Chapter 6: The Heir of Aetherion
The journey to the Northern Divide was neither quick nor easy. Snow blanketed the roads, and Kairos and Lena traveled through ancient routes carved between the roots of the earth. Though only a few days had passed since the encounter in the Forgotten Library, time had begun to distort for them.
Hours stretched. Dreams bled into waking. The Codex Fragment whispered.
Lena clutched the vision orb the Guardian had given her, its glow intensifying with each step north. They were heading toward the Dreamwood, a mystical forest said to be more memory than matter.
Kairos felt the change first.
One night, while camped beneath a frost-laced ridge, he dreamed of the burning tree. Its white bark cracked and cried like a living thing, its roots stretching across the sky like lightning. And standing beneath it was the girl—the one from the orb. Her eyes pierced his dream.
"Find me," she said.
He awoke with a name on his lips.
"Elaria."
Lena sat upright. "You saw her?"
Kairos nodded. "She spoke to me."
By dawn, they reached the first marker: the remains of an old monastic temple buried in snow and thorn. It was guarded.
Not by soldiers, but by warded spirits—transparent beings flickering between calm and fury. They had no bodies, only tattered robes and hollow eyes that bled mist.
Lena whispered, "Soulbound protectors."
Kairos stepped forward, raising the Fragment.
The spirits stopped. Then bowed.
One of them, taller than the rest, drifted close and spoke.
"Bearer of the First Light. The Heir is beyond the Vale. But tread carefully—the Dreamwood does not forget."
The path beyond the temple twisted through a veil of fog, where sound fell silent and thoughts echoed too loudly. Trees, ancient and too tall to measure, wept silver sap. The sky was a twilight hue, though the sun hung directly overhead.
"This isn't just forest," Lena murmured. "It's a sealed space. A fragment of Aetherion's old realm."
They reached the Heartgrove at midday.
And there she was.
Elaria.
White-haired. Silver-eyed. Clothed in a robe stitched with runes. She stood with her back to them, hands extended over a pool of starlight. The tree loomed behind her—half-dead, half-divine.
"I've been waiting," she said.
Kairos stepped forward, heart pounding. "You know why we're here."
"Yes," Elaria said, turning. Her face was calm, ancient in youth. "You seek the Second Fragment. But I am its keeper—and it will not yield easily."
Before he could speak, the ground shuddered.
The tree behind her roared—not with sound, but with pressure.
And then the trial began.
The pool of starlight erupted, and the three of them were pulled into a shared vision.
Each awoke in a different realm of memory.
Lena found herself in her childhood village, moments before it was destroyed. The wind carried familiar voices. Her brother. Her mother. The scent of stew on the fire. Her heart ached. Could she change it this time?
Kairos stood in a field of his regrets, each mistake he'd ever made taking form as shadows that attacked him. Faces of those he failed. Lives he couldn't save. Words he never said. He fought, but every cut was familiar. Every cry an echo of his guilt.
Elaria walked through an endless corridor of her own lifetimes—each one a failed attempt to protect something she could not name. The same decision again and again: to run. To seal. To survive. But not to fight.
The Fragment had created a test—not of strength, but of resolve.
To pass, they each had to choose: erase the memory or embrace it.
Lena watched her village burn and chose not to interfere. She wept. But she stood. Acceptance.
Kairos embraced his pain. His shadows faded. In their place, a garden bloomed—nourished by his grief, not consumed by it.
Elaria found the moment where she first fled instead of fighting—and stepped into the fire. Her body burned, but her will did not. Her path shifted.
They awoke together.
The pool of starlight had solidified into crystal.
The Second Fragment.
Elaria touched it, and her eyes glowed. "It is done. I will go with you."
"What?" Kairos asked.
"I am not just the key. I am part of the seal. To retrieve the third, we must go to the Ruins of Veyrûn."
As she spoke, the sky above cracked—just as it had in the city.
Only this time, a voice pierced the sky itself:
"You gather fragments. You awaken what was buried. Soon, Kairos, you will see why it was sealed."
The voice faded.
And far above, in the shifting heavens, something began to stir.
Yet before they could leave the grove, Elaria collapsed.
Her mind, once sealed by the Dreamwood, was unraveling.
Visions poured into her—of realms shattered, of stars bleeding into void, of a celestial prison that howled with names long forgotten. Lena steadied her, drawing runes of balance, but even the Fragment pulsed wildly in her pack.
"Kairos," Elaria whispered. "The seal… it's not just to protect what's inside. It's to protect us from becoming what's inside."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
But her eyes had already rolled back.
That night, the Dreamwood bloomed for the first time in centuries. Trees opened like gates. Light rose from the ground. And the sealed moon—an illusion—shattered to reveal a second sky.
A sky where something watched.
Something… waiting.
(To be continued ....)