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Chapter 6 - Chapter Six-Trial of the Warden

The wind was wrong.

Lyra felt it the moment she and Kael stepped deeper into the lost city of Eldarath. The air was too still, too heavy with unspoken memories. The strange, eternal twilight of the floating metropolis glimmered off glass-leafed trees and impossibly tall white towers that spiraled upward like stone-made music. But the silence… the silence swallowed even the sound of their footfalls.

Cael hovered beside her, his glow faint but steady.

Kael's voice was low. "She's here."

"She never left," Lyra murmured.

And then, from beneath a shattered archway carved with forgotten Aerthian script, Aevara stepped into view.

She walked like someone born from moonlight — graceful, without fear, every movement precise. Her armor was black and ink-slick, etched in silver runes that shifted and pulsed like a living script. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and her hair poured down her back like liquid silver. But it was her eyes that rooted Lyra to the spot — twin golden embers, burning with ancient sorrow and fury.

"You carry the blood of the betrayers," Aevara said, her voice a crystalline echo, impossible to place by age or time. "And yet you dare to enter Eldarath."

Kael instinctively stepped in front of Lyra, sword drawn, his boots scraping the glass-like path beneath them. "She's no betrayer."

Aevara tilted her head. "No? Then what is she? Another scavenger? A child of the wind, pecking at the bones of what she does not understand?"

Lyra stepped forward, brushing Kael aside. "I came because I need answers. Because the world out there is dying. The storms are spreading. The sky is tearing itself apart. And Eldarath—this city—may hold the key to stopping it."

The Warden's face remained unreadable. "So you seek salvation in a tomb."

Lyra's grip tightened on Cael. "Call it what you like. But I will enter the Heart of Eldarath."

Aevara extended her hand, and with it, the air rippled.

The arena appeared around them — a great domed courtyard suspended in midair. The ruins shifted and rearranged with a sound like chimes being crushed underfoot. In an instant, Lyra, Kael, and Aevara were enclosed within a wide open circle flanked by floating pillars of light. The sky above dimmed.

"Then prove yourself," Aevara said. "If the city is to awaken, it must do so to one worthy."

The moment the words left Aevara's lips, the wind ignited.

Aetheric energy burst around the Warden as her runes flared bright and lifted her into the air. She moved like a memory — fast, elegant, impossible to predict.

Lyra's wings snapped open, catching the current. She shot upward just in time to avoid a spiraling volley of razor-sharp magic, the projectiles gleaming like shards of obsidian. Cael hummed with mounting energy in her hand.

"She controls mirrored magic," Cael warned, his voice thrumming in Lyra's mind. "Be careful. She reflects the strength of what you give her."

Lyra banked hard left as Aevara came at her in a blur of black light and trailing silver fire. Their blades clashed mid-air, energy rippling outward from the impact.

Kael fought from below, anchoring magical runes into the stone and launching pulses of fire upward to distract the Warden. But Aevara anticipated him. With a flick of her hand, a counter-rune detonated near his feet, nearly toppling him from the edge.

Lyra dove and twisted, throwing a blinding spark of lightning toward Aevara's side — but the Warden caught it with one hand and returned it, amplified.

It grazed Lyra's shoulder, sending her spinning.

Blood bloomed across her flight sleeve.

"You think you understand magic," Aevara said, voice echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once, "but you know only fragments — splinters of a forgotten art."

Lyra righted herself with gritted teeth. "Then teach me."

She surged forward, blades out, and struck with everything she had.

Steel screamed against the shadow-blade. Runes flared across Lyra's arms. Cael pulsed with golden brilliance as she channeled not just power but purpose — the legacy of her Skystrider bloodline, the memory of her mother's last flight, the aching need to prove she wasn't just another scavenger in the sky.

Aevara faltered — for a second, just a second — and Lyra saw the truth flicker in her golden eyes.

Regret.

With a cry, Lyra struck, driving Aevara down to the stone floor. The Warden rolled with the blow and rose to one knee, breathing heavily, armor cracked along one side.

Kael moved to strike, but Aevara held up her hand.

"Enough."

The arena melted away into mist.

Aevara stood, watching Lyra in silence.

"You are not what I expected," she said at last. "There is strength in you… but not just strength. There is balance."

"I'm not here to conquer Eldarath," Lyra said, wiping blood from her arm. "I came to understand why it fell. And how we can stop the same thing from happening again."

Aevara looked past her — toward the central tower, the Heartspire, glowing faintly now in the distance.

"Then come," she said. "Face the Trial of Memory. And if you survive it… Eldarath's secrets will be yours."

They crossed the sky-bridge in silence. The wind returned — gentle, melancholic. Below them stretched the hollow beneath Eldarath, a sky-chasm that shimmered with hidden stars.

Inside the Heartspire, the air grew colder. Runes lined every wall, glowing as they passed. The entire tower seemed to hum with memory.

They stopped before a massive door of silver and crystal.

"This is the Gate of Memory," Aevara said. "It leads to the city's final defense — and its truth. But to pass it, you must surrender something of yourself."

"What do you mean?" Kael asked.

Aevara looked at Lyra. "She must relive what she fears most."

Before Lyra could speak, the gate pulsed — and opened.

Light swallowed her whole.

She was a child again.

Standing at the edge of the Skycliff near Aviari. Her mother's wings outstretched, her laughter carried on the wind.

The day of the fall.

The day the storm came.

She relived it — every moment. The scream. The way her mother vanished into the cloud. The silence after.

But this time, she was not helpless.

She fought it.

She raced into the storm, Cael's power sparking around her younger self. She screamed her mother's name and punched through the illusion — refusing to relive loss without resistance.

The vision cracked.

The storm turned to glass.

And through it, Lyra saw the truth.

A figure — robed, faceless — had stood at the heart of the storm that took her mother.

Not a storm.

A weapon.

She stumbled out of the vision with a gasp.

Aevara stood waiting, solemn.

"You saw it," the Warden said.

"Yes," Lyra whispered. "It wasn't just a storm."

"No. It was the first weapon of the Fractureborn — those who turned Aerthys' own magic against itself."

Kael stiffened. "You mean… the Empire was destroyed from within?"

Aevara nodded. "By arrogance. By ambition. By those who tried to bind magic itself."

She turned toward the Heartspire's center — where a massive crystal stood, pulsing softly. Within it swirled an image of the continent of Aethoria — but it was cracked, as though history itself had splintered.

"This is the truth," Aevara said. "The fall of Eldarath was not a collapse. It was a sealing. We locked the city away to protect what was left of the Aerthys legacy… and to keep the Fractureborn from finishing what they began."

Lyra stepped forward. "Are they still alive?"

Aevara's golden eyes narrowed. "Some. Sleeping. Others… already walking among the stormfronts."

A new silence fell.

Then Lyra turned to Kael.

"We can't go back to Aviari. Not yet."

He nodded.

"Then where?" he asked.

Lyra faced the map again.

"The Vault of Orun'Kai," she said. "If we're going to stop them, we need the relics of the Aerthys Empire buried. And the next one lies in the mountains of flame."

Aevara turned, her voice soft. "Then Eldarath grants you passage. Go. And may the winds remember your names."

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