The Echoing Vale did not whisper. It keened. A ceaseless lament carried on wind that had forgotten warmth, threading through the thorn-thick pines and across the shattered monoliths as if the land itself begged for sleep it could no longer find. Gareth dismounted first, laying a hand on his horse's trembling neck. The beast's eyes rolled white; the Vale remembered cavalry charges and the taste of iron.
"Stay behind me," he said, but the Guardian had already stepped into the singing fog. It parted reluctantly around him, his presence bending its grief into a deeper, more sonorous chord. Lyra followed, fingers splayed, the sigils on her skin guttering like stars at dawn.
At the heart of the Vale stood a stone that should not have existed: smooth as still water, night-black, and pulsing with a slow, sullen light. Lyra's breath hitched. "A Null Obelisk. From before the Courts. Who placed this here?"
"Someone who wanted the world to forget," the Guardian replied. "And someone who could not bear to let it go."
Runes woke along the ground as they approached, lines of grief connecting battlefield graves to the Obelisk's cold gravity. Faces surfaced in the fog—soldiers, mothers, a boy no older than twelve clutching a wooden sword. Lyra's magic faltered under the weight of their memory.
Gareth planted his sword point-first. "If this is a grave, let it rest. If it is a door, let us bar it."
The Guardian raised his hand. The Vale screamed.
The Obelisk drank sound, drank light, drank hope. It pulled at the Guardian's oath, threads of vow and starlight unspooling from his chest. Lyra lunged, weaving a counter-harmony, her voice raw as she sang the Names of Stillness. Gareth set his shoulders against a wind that wanted to peel him apart molecule by molecule.
Cracks spidered through the Obelisk. With each fracture, a memory bled free—Seraphine laughing in a garden long ago; Aldric, young and proud, lowering his blade before a kneeling enemy; Kael himself, as a child, staring at a night sky and wishing the stars would answer.
They did. The pieces fell inward. From the ruin rose a figure bound in chains of mourning-cloth, eyes dark as wells. It bowed—not to the Guardian, but to Lyra.
"Binder of Names," it said, voice like rain on grave dirt. "You were promised to me."
Lyra went cold. "By who?"
The thing smiled with someone else's mouth. "By the one who taught you that pain listens when nothing else will. By the woman who stands between you and your destiny with a blade of light and a heart that breaks to do it."
Seraphine.
Gareth roared and charged. Chains snapped tight around his limbs. The Guardian moved to intervene—and stopped, head tilting, as if hearing an instruction from far away.
"This isn't a rift," he murmured. "It's a bargain. And we are already inside its terms."
Lyra stepped forward, palms bleeding sigils. "Then we change the terms."