They fell for what felt like minutes—but there was no wind, no sensation of movement. Just light and silence.
Then: impact.
Not pain, not stone. Something soft caught them, as if the air itself had thickened. Orin hit the ground with a thud and gasped, blinking into darkness laced with starlight.
They were no longer in the grove.
The chamber around them was enormous—impossibly so. Pillars of crystal arched into a ceiling that shimmered like a sky full of constellations. Floating glyphs hovered midair, rotating slowly in orbits unseen.
Mira staggered to her feet, blade still in hand. "Where… are we?"
Kaelen's voice was reverent. "The First Hall of Memory. I'd heard rumors, but I didn't believe it still existed."
Orin looked around in awe. "It's beautiful…"
"It's forgotten," Kaelen said. "Built before the Severing, by those who bound the world to the sky. This is a place where time remembers."
One of the glyphs drifted toward Orin and pulsed, casting soft light over his face.
"Why me?" he asked. "Why am I marked?"
Kaelen hesitated, then approached a central dais. "Because you're not just marked. You're attuned. A conduit between the broken sky and what remains below."
He placed the Skyglass shard onto the dais.
The chamber reacted instantly. Light coursed through the floor in branching paths, illuminating new corridors—doors sealed for centuries clicked open.
"Can we hide here?" Mira asked.
Kaelen shook his head. "Only briefly. The Scorchers can't reach us, but the Order has ways."
He turned to Orin.
"You need to see something. Something no one has seen in a thousand years."
Orin followed Kaelen through one of the open halls, Mira close behind. At the end, they entered a smaller room filled with mirrors—tall, ancient, rimmed with gold and stardust. One of them was cracked.
"This is a Memory Vault," Kaelen said. "Each mirror holds a vision of what was."
He gestured to the nearest.
Orin stepped close—and the mirror rippled.
Suddenly, he saw a city in the sky. Massive towers of crystal, flying ships, people with cloaks that shimmered like galaxies. Then the sky shattered—white cracks racing across it like lightning—and the city began to fall.
The vision ended.
Orin stepped back, breath shallow. "That was real?"
Kaelen nodded. "That was Vel'Astra, the last sky-city."
Mira was pale. "If the sky broke once… it can break again."
Kaelen looked at Orin.
"That's why you're here. Not to restore what was—but to decide what comes next."