Before Kael, there was Nyra.
Before curses, before fire, before the Spiral reached through the veil, there was only silence.
Nyra had been born in the Shadelands, in a village that no longer breathed. Its name was unspoken, scrubbed from every map, not by time, but by decree. Her people were the Hollow-Tongued—songweavers of forgotten language, their voices able to shape emotion, command nature, and fracture lies.
They were not warriors. They were keepers of balance. When war raged between kings and dragons, it was the Hollow-Tongued who sang truce into the bones of the land. When a child was born soulless, they sang it into being. Their melodies were bridges—between life and death, sky and sea, truth and madness.
But their gift was seen as threat. And so, when Nyra was still a child, the Silence Wars came.
The soldiers did not kill with swords. They came with iron masks and rune-laced gags, sealing throats with spells. Her mother, Elenai, who sang a river to change its course, had her voice stolen. Her father was not so lucky.
Nyra was hidden beneath the altar when it happened. Her older brother, Aiven, swore to protect her. He took the voicebrands meant for her. His song burned him alive. His final words were turned into static by the binding magic, and the sound of his scream never reached her ears.
She never saw him again.
For years, she wandered, unable to speak a word without attracting ghost-hunters or curse-forgers. She wrote her thoughts in ciphers, sang only in her sleep. Her melodies twisted trees, woke storms, stirred memory in strangers. Each village she passed knew of the Hollow-Tongued, and most feared her. Some tried to kill her. Others tried to use her.
The world taught her not to trust kindness. Only silence was safe.
She lived beneath the ruins of Hollowspire, among whispering rocks and shattered memory. There, the voices of the past clung to the walls, moaning songs too old for language. Nyra would sit for hours, humming to the stones, and they would hum back. The echoes grew fond of her—gave her back lost lullabies, melodies meant for grieving kings, dirges that bent the bones of trees.
And then came the cult.
The Endless Maw found her while she meditated beneath the ruins. They did not attack. They knelt.
They promised her purpose, power, and protection. They said she was destined to be the Spiral's vessel—a voice of awakening. Their leader, a veiled woman called Prela the Hollow-Eyed, told her the curse was not a punishment, but an invitation.
Nyra stayed. She needed to understand.
She learned their rituals—the way they coiled time, how they whispered into flame. She learned how to listen with more than ears. She began to hear the Spiral's rhythm, its pulse like a distant drumbeat in her blood.
But the deeper she listened, the more she saw: the Maw did not create. It devoured. It twisted melody into madness.
Prela offered her a place in the inner sanctum. There, the Maw had bound a living symphony—once a choir of Hollow-Tongued elders, now fused into one body, endlessly singing a single cursed note. It bent reality around it like a black hole of sound. Nyra was meant to harmonize with it. To complete it.
She refused.
That night, she walked into the Maw's sanctum and sang a forbidden hymn of unmaking. Her voice shattered the binding runes. The choir was freed—and in dying, they sang one last requiem, wiping out the cult's presence in Hollowspire.
That was the first time she truly felt her voice.
She fled through the mountains, hunted by survivors of the cult, her song now feared and coveted by warlords who saw in her the power to break kingdoms. She traveled in shadow, singing only when forced. Even then, her song could rip iron from bone.
She met Kael during a storm in the Mawscarred Wastes. He had collapsed from Spiral sickness, visions tearing through him. She nearly left him to die. The Spiral hung on him like a second skin. His fire was raw, volatile, barely contained.
But his eyes—bright with fire, wide with guilt—reminded her of Aiven.
She healed him using the Hollow Tongue. He woke screaming her name.
They didn't speak of fate. Only of pain. Only of loss.
And slowly, she began to sing again.
Now, standing beside Kael on the cliffs of Emberhold, Nyra looked down at the valley of flame-forgers and knew what she had become.
Not a survivor. Not a remnant.
A storm, waiting for the right silence to strike.
Each night she taught the Emberhold children the quiet songs—the ones that calmed anger and coaxed sleep. By day, she forged blade-hymns, chants of resistance that could turn steel to light. Her voice was no longer a secret. It was a weapon. And a healing balm.
Kael often turned to her in the stillness, when his dreams grew sharp. He feared the Reflection—his other self. But Nyra did not.
"Reflections can be shattered," she told him. "If they cast a false light."
She crafted charms of glass and song, planting them like seeds throughout Emberhold's tunnels. If the Maw ever came again, they would awaken and blind the enemy with sound.
In the forge-halls of Emberhold, she found herself again. In the eyes of the children, she saw her brother's promise alive. In the voices of the singers she trained, she heard her mother's echo.
One evening, she returned to the ruins of Hollowspire, drawn by a dream. Beneath the altar where Aiven once bled, she sang again—not a song of war, but of memory. The stones wept. The wind trembled. And from the cracks of the world, a voice rose to meet hers.
It was her brother's echo. It had waited all this time.
She stayed until dawn, weeping into the stones, cradling the sound like a child. Then she rose.
She knew that when the Reflection came, bearing Kael's face and all his doubt—
She would be the first to speak.
And the last to fall.