall. He had seen fire. He had seen blood. But this… this was something else.
Light and darkness mingled above in perfect, terrifying harmony. The sight hollowed him, scraped away the bitterness he carried like a second skin.
He dropped his sword.
The echo reached him like a slow heartbeat beneath the world.
"Even the lost can build."
He didn't know why the words made him weep. He only knew they were not from his own mind. He looked toward the mountains, his lips moving in a prayer he didn't remember learning.
Far away, in a fishing village by the silver sea, a child sat awake in the dead of night. Her name was Sira, and she was too young to understand the wars of faith or the whispers of prophecy.
When the Gate formed, its faint glow painted the waves with gold and shadow. She pressed her tiny hands to the window. Her breath fogged the glass.
The whisper came to her as laughter. Warm, kind, like a father watching his child discover sunlight for the first time.
She laughed back, a pure sound that cut through the night like the first bird's cry at dawn. Outside, the waves began to glow faintly, forming luminous spirals that danced with her joy.
Her mother would wake to find the shore lined with flowers that had never existed before.
In a ruined city where the Church of the Old Sun still held its towers, a woman knelt in an empty temple. Her name was Kaelen, and she was once a mother of three. War had taken them all. She prayed not for gods, but for silence.
When the Echo reached her, she did not hear words. She felt arms — unseen, vast — settle around her shoulders. Not to save. To hold.
Her tears fell soundlessly to the cold stone floor.
"Even grief is a kind of light," the whisper said.
For the first time in years, she whispered back, "I remember you."
The temple walls, cracked and faded, glowed faintly with silver veins that hadn't been there moments before.
The Veilborn finished their first formation. The Gate of Two Suns hummed in the sky, a colossal sigil connecting realms. The air was alive — vibrating with something older than war, older than language.
In Elyndris, Seravyn felt the pulse return. Her rivers began to flow again, brighter than before. She lifted her face to the unseen sky and whispered, "I hear you, Father."
In Nethralis, Nyxara stood before her mist-bound temples. She raised her hand, and the silver veins in the walls pulsed in rhythm with Kaelith's whisper. "Always," she murmured.
And in the Veilspire Peaks, Vareth and the Veilborn knelt as one.
The voice threaded through them all now — not booming, not commanding. Calm. Loving. Eternal.
"My children… The Echo is not my return. It is yours."
Light spread from Seravyn's realm, threading downward. Silence rose from Nyxara's, reaching upward. The two forces met at the Gate, entwining like strands of the same soul.
Mortals who looked upon the sky that night spoke in many tongues, gave it many names. Some called it The Day of Whispering Suns. Others called it The Silent Dawn. But all remembered it as the night when faith was reborn not through miracles, but through a whisper.
Kaelith's voice lingered in every heart — divine, fatherly, steady.
"I am with you in every breath, in every silence. Build. Live. Remember."
Then the whisper faded, leaving only the Gate's distant hum and the soft light of dawn creeping across the world.
End of Chapter 16 — "The Echo of Light"