The sky burned like parchment set to flame.
Ash fell in sheets over the fractured skyline. Towers that once defied time crumbled inward, their spires snapping like brittle teeth. The capital—ancient, venerated, and rotted at the root—was dying without ceremony. No horns, no declarations, no final benediction.
Only collapse.
Only fire.
Six figures moved through the ruin, cloaked in smoke and urgency. Their boots struck blood-slick marble. None spoke. Words had failed hours ago, somewhere between the last prayer and the first scream.
One of them carried the weight of more than armor in his arms.
A girl.
Young. Unmoving. Her robes—once royal—were soaked in red. A wound bloomed beneath her ribs, too deep for poultice or prayer. Her face, pale as snowmelt, pressed against his chest as if she slept through the world's ending.
His arms trembled beneath her weight, though not from weakness. His strength had carried her across siege lines, through flame-cursed halls, and over the bodies of men he'd once called brothers. But this—this weight was memory. Oath. Failure. Hope.
None of them said her name.
None dared.
⸻
A nearby tower groaned as it fell, the sound low and hollow, like a giant exhaling its last. From above, fire spiraled downward in petal-shaped bursts—burning blossoms devouring what the blade had missed. Stained-glass saints shattered in waves, their faces shattering into silence. And deeper still, along the bleeding streets, shadows moved with hunger—things unspoken by law or litany, birthed not from realm but from rupture.
Whispers laced the smoke. Not words. Not Thread-song. Just the kind of sound that sinks into your spine and tells you to run. That was what hunted them now. Not soldiers. Not hounds.
Remnants.
The six veered from the main roads, slipping through alleys and half-collapsed sanctuaries, guided by memory and oath. The knight carrying the girl felt each step like a countdown.
Somewhere beyond the smoke lay a passage forgotten by time and spared by flame. If it still existed.
If it had ever existed.
Without order, three stopped.
They turned toward the howling dark.
Blades drawn. Threads ready.
No hesitation. They knew what this meant.
A final stand. A breath bought with blood.
One whispered a final rite—half-lost to wind:
"We bind our lives for hers.
As was sworn.
So shall it be."
Then they were gone—shadows against ruin, light against ruin, vanishing into the maw of the fallen city.
The others ran on—one flanking, one leading, the last still cradling the girl whose breath grew thinner with every step. He felt her pulse flicker against his gauntlet. Too faint. A thread unspooling.
The knight did not look back.
But he heard.
The clash of blade meeting something that did not bleed.
The first scream—short, sharp—was human. The second was not. It sounded like grief made manifest. Like a cathedral breaking beneath its own prayer.
Somewhere, a warhorn tried to rise. It faltered. Choked. Fell silent.
The flanking protector clenched her jaw. Her fingers twitched along the edge of her Threadwoven spear. "They'll last as long as they can," she murmured. "They always do."
"How long is that?" the knight asked.
She didn't answer.
Instead, she pressed a rune-stone into his palm—a sliver of bone carved with a single curve. The Mark of the Bound Flame. A silent promise from those who die so another may vanish.
"Give this to her," the protector said. "When she wakes. If she wakes."
Then she was gone too—back into the smoke, back into the weight of a vow older than her breath.
Only two remained.
He adjusted the girl's position, holding her closer. Her pulse still fluttered against his armor—fragile as a leaf caught between seasons.
"Hold on," he whispered. "We're almost out. I swear it."
But the city disagreed.
It groaned, loud and long, as if the very stone remembered betrayal.
Don't fade, he begged her silently. Not yet. We're close.
⸻
They passed dry fountains, their statues melted to slag. Gardens once nurtured by crown and covenant now smoldered with blackened thorns. Marble lions wept soot. Ancestral archways trembled as they passed beneath. A line of gravestones burst into flame as they passed, the names etched upon them warping and running like ink in rain.
The path grew thinner. The smoke thicker.
Finally, at the cliff's edge, the world opened.
There it was: a narrow opening, half-choked with vine and moss, hidden between two crumbled statues whose faces had been erased by fire. One bore a broken sword. The other, a shattered crown.
The knight fell to one knee, breath ragged. The girl was lowered gently to the ground. Her lips had turned a strange shade—like petals wilted beyond bloom.
His voice broke. "Is this the place?"
The flanking protector—blood on her sleeve, throat striped with ash—whispered, "Is this where she ends?"
A voice answered, not from behind nor ahead, but from the hush between.
"I wondered if it would be this night."
⸻
An old man stepped into the clearing.
Barefoot. Cloaked in ash-laced robes. His beard hung like trailing roots, and his hands bore the quiet stain of age and mourning. His eyes—milky and still—reflected no firelight.
