Chapter Seven – The One Who Was Stolen From
Part One – Where Only the Fog Remembers
He moved like something half-remembered.
Not a ghost. Not a god.
Just a name that hadn't stopped breathing.
The wind did not announce him.
The Riftborn did.
He arrived hours after the scream.
A village by the riverbend—no title left, only ash-scrawled fences and walls made of prayer. The Doctrine hadn't come. The Lyceum didn't patrol this far. But the Riftborn had found it.
And so had he.
A child was crying.
Not loud. Not panicked. Just tired. Like the sound was all he had left to remind the world he existed.
Zephryn moved through the smoke, cloak trailing behind him in coiled silence. His boots left no tracks. His pulse left no trail. But every Riftborn still turned toward him.
The first rushed.
Zephryn met it not with speed, but stillness.
His hand opened.
Lightning bled from his fingers.
The creature's head struck the ground before its limbs realized it was dead.
Two more came. Spined and shrieking. He didn't speak. He didn't warn. He didn't breathe differently.
He only moved.
And where he moved, the air forgot how to scream.
One Riftborn crashed through a prayer wall—stone falling like paper. Zephryn ducked beneath the collapse, cloak spinning wide, and cast low. Veilmark flare. Blue and violent. The glyph at his wrist flickered—but held.
The Riftborn burst open from within.
He landed on one knee, panting.
The child didn't scream. He was watching now. Silent. Eyes wide.
Zephryn stood.
He stepped toward the boy slowly. The smoke parted without being asked. The world, for a moment, allowed itself to still.
He knelt.
"You're safe."
The boy didn't answer.
But he reached out—and in his hand, he held something.
A scrap of cloth. Crimson. Faded gold threading.
Solara's colors.
Zephryn's fingers trembled before he took it.
He closed his hand around the cloth and whispered.
"Solara…"
The boy's voice came small: "Who are you?"
Zephryn stood again.
He didn't answer.
⸻
When the smoke cleared, and the last Riftborn collapsed without song, the villagers emerged.
They saw no one.
Only the message scorched into the earth where the lightning had struck deepest. A spiral glyph. In its center:
Memory… belongs to the living.
Beside it, half-buried in ash, lay a sigil.
The mark of the Hollow Choir.
Burning.
Fading.
Left behind.