The camp quieted as dusk sank in.
Kaien sat alone beneath the broken tower, back against the warm stone wall, knees bent, the relic sword laid flat across his thighs. It had stopped humming, but he could still feel it—a pressure in his ribs, not pain, just presence. As if the blade watched him dream.
He hadn't dreamed in years.
Not since the black rain.
Around him, voices softened. The Sovereignless murmured over cookfires. A girl with a lopsided braid dragged a tin spoon through an empty bowl, humming off-key. A man with glass bones leaned on a crutch made of rusted spears.
No one looked at Kaien. But no one turned away either.
He was still new. Not trusted. Not yet feared.
He had the mark, though.
That meant something.
Erya returned after nightfall.
She walked like someone used to being followed, though no one ever dared. Her coat was damp with ashdew, her boots blackened at the tips. When she dropped beside Kaien, she didn't speak at first.
He didn't either.
"The Citadel sent two more hounds," she said finally. "Memory-hollow. They're trailing you."
Kaien stared at the firelight dancing across the blade. "Why?"
Erya shrugged. "Because you exist."
"That's enough?"
"It always is."
A beat of silence.
Then, quietly: "The Archivist wants to see you again."
Kaien didn't move. "More visions?"
"No. She found a name. In the shard."
He turned his head. "Mine?"
Erya didn't answer.
The tower groaned in the wind.
Inside, the Archivist was alone, lit by hanging glowsap jars and the eerie flicker of burning ink. Her robes rustled like paper. She didn't look up as they entered, just slid a slab of thin stone across the table.
Kaien stared at it.
Etched into the stone were five names.
Only one still glowed.
Kaien Vael.
"You were part of the Ninth Sovereign Ring," the Archivist said softly. "A warborn council bred for memory resilience. Seven survived the Fall. Five were marked. One vanished."
"And that was me."
"It would seem so."
He stared harder at the stone.
The other names were distorted, smudged by time or ash. But one caught his eye.
Seth Vael.
The hum returned.
The sword across his back pulsed. Like a heartbeat.
Kaien stepped back. "Seth was my brother."
"So you do remember."
"No," Kaien said. "I didn't. Until now."
The shard had planted it. Not restored. Inserted.
What else was buried inside him?
Erya stepped between them. "That's enough. He needs time."
But the Archivist pressed on.
"The Citadel doesn't just erase," she said. "They overwrite. What you remember may not be true. But what you feel? That's where their fear lives."
Kaien said nothing.
He turned and left the tower.
The wind stung his face.
He walked until the lights of camp blurred behind him. The sword was heavy on his back, but he didn't let go of it.
He couldn't.
Something moved behind his eyes.
Not a memory.
A presence.
"You left me beneath the Garden," it whispered.
Kaien froze.
The voice wasn't his.
It wasn't Mercy.
It was Seth.
Kaien dropped to one knee, clutching the hilt. The ground shivered beneath his palm. The mark on his hand burned cold.
The rain had stopped years ago.
But the rot still lived.
A hand touched his shoulder.
He almost swung.
Erya stood over him. Unblinking. Unafraid.
"I saw him too," she whispered. "Seth. In the shards. But not like he was. Like he could be."
"He's not dead."
"No."
"Then what is he?"
Erya's eyes glinted in the dark. "What you were supposed to become."
Kaien sat in the ash.
The sword stopped humming.
The wind carried no scent.
Only the memory of a voice that shouldn't have survived.
The wind hollowed out the world.
Kaien still knelt in the ash, the faint mark on his palm dulling to a bruise. Eris stood a step behind him, her hand ghosting toward his shoulder—but her eyes weren't on him. They were fixed on the jagged horizon, where shredded clouds hung like guilty witnesses over the cracked bones of the land.
He rose in silence. The sword at his hip had grown heavier, though he hadn't shifted it. It felt heavier in his blood, as if something deeper than steel pressed against him now—something left behind in the wake of Seth's whisper.
The campfires were burning low when they returned to the ridge. The others barely looked at him. The scarred old watchman who'd once smirked every time Kaien passed now avoided his eyes. There were tracks near the edge—fresh prints in the frost, half-melted and crystalline. Whatever had stood by the shattered tree was gone, but it had left something behind.
"Do you feel it?" Eris asked. Her voice was low, wary.
Kaien didn't look at her. "It hasn't stopped."
That night, around the brazier, no one spoke much. Ash drifted into the flames like snowfall. Eris sat across from him, the flickering fire painting hollows in her cheeks. Her eyes found his once. Briefly.
