The ash never left Hollowreach.
It sifted endlessly from the cracked sky like soot from an unseen fire—thin, gray, and constant. No flame burned above the spires. No smoke trailed from the chimneys. But still it fell, as if the sky itself remembered a fire the world had long tried to forget.
It coated everything. The rafters. The stone beds. The cold wooden floors. The orphans.
It clung to their robes like a second skin and drifted into their mouths when they slept. It gathered in their lungs, in their hair, in the corners of their thoughts until they no longer noticed its weight. Ash was not a thing to be cleaned. It was simply there—like cold, or silence, or fear.
Soren Vale sat alone at the edge of the dormitory, knees tucked to his chest, back pressed to a wall blackened by time and moisture. The morning bell had not yet rung, but most of the others were already awake, stirring quietly in their rows, careful not to speak.
Ceremony Day.
He gripped a tin cup in his hands. The water inside was warm from his touch and had gone still long ago. He hadn't drunk it. Not since last night.
Not since the dreams.
"Still holding that like it's holy?" a voice whispered beside him.
Soren turned slowly. Rilo.
He was two winters younger, small for his age, and quick to smile even when he shouldn't be. His eyes always looked like they were on the verge of laughing or crying—no one could ever tell which.
"I'm not thirsty," Soren mumbled.
"You say that every morning," Rilo said, crouching next to him and setting down his own cup. "But I heard Bren say if you don't drink, you get the Scorch."
Soren didn't respond.
Everyone knew the Scorch. They just didn't talk about it.
The fever. The slow burning from inside. It started in your bones, they said, and by the time it reached your chest, you either woke up different—or didn't wake up at all.
Rilo swirled his cup, then took a sip. His lips smacked, half-joking. "Still better than the altar."
That word hung in the air like a hook.
Soren's jaw clenched. "Don't say that."
"Why not?" Rilo said. "It's true."
"It's not supposed to be."
Rilo shrugged and gave him a tired grin. "Maybe they'll pick me. Then I won't have to eat stale roots or drink floor-water anymore. They say it's warm beyond the altar."
"They say a lot of things."
"You ever think about what happens after?" Rilo asked.
Soren didn't answer.
But he had.
Of course he had.
He remembered the first time the Warden had come through the dormitory. He'd been five, maybe six. Too small to understand why everyone froze. Why no one looked up. Why even the older boys pressed their faces into their cots and whispered prayers under their breath.
The Warden hadn't spoken.
She hadn't needed to.
She had simply stopped beside a girl named Elya, touched her forehead with a veiled hand, and said one word:
"Chosen."
They never saw Elya again.
Just like they never saw Korl. Or Fen. Or Mila.
All "chosen." All vanished. All names the priests told them not to say aloud anymore.
But Soren remembered them. Every one.
He didn't know why.
Maybe it was something broken in him.
Maybe it was something whole.
The morning light shifted through the rafters, dull and bronze. The ash caught the glow like falling dust in an attic—soft and slow and unending.
Somewhere outside, the gate chains stirred.
Not yet the bells.
But soon.
Soren set his cup down beside him and looked at Rilo. "If they pick you… what would you do?"
Rilo blinked. "I dunno. Smile, I guess?"
Soren frowned.
Rilo grinned. "You'd be stuck with Bren. Or worse—Fesk."
Soren tried to smile back, but his throat felt tight.
They sat in silence for a while, side by side on the cold floor.
Then Rilo leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
"Try to sleep," he whispered. "It helps the hunger."
But neither of them slept.
The ash kept falling.
And outside, the sky shifted again.
Like it was waiting.
The bells rang at dawn.
No hymn. No harmony. Just three dull, flat strikes of rusted brass echoing across Hollowreach like the groaning of something ancient trying to rise—and failing.
By the time the orphans reached the courtyard, the ash was thicker. It swirled at their ankles like mist and filled the seams between the blackened tiles. The ceremonial robes they wore clung to them damp and too light for the chill. Linen, off-white, frayed at the edges, with the same golden glyph stitched into every back: a radiant eye split down the middle.
The Eye of Order.
Soren hated it.
It was supposed to mean clarity. Power. Truth.
