The relative calm after the festival was like a bandage on a gangrenous limb. It only delayed the inevitable. The ebony box in my backpack was a constant reminder, a dead weight that seemed to grow heavier with every passing hour. Even Liriel, usually unshakable, seemed restless, her eyes returning to the box with a mix of disdain and… caution.
"The amulet is dreaming," she announced one morning, while I was trying to negotiate with Brom a payment plan that didn't involve selling myself into servitude.
"It's… what?" I asked, distracted, while Brom waved a work contract that would basically make me his employee for life.
"Dreaming. Whispering to the things around it. Not with words, but with… intention. It's bored. And powerful, bored things are dangerous."
As if to prove her point, Kael's heaviest anvil — the blacksmith's grandson, not the old one — suddenly lifted off the ground and hovered in the air for a good ten seconds before crashing down into the coals with a thunderous thud, nearly crushing the apprentice's foot.
Everyone in the main square stopped and looked at me.
"It wasn't me!" I protested, but Kael's expression said the bill for moral damages was already being drafted.
The Forest of Whispering Stones could wait no longer.
The journey to the forest was dark and silent — but in a different way from the Silent Vale. There, silence was an absence. Here, it was a presence. The trees, twisted and black-barked, seemed to whisper to each other in a language of dry leaves and creaking branches. The ground was covered by a low, cold mist that clung to our ankles like icy fingers.
"Rejoice," Liriel said, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the oppressive atmosphere. "According to legend, this forest was planted over the grave of a god of logic who went mad. The place absorbed his insanity."
"That's supposed to cheer us up?" Elara asked, wrapped in her cloak, her staff trembling slightly.
"It means the amulet will feel at home. And maybe it'll stop trying to redecorate the blacksmith's workshop with flying tools."
The Temple of Eternal Forgetting was not a temple in the conventional sense. It was an opening at the base of a black mountain, flanked by two statues of warriors whose faces had been eroded by time, leaving only hollow voids that seemed to watch us.
Inside, the air was dry and dusty. The only light came from bioluminescent mushrooms growing on the walls, casting eerie, dancing shadows. The main hall was a circular chamber filled with niches carved into the rock. In each niche rested an artifact: a sword that bled shadow, a crown that ground invisible teeth, a mirror that reflected only bones.
It was a museum of horrors.
At the center of the chamber stood a pedestal of obsidian, empty.
"Looks perfect," Vespera remarked, glancing around with interest. "No one would come looking for an amulet here. Unless they like nightmares."
"Exactly the point," Liriel said, approaching the pedestal. "This place doesn't hide. It keeps. And deters." She pointed to the bones scattered on the floor, some clearly not human. "Seems some people didn't understand the concept of 'don't touch.'"
I placed the ebony box on the pedestal. It seemed to settle, as if it had finally come home. An immense, though cautious, relief washed over me.
"It's done," I sighed.
That's when the statues at the entrance moved.
It wasn't a sudden movement. It was slow, heavy, like stone grinding against stone. They turned, their faceless forms now facing us, and drew granite swords that shouldn't have been possible to lift.
"The Guardians of Forgetting," Liriel said, her voice restrained. "They don't allow anyone to leave with what they brought. And sometimes, they don't allow anyone to leave at all."
"You could've mentioned that BEFORE?" I shouted, drawing my sword.
"Where would the fun be in that?"
The battle was a nightmare. Our weapons barely scratched the stone. The strikes from the granite swords made the ground tremble with each impact. Elara tried a disintegration spell, but the magic seemed to be absorbed by the temple's darkness, leaving her collapsed and gasping after a single cast.
Vespera fired arrows that ricocheted uselessly. "This is unfair!" she complained, dodging a blow that shattered the niche behind her, releasing a scepter that began screaming prophecies in a dead language.
Liriel fought with bolts of pure energy, but each strike she unleashed seemed to cost her more, as if the temple itself were draining her divinity. "They… are powered by the very concept of forgetting!" she shouted, retreating. "My magic is based on memory and existence! It's their antithesis!"
We were being cornered. One of the guardians raised its sword to crush me. I closed my eyes, thinking of all the debts I'd be leaving behind.
Then, I heard a click.
I opened my eyes. The ebony box on the pedestal had opened. The Amulet of the Nocturnal Whisper was no longer inside. It hovered in the air, the black gem pulsing with a deep, voracious light.
It didn't emit a sound. It emitted silence. A wave of pure and absolute forgetting.
The wave hit the stone guardians. They froze. Their swords fell, shattering against the floor. Then, slowly, they began to disintegrate—not into pieces, but into dust, as if centuries of erosion were happening in seconds. They weren't destroyed. They were… forgotten by the very reality that sustained them.
The silence that followed was jaw-dropping. Even the mushrooms stopped glowing for a moment.
The amulet hovered for an instant, as if satisfied, then quietly returned to the box, which closed with another click.
We stood there, gasping, staring at the pedestal where the box now rested, innocent.
"Well," Liriel said, breaking the silence, her voice slightly trembling. "It seems it liked its new home."
We left the temple in a stunned silence. The forest still whispered, but it felt less threatening now. We had gotten rid of the amulet. For real, this time.
On the road to Vaelor, none of us spoke much. What had happened was too great to put into words. We had witnessed an artifact annihilate ancient guardians with the pure power of nonexistence.
When we finally saw Vaelor's gates, a guild messenger intercepted us.
"Takumi! A message from Blacksmith Kael!" he said, handing me a piece of paper.
I opened it, expecting another bill.
Problem solved. The anvil doesn't fly anymore. But my apprentice quit. Says he dreamed the tools were singing to him. I'll charge you for the cost of his training. —Kael.
The amulet might have been sealed in a forgotten temple, but its echoes still reached us. Some prices, I realized, aren't paid with coins. They're paid with nightmares—and with the lingering reminder that some things, once touched, never truly leave us.