"I thought we left the Garden behind," she said. "But you—when you looked at that banner…"
She didn't finish. She didn't have to.
Kaien stared into the embers. "I don't know what I want anymore."
The Chronicler was close by, fingers ink-stained and trembling as she tried to finish a scroll. Her script had slipped, turned crooked, the edges of her runes curling in on themselves like they no longer knew what they were spelling.
"Memory isn't a gift," she murmured. "It's a burden carved into bone."
Kaien woke before dawn. Ash had dusted his lips in the night. When he sat up, his hand ached with cold. The sword beside him was humming—not with noise, but something deeper. When he grasped it, the runes along the blade faintly glowed.
Outside the tent, frost coated the soil. Even in the darkness, he saw every line of cracked stone and breath of cloud. His body felt sharper. His thoughts did not.
He stabbed the blade into the ground and watched it pulse. The glow ran into the earth like water seeking old roots.
He wasn't alone.
The Chronicler found him there as the sun rose, paper clutched in her hands. "The runes," she said softly. "They're changing."
Kaien blinked at her.
She passed him a slip of parchment. "This was your name. Yesterday. But now…"
He looked. His name was there, ink running. Not erased—altered. Redrawn by a hand that wasn't his, in letters half-familiar, half-strange. Something was writing him.
A flurry of bone-feathers broke the silence. A small skeletal bird landed on Kaien's shoulder, hollow-chested and light as wind. It carried a scroll, sealed with wax and stamped with a mark Kaien didn't recognize—until he tilted it sideways. His mark. Inverted. Split.
He opened it.
"Beyond the Frostfall," it read, "the first memory waits."
When Kaien turned, Eris was already strapping on her gear. "I saw the bird," she said. "We follow."
They traveled east. Through a valley where pine trees sagged like grieving men and bled sap that steamed in the cold. The wind whispered through the needles in a language none of them wanted to understand. Eris moved ahead without speaking. Kaien kept pace, his hand never far from the sword. Each step made the runes flare—just briefly, just enough to remind him that something still followed.
At dusk, they reached the cliff.
The Frostfall wasn't a waterfall anymore. It had frozen mid-drop, a great plume of ice plunging into shadow, locked in place like a scream with no breath to carry it. Mist hung like gauze around its base. The world went silent here.
Ilya was waiting.
She stood at the cliff's edge, barefoot despite the cold, her arms wrapped around a bone-sketched canvas. Her eyes didn't blink.
"It called me," she said. "A voice in the ice."
Kaien moved closer. The sketch she held was simple, but wrong in all the right ways. A ring of frozen swords. A throne shaped like a crown of roots. In the center, a single droplet—spinning, suspended above the ground.
"What does it mean?" Kaien asked.
Ilya's hand brushed the canvas. "The echo of Sovereigns."
Eris stepped forward. She pulled a length of silver chain from her coat, one end looped like a noose. Without a word, she dangled it over the cliff.
Frost formed around the metal almost instantly.
"Your past isn't here to save you," she said. "It's here to judge you."
Then she let go.
The chain dropped—straight down—but the droplet of frost it passed through didn't fall. It hovered for a second, then shattered like glass.
"You'll have to catch it," she said.
Kaien unsheathed the sword. It hummed in recognition. He stepped to the edge, lifted the blade, and struck.
The impact was like cutting through his own heartbeat. Ice exploded upward, and for a second, everything was silver and pain.
The ground trembled beneath them. Something inside Kaien's chest shivered—and didn't stop.
They descended slowly. The cliff spiraled into a grotto of silence. Root and ice, fused like bone and nerve, curled across the walls.
In the center stood the column.
Frozen water, tall as a man, perfectly still. At its core hovered Seth's pendant—suspended in time. Untouched.
Kaien stepped forward, breath clouding. The sword trembled in his grip.
"This was me," he whispered. "Or what I want to be."
Eris watched him.
"Remember this," she said, voice cold. "Sovereignless stay beneath the rain."
He touched the column.
His hand went numb. Visions surged—a thousand screams, laughter that wasn't his, Seth's voice fractured like glass.
He could shatter the column. Reclaim the memory. Let it consume him.
Or leave it buried.
Kaien stepped back.
"I'm not ready."
Eris nodded once. Her grip tightened on her blade.
"Then we leave it."
They turned, the grotto behind them silent—except for a single crack forming across the ice. Not loud. Just enough to remind them:
Some things wait to be remembered.