But to him, it looked cracked. Not sacred—wounded.
Fifty-nine children stood in nine lines. Barefoot. Heads down. Breaths shallow.
None of them spoke.
To speak on Ceremony Day was to invite attention. And attention led to questions. And questions—if answered incorrectly—led through the altar doors.
So they waited. Silent.
Even the air was still.
Even the wind had learned to be quiet here.
Soren stood near the end of the third row. Rilo was beside him, hands clenched in the folds of his robe. His knuckles were pale, and a fine dusting of ash lined his brows.
"You think they'll pick me?" Rilo whispered.
The question was soft enough that only Soren could hear it.
He didn't answer. Not because he didn't want to—but because he didn't trust himself to say the right thing.
He wanted to lie.
To say, No, of course not. You're too clever. Too small. Too young.
But the truth was, the altar didn't care.
It chose without mercy.
Or maybe the Warden did.
Soren didn't know which was worse.
He reached down and gripped Rilo's hand instead.
The boy didn't pull away.
They stood like that, side by side, for another minute before the gates opened.
The Priests came first.
Three of them, robed in bone-white and gray, veils over their faces, glyphs stitched into the hems of their sleeves. None of them spoke. They moved like shadows—too steady, too quiet.
Then came the Warden.
She wore silver.
Not polished, not beautiful—functional. Stiff and sharp at the shoulders, layered like plated bark. Her veil was long and shimmered faintly with threads of Crownlight. A thousand symbols were woven into it, most of which no child could read.
Soren didn't need to read them.
He felt them.
She stopped ten paces from the front row and raised her hands.
"You stand beneath the Eye of Order," she said.
Her voice was smooth and distant, like something heard from underwater.
"One among you bears the scent. One among you carries the mark. One among you will be taken."
No one answered.
They never did.
The Warden stepped forward.
Her feet made no sound on the stone, no matter where she walked. The ash seemed to part for her robe. Her veil trailed behind her like a second spine, swaying with every motion.
She passed the first row. Eyes hidden behind silk. Hands folded.
She stopped in front of a girl named Lysa. Tilted her head. Moved on.
Then before Nerin. A pause. Nothing.
Tolla. Fesk. Bren.
Then—
She stopped at Rilo.
Soren felt his fingers tighten.
The Warden reached out.
Her gloved hand hovered just above Rilo's cheek, then lowered and pressed lightly below his left eye.
The spot shimmered faintly.
A glyph.
No. Not quite a glyph.
A scar of light.
A memory.
The Warden's hand withdrew.
"This one carries it," she said.
The Priests moved quickly.
Rilo didn't cry.
Didn't plead.
He just looked back at Soren. No words.
And smiled.
A crooked, ash-flecked smile.
The kind that knew it couldn't change anything… but smiled anyway.
And then he was gone.
Swallowed behind the altar doors.
Soren was left in the courtyard.
Cold.
Still holding his breath.
The altar doors closed.
Not with a slam. Not with ceremony. Just a slow, heavy click that echoed in Soren's bones like the final note of a song no one had agreed to sing.
Rilo was gone.
The Warden turned without another word, her veil catching the windless air as if drawn by unseen strings. The Priests followed. The courtyard began to empty, row by row, called away by quiet gestures from hollow-eyed attendants.
But no one called Soren.
No one seemed to notice he was still there.
So he stayed.
Ash drifted down in thicker sheets now.
It clung to his robe, gathered in the lines of his knuckles, filled the cracks in the tile beneath his bare feet.
He didn't move.
Not when the Warden passed by again. Not when the last row of children was ushered out. Not even when a windless chill slid down the back of his neck like a hand he couldn't see.
The sky overhead hadn't changed.
Still copper-tinted.
Still wrong.
But the weight in the air had.
Something was listening.
He found himself walking.
One step at a time, moving not by decision but by pull. The kind of pull that turned dreams into memory. That made thoughts feel like footsteps already taken.
The edges of the courtyard were rarely visited. The far left wall had collapsed long ago, exposing old stone, twisted support roots, and shattered decorative columns the Empire no longer bothered to repair.
It was near that ruin that he stopped.
Something was there.
Not glowing. Not pulsing. Just waiting.
He crouched.
