She had worn red that day.Not because she liked the color — but because the girl she followed did.
Her name had been Seren.
The Seventh Shard. Bright. Proud. Brilliant in ways El could never be. Not stronger — but louder, as if her soul had always been burning through her skin. And in that last Sector Battle… she glowed like a nova.
A broken plane. Floating platforms. A storm that never stopped screaming. And a dozen gifted from across the realms, chosen to fight until the Gate pulsed open. The prize? Entry to a higher realm. The truth was simpler — those who weren't meant to awaken would not leave alive.
El had broken the rules to follow. Cloaked herself. Disguised as a healer assigned to patch wounds. But she was there for Seren. She'd known Seren was a Shard the moment they met. And Seren had known too.
"Do you ever feel like you've already lived this moment?" Seren asked her once."Like you're not learning, you're remembering?"
El never answered that.
Seren made it to the last gate. She was bleeding from twelve cuts, her aura flaring erratic — not from loss of control, but from conflict. "Why do they call this a test?" she shouted at the judges watching from their glass citadel. "You're not testing us. You're afraid of us!"
El remembered watching her raise her hands, glowing with veinlight — not from power, but from the fissure within her.
And then…The gate opened wrong. Not forward, but inward. A black fold. A scream without sound.
"It wasn't meant for her," El whispered."It was meant to erase her."
The Queen called it a collapse. A system failure. But El saw the truth. The gate chose to consume Seren. One moment, she was a blaze of life. The next, a ripple of ash — not just dead, but unmade.
She wakes some nights to that flicker. That soundless scream. Not from guilt — but from realization.
"Seren never got to know what she was," she whispers."She died trying to prove she mattered."
And now Kael walks the same path. Marked. Unknown. Unaware. El stares at the sigil on her shoulder. It still pulses. Kael's thread is the same frequency as Seren's.
She stands. The city below is quiet. The Seers are watching. The Gate prepares to open.
"I won't let another one burn without knowing who they are."
She draws a cloak of forgetting over her form — an old Veylan technique. Tomorrow, Kael will see a stranger. A girl with questions and warnings. Not about power. Not about danger But about the truth:
That sometimes, the world doesn't fear what you can do.It fears what you might remember.