Only memory.
The knight bowed his head. "She's fading," he rasped. "We couldn't—there wasn't enough time. She—"
"I know what she carries," said the Hermit. "I always have."
He knelt beside the girl. His hand hovered over her wound, palm trembling faintly. Her chest lifted in shallow breaths. Not dying—yet—but drifting. Her Threads trembled like spider-silk in wind, too fine for strength, too fragile for fate.
"She's more than she knows," the Hermit murmured. "A bell's breath. A memory sealed in flesh. I feared the day would come when even silence wouldn't be enough."
"Can you save her?" the knight whispered.
The Hermit closed his eyes. "No," he said. "But I can keep her."
"Keep?"
"Hidden. Between breath and memory. Where names are kept warm until the world remembers. Until the bell stirs of its own will."
⸻
From his robes, the Hermit drew a slender bone needle.
It shimmered faintly, etched in runes that pulsed at the girl's blood's touch. The symbols resisted. Then yielded.
The vines around the clearing rustled. Moss curled inward, as if holding breath. The air shimmered—not with power, but with the pause before something ancient chooses to witness.
"She'll sleep," he said. "But not like the dead. Not like the lost. She will not decay. Nor fade. She will remain."
"For how long?" the knight asked.
The Hermit's gaze didn't waver. "As long as it takes. As long as she must."
The girl shifted—barely.
But even in silence, the Threads stirred.
Something deeper than breath. Older than will.
In the moment between waking and sleep, the girl's sight slipped sideways—drawn inward, or perhaps elsewhere.
A vision.
Faint. Fleeting. But real.
She saw him.
A boy.
Walking alone across the stars.
Not sky. Not dream. Stars.
They bowed beneath his feet as he passed, bending not out of reverence but recognition. As if they remembered him before he was born. His cloak trailed behind like smoke made of starlight. His eyes—dark, wild, unbroken—looked upward, always upward, searching for something he had not yet lost.
He paused once.
Turned.
And though he could not see her—she felt it.
He knew she was watching.
Then the vision shattered—
Like glass dropped in a still pool.
Only to reform.
⸻
Now they were seated.
Side by side beneath a tree that had no name.
Night wrapped the forest like a song half-whispered. Lanterns swayed along the wooden eaves of distant cabins. A small town. Forgotten. Safe. The scent of ashbread drifted faintly from somewhere unseen.
The boy spoke of things he hadn't yet done. Of stories not yet lived. He laughed once, not loud, but whole. And when he turned to her, something bloomed in her chest.
Not longing. Not love. Just…
Belonging.
He looked at her like she mattered.
Like she'd always mattered.
The tree overhead shimmered. Not with leaves—but with memory.
She opened her mouth.
No blood on her gown. No wound at her ribs. No war at her heels.
Only a name on her lips.
Her own.
And this time—
she said it.
But as the sound formed—
the vision ended.
Not erased. Not lost.
Kept.
Folded like a page between stories.
⸻
The Hermit did not stir. The knight still knelt beside them, unaware of what had passed.
But the girl's lips remained parted.
And though the name was not spoken aloud—
something heard.
Far below. Beneath vault and root and silence.
It pulsed once.
Not loud.
But listening.
Her brow furrowed. Her lips parted, as if to speak.
But no sound came.
Only the faint flicker of a name she had never been allowed to say.
⸻
Behind them, the city collapsed in earnest. One final bell tolled as a tower gave way. The sound was jagged, like bone breaking in the mouth of the sky. The silence that followed struck deeper than the sound itself—an absence, a wound where time itself recoiled.
The last of the protectors turned back. His Thread-wrought cloak, torn and burnt, drifted like ash around him.
"We'll draw them away," he said. "Whatever follows—mustn't find her. Not yet."
They didn't wait for blessing or command. They vanished into the haze, a blade fading into myth.
No words passed.
Only a nod.
The Hermit gathered the girl into his arms. Her weight was small. But heavy. The kind of heavy that anchors dreams or breaks them.
"You must sleep, little ember," he murmured. "The hour is not yet struck."
He turned to the narrow path. With each step, the vines rose to cover their trail. Moss thickened. The forest closed behind them—quiet as breath held before truth.
Time folded in the wake of their passing.
And as they vanished into the shadow of root and stone, the world above trembled.
No name was spoken. No chronicle marked the moment.
But deep beneath the ruined city, past sealed vaults and buried oaths, something pulsed—
Soft.
Rhythmic.
Waiting.
And far beyond that…
in the deep heart of the world…
Something that had not struck in an age
shifted.
It did not toll.
Not yet.
But it listened.
And somewhere beyond ash, flame, and silence—
the promise slept.