The basin stretched before them like a wound.
White salt flats shimmered beneath a sky fractured by Riftstorm scars. Faint red hues drifted between the clouds, as though light itself had bled dry. There was no wind, no cry of bird or beast. Just silence and stillness—and a suffocating sense of memory too old for any map.
Kaelen stood at the ridge's edge, arms crossed, his shadow long and sharp behind him.
"This is the place," he murmured.
Aelira moved up beside him. "Looks dead."
"It is," Kaelen said. "Or it's waiting."
She glanced sideways at him. "You're more cryptic than usual. Since the ruin."
"I remember things I shouldn't. Things the Weave itself wants to forget."
He turned to descend.
Aelira followed.
Hours passed as they crossed the dead plain. Their footsteps left no lasting imprint; the salt closed over behind them, like the land refused to acknowledge their presence. Kaelen remained quiet, gaze distant.
He could feel the echo of something buried beneath the basin. Not a structure. Not a creature.
A presence.
It pulsed in the back of his mind, like a heartbeat too far away to be real.
"What do you expect to find?" Aelira asked.
Kaelen spoke without turning. "An answer. Or a question I haven't yet learned to ask."
She rolled her eyes. "That's not helpful."
"I know," he said.
By midday, they reached a rise in the center of the salt basin—an outcropping of jagged obsidian, like the broken tip of a submerged tower.
Kaelen knelt near its base. Runes marked the stone, too faint to see but felt—threads of ancient Weave-touched script that hummed beneath his skin.
"These aren't from the current age," he said. "They're older than the Threadburn."
"From the First World?"
He nodded. "They called this place… 'Narthanax.' The Basin of the Last Pulse. It was the final point of resistance before the collapse."
"Against what?"
Kaelen didn't answer.
Instead, he touched the stone.
A single crack of thunder split the air.
Then, the sky went dark.
Reality shifted.
The salt basin was gone.
They stood within a ghost of the past—structures half-formed, people made of light and echo. An illusion? A memory? No. Something more. A branch of the Weave, reawakened by his touch.
Kaelen looked around. Figures flickered through the dreamscape: warriors in mirrored armor, mages holding staffs that bled ink, children that sang without mouths.
"This isn't a vision," Kaelen said. "It's a loop."
Aelira was tense, blades drawn. "You brought us into the past?"
"No. The past came forward."
Then, the sun rose.
But it was wrong.
Not golden. Not white.
It was red and cracked, leaking beams like broken swords. As it climbed, the figures began to dissolve—not from heat, but from conceptual disintegration. One by one, the beings twisted, screamed in silence, and scattered into strands of light.
Aelira backed closer to Kaelen.
"What is this?"
Kaelen stared at the red sun. "A Broken God. A fragment of it was sealed in this place. Its death was unfinished… and its decay became a sun."
The Weave trembled.
Reality broke again.
The figures turned to face Kaelen and Aelira—eyes glowing, not with life, but with recognition.
They spoke as one:
"You bear the mark."
Kaelen stood tall. "I'm not your heir."
"No," they replied. "You are our jailer."
And then they attacked.
The first came as a flash of mirrored blades.
Aelira intercepted it—her movements honed, fluid, deadly. She ducked, spun, slashed through the phantom with a shriek of clashing threads. It dissolved—but more replaced it instantly.
Kaelen raised his hand. A ripple of force exploded outward—Matter manipulation, folded through inverse laws. The ground warped. Salt turned to crystal. Figures shattered.
But they kept coming.
"Cut the memory," Kaelen said, voice low. "They aren't real. They're Weave echoes trying to latch onto us."
"I don't care what they are if they bleed," Aelira hissed, already dancing through three more with blade and fire.
Kaelen extended both arms. He reached.
To the Weave.
To the core of this echo-loop.
He found it: a buried spindle of thought and regret, embedded like a parasite in the basin's metaphysical structure. It pulsed with a familiar signature.
The Quiet Ones.
They had left this memory as a trap.
To trigger him.
To test him.
Kaelen smiled coldly.
"So be it."
He inverted his consciousness—folded it around the core.
Time slowed.
Every figure froze mid-motion.
The red sun pulsed—once, twice—and then collapsed into itself.
Kaelen rewrote the pattern.
The memory shattered.
Reality reformed around them in pieces, like glass returning to shape.
They stood again in the salt basin.
Real. Present. Alone.
Kaelen swayed slightly. Aelira caught his arm.
"You alright?"
He nodded, barely. "Tore a recursive echo from the Weave. Left me disoriented."
She looked at him. "That was more than disorientation. Your eyes were bleeding."
Kaelen touched his cheek. Dried blood.
"I'm close," he whispered. "To something ancient. Something… unfinished."
"You mean the Broken God?"
He shook his head. "Not quite. That was a shell. A broken cage. The real threat is still slumbering deeper—beneath the Rift. Beneath all of this."
Aelira said nothing.
She simply stood beside him.
That night, they camped near the edge of the basin.
Kaelen sat alone, staring into the dying embers.
Aelira approached quietly.
"Why do you keep pushing?"
He didn't look at her. "Because I remember what it felt like… to be nothing. In the lab. In the chains. When I didn't even have a name."
A pause.
"You have one now."
He turned to her. Eyes calm. "So do you."
She met his gaze. For a moment, there was no Rift. No echoes. No gods or war.
Just two people.
"I'm not leaving," she said softly. "You know that, right?"
Kaelen nodded once.
"I do."
Far beneath the basin, something stirred.
A single black eye opened in the dark.
And waited.