At first, he saw only stone.
Charred. Fractured.
Then—beneath a patch of ash, almost completely hidden—he saw it:
A mark.
Thin. Crude. Etched with no tool he recognized. It wasn't a symbol. Not a glyph. Not anything the Priests had ever spoken of.
It was a name.
Or part of one.
He reached out, brushing the ash away with shaking fingers.
And the moment his skin touched the mark, the world shifted.
The stone trembled under his palm.
Not violently. Not loudly.
Just enough to be felt.
A pressure built behind his eyes, in his chest, in his spine. His ears rang—not with sound, but with memory. The kind of memory that didn't belong to him.
Do you remember me ?
Soren gasped.
The voice wasn't a voice. It didn't enter through his ears. It came from beneath—from the roots of the stone, from behind his heart, from the marrow of things left unsaid for too long.
He fell back, heart pounding.
The mark beneath him glowed faintly, then went still.
But the feeling didn't.
Suddenly, something inside the altar chamber roared.
Not audibly.
Not physically.
But every surface quivered.
The flames in the courtyard basins flared blue, then died.
Soren turned toward the sealed doors.
And saw the light behind them fracture.
He ran.
Not from fear.
From knowing.
From the unbearable certainty that whatever was happening behind that altar now belonged to him .
He crossed the courtyard in seconds, passed stunned attendants, ducked beneath the slow-turning gaze of a Priest too frozen to act. He reached the door—and it opened.
Not by his hand.
Not by command.
It just yielded.
The altar chamber was gone.
At least, the one he knew.
In its place was ruin—stone curled inward like a crater, walls scorched with veins of dim light, ash hovering in the air like trapped breath.
At the center of the ruin stood a figure.
Unmoving.
Waiting.
Wreathed in soft white glow and silence.
Soren stood at the edge of the broken altar, his breath catching in his throat.
The figure at the crater's center didn't move.
It didn't need to.
Its stillness was more commanding than any roar. It held the silence the way a blade held an edge—perfect, honed, and final.
The light surrounding it pulsed faintly, not like magic or flame, but like something alive trying to remember how to breath.
Ash drifted around it in slow spirals, but never touched its robes.
Those robes were black. Not dyed—burned. Charred and uneven, ragged at the sleeves. The fabric fluttered though there was no wind, as if something beneath it stirred in ways the eye couldn't follow.
But the mask—
That was what rooted Soren to the floor.
It was smooth and white. Porcelain, maybe. Bone, perhaps. Cracked through in jagged patterns that converged at the forehead, forming the shape of a broken crown. The fractures glowed faintly with a color that wasn't color at all—like the memory of fire, long after it had burned out.
The figure tilted its head, ever so slightly.
"You bled," it said.
The voice didn't carry across the air. It landed directly inside Soren's thoughts, like the echo of something half-forgotten.
"You bled where memory once lived."
Soren couldn't speak.
The voice again, calm. Patient. Ancient.
"You touched a name the world erased. And in doing so…"
The figure stepped forward.
"You remembered me."
Soren took a step back.
He shouldn't have. He knew it instinctively—every part of him screamed that you didn't turn away from this.
But his body moved on its own.
The figure stopped, observing him not with eyes—there were no holes in the mask—but with something deeper.
Not pity.
Not judgment.
Recognition.
The light at the figure's feet began to change.
It rose—not quickly, not violently, but deliberately.
A shard of something white and sharp emerged from the center of the cracked floor. It hovered between them, rotating slowly, giving off no heat yet making the air feel heavy with breath and memory.
It pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Soren's heart raced.
And then it moved.
Not toward the figure.
Towards him.
The shard streaked through the space between them like a whispered scream, then slammed into Soren's chest.
He didn't cry out.
Didn't fall.
He just… stopped.
Time blinked.
The world stilled.
And something inside him opened.
There was no pain. Just pressure. Like an old door forced ajar.
Memories poured into him—but they weren't his.
He saw flashes.
A field of golden roots coiled beneath a burning sky.
A tower made of masks, each whispering a different name.
A child in robes too large for their frame, holding a book made of teeth.
A god… breaking.
Then—
Darkness.
And a voice.
Soft. Familiar now.
