The flame in the lantern shook.
The young scribe, barely more than a boy, stumbled backward. He stared at the sigil scorched into Alden's notebook the broken sun-lion of House Valerion, scorched but not gone. It had no right to exist. Not anymore.
"Y-you can't be him," the scribe whispered. "You were… erased."
Alden's voice was calm.
"And yet, here I am."
He stepped further into the light. His boots left no prints on the dusty marble. His face thin, sharp, older than it should've been held the kind of silence that only years of being forgotten could carve.
"Go," Alden said. "Tell Lady Miren. Tell the historians. Tell whoever still remembers how to listen."
The boy hesitated.
"They'll come for you."
Alden smiled but it didn't reach his eyes.
"Let them."
The boy ran, clutching the notebook to his chest.
Alden watched him disappear down the long corridor of books and glass. When the door finally closed behind him, Alden was alone again truly alone, not in body, but in layer.
He sat.
The lower vaults were cold, carved deep into the rock beneath the palace. Here, the Kingdom kept its forbidden records. Forgotten laws. Lost lineages. Names that were meant to disappear.
Alden pulled out a map hand drawn, stitched together from memory and madness. On it were marks: secret exits, rumored relics, names that were once spoken in royal courts but now only in dreams.
At the center: a sealed document chamber.
"If the world won't remember me," he murmured, "I'll make it remember what it tried to forget."
Above the archives, in the Echo Hall of Records, Lady Miren Caelus nearly dropped the notebook when the boy placed it in her hands.
She stared at the scorched crest. Her face, pale already, drained of all color.
"Where did you get this?" she demanded.
"A man. In the vaults," the boy said quietly. "He said… the forgotten heir has returned."
Lady Miren closed her eyes. For a moment, she was no longer in the Echo Hall. She was a younger woman again, standing in front of the Council as they ordered the erasure of Alden Valerion's name. As they burned his records. As they carved him out of history.
And she had watched.
And she had done nothing.
Back in the vaults, Alden stood in front of a sealed stone door.
Etched across the top were words written in the old tongue:
"Only those who are remembered may enter."
He smiled bitterly.
Then he stepped sideways into Layer -2 memory.
The air grew heavy, like breathing through water. The stone door shimmered faintly, flickering with its shadow-self, its memory-version. Here, in this deeper layer, the lock didn't ask for recognition. It asked for truth.
Alden placed his hand on the forgotten version of the seal.
For a moment, the stone resisted.
Then it clicked.
Dust poured from the cracks as the wall slid open, revealing a hidden chamber, untouched for two decades.
Inside:
A single throne broken. A painting of the royal family Alden's face scratched out. And a silver ledger, still warm to the touch.
He opened it.
His name was gone.
But the gap was there. A blank space. A silence where history had been cut.
Alden ran his fingers over it.
"You made me a ghost," he whispered.
"Now I'll haunt every crown that forgot me."
He closed the book and turned to leave.
By morning, the court would know the impossible.
A name erased from history… had spoken again.