"The world forgot me."
"But you… remembered."
The light faded.
Soren gasped.
Air rushed back into his lungs like he hadn't drawn breath in years. His knees buckled. He caught himself on one hand, panting, the other pressed to his chest where the shard had entered.
It was gone.
But he could feel it.
Not a wound.
Not a weapon.
A name.
And it was still speaking.
Not in words.
In presence.
He stood slowly.
The chamber was quiet again.
The figure—gone.
Not vanished. Not dismissed.
Just… absent. As if it had never been there at all.
But the feeling remained.
Not fear.
Not power.
Witnessing.
Something had seen him.
And chosen to be seen in return.
Soren stood in the center of the hollow chamber, chest rising and falling like he had just broken through the surface of deep water.
The world had returned—but not the same.
The altar was ruined. The polished obsidian tiles that had once framed the chamber were fractured, curling inward like petals around a void. The air was thick, not with heat or smoke, but presence. As if something unseen still lingered in the corners of the room, watching, listening, remembering.
His fingers trembled.
Not from fear.
From knowing.
A pulse throbbed in his chest where the shard had entered. Not pain. Not even warmth. Just… awareness.
Something had rooted itself inside him. Not a foreign object or a curse, but a truth. Something the world had buried, burned, and forgotten—and he had dug up without trying.
He looked down at his hands.
Nothing had changed.
And yet, everything had.
Outside the altar, the ash was still falling.
But now, it seemed quieter.
Like the sky was holding its breath.
The silence broke behind him.
Boots on stone.
Slow. Controlled. Measured.
Soren turned.
A figure stepped through the ruined gate—not a Priest, not a child.
She wore Veinsteel armor. Pale silver and trimmed with gold. A ceremonial breastplate carved with the symbol of the Eye, the same radiant glyph etched into every orphan's robe—but hers glowed faintly, pulsing with power he couldn't place.
She wasn't masked, though one hung at her side. Her face was cold. Precise. Trained.
Older than him by maybe a few years.
But her eyes were sharp.
They locked onto him.
She raised a blade—not in aggression, but in ready confusion.
"You're not supposed to be standing," she said.
Her voice was clear. Not cruel, but far from kind.
Soren said nothing.
"I felt the fracture from the outer corridor," she continued. "No one's ever survived a glyph break. Especially not from inside."
Her eyes narrowed.
"What are you?"
He didn't know how to answer.
He wanted to say nothing. That he was no one. That he didn't understand.
But the words wouldn't come.
The shard in his chest pulsed again.
And suddenly, he remembered.
Not facts. Not names.
A feeling.
The moment he touched the etched stone in the courtyard.
The moment he heard the voice say: Do you remember me?
He took a breath and said, "I remembered something I wasn't supposed to."
That gave her pause.
She lowered the blade slightly.
"You're an orphan."
It wasn't a question.
"I was," Soren replied.
"You still are."
He didn't respond.
She stepped forward, more cautious than afraid.
"What did you see?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. Not fully."
"What's your name?"
"Soren."
Her eyes flicked toward the cracked floor. Then back to him.
"No number?"
"Just Soren."
That made her frown.
In Hollowreach, names were rare. Names had weight. Most of them had only numbers now. Names were risks.
But he had one.
And it felt heavier than ever.
She seemed to consider something, then turned slightly, raising a communicator crystal to her lips.
"Judicator Kanna reporting," she said. "Glyph rupture confirmed. Unregistered Witness present. Possible unsealed pact. Immediate containment required."
The crystal hummed.
A voice crackled faintly back, too distant for Soren to hear.
Kanna turned to him again.
"You're coming with me."
Soren took a step back.
"I'm not going back into a cell."
"You're not going to a cell," she said calmly.
He blinked.
"No?" he asked.
"You're going to be studied."
Soren clenched his jaw.
That sounded worse.
But even as his mind whirled, the presence in his chest stirred again.
And for the first time, he felt something new:
A choice.
It wasn't loud.
Wasn't urgent.
Just present.
A door he hadn't seen.
A path no one else could walk.
Soren turned to face the ash beyond the chamber doors.
It was still falling.
Still endless.
But now… it felt like an invitation.