The rains came three days after Arenne first tasted mortal sleep.
It was not a storm of wrath or omen, but of memory — a gentle, ceaseless weeping from the sky that cleansed the dust of centuries from the marble ruins.
She stood beneath it without a cloak.
Each drop slid down her face like tears she had never allowed herself to shed.
For the first time in a thousand years, her hair clung damp to her skin, her heartbeat quickened, and she realized something profound:
She could die.
The thought frightened her — and thrilled her.
"You're not supposed to stand in the rain," Lysander called from under a half-collapsed archway.
She smiled faintly. "Why not? It remembers me. Let it touch me."
"You'll get sick," he said.
"Good," she murmured, half to herself. "Let me learn what sickness means."
He sighed, but there was warmth in it. "You really are impossible."
Arenne turned toward him, eyes glimmering like molten silver. "No, Lysander. I'm becoming possible."
That night, after the rain ceased, she dreamed — but not her own dream.
It was the priestess's.
Darkness, rippling like oil.
A voice whispering through broken mirrors.
"She gave up her crown. She gave up her light. So I will wear her silence."
The priestess knelt before a pool of black water, her blind eyes open to the void.
From her palms dripped blood, and in her grasp, the shard of black glass pulsed with a faint, steady rhythm — a heartbeat not her own.
"Show me what she cast aside," she begged. "Show me what it means to never end."
And the darkness answered.
I am what remains when love forgets itself.
The shard dissolved into her skin. The veins of her hands turned black, tracing upward toward her heart.
Her mouth opened — and silence poured out like smoke.
Arenne awoke gasping, her body drenched in sweat.
The stars above were steady, but their light felt distant, wary.
Lysander stirred beside the dying embers of the fire. "Another dream?"
She nodded slowly. "Not mine. Hers."
He rose, concerned. "The priestess?"
Arenne's expression tightened. "She's found something. Something I left behind."
"What could you have left?"
She hesitated, her voice soft. "The one thing even eternity couldn't erase — my grief."
The next day, they traveled east toward the obsidian cliffs.
Arenne said little, but her steps grew slower, heavier, as though every mile drew her closer to something she didn't want to remember.
At dusk, they came upon a village where the river had overflowed.
Children gathered to see the strange pale woman who made flowers bloom in her wake.
Arenne knelt among them, showing them how to replant roots, how to coax water back into the soil.
But as she smiled, Lysander saw the tremor in her hands.
Her power was faltering.
That night, when the village slept, she stood by the river's edge, watching her reflection waver on the current.
Her voice was a whisper:
"It's fading."
"What is?" Lysander asked softly.
"The divinity. Every hour, it dims. Soon I'll be only what I was meant to be — flesh and bone. And then…"
He stepped closer. "Then you'll live as we do. You'll grow old."
She nodded, though her eyes shone with a sorrow too deep for words.
"I do not fear time. But I wonder — when I die, will the world dream again… or will it sleep forever?"
Far to the west, in the ruins of Velhar, the blind priestess stood before a mirror of black water.
Her reflection was no longer her own.
The darkness had taken shape — smooth, feminine, and cruelly serene.
"Who are you?" the priestess whispered.
The reflection smiled — the same smile Arenne had once worn upon her throne.
"I am what she denied. I am the Eternal without mercy. The silence that remembers everything she tried to forget."
The priestess's body trembled. "Then… I am your vessel."
The reflection stepped through the water.
"No," it said, brushing a shadowed hand along her face. "You are my beginning."
And when their lips met, the last of the priestess's humanity vanished.
Arenne awoke with a start.
Her reflection in the river flickered — for the briefest instant, it wasn't her face staring back, but that same smile, cold and perfect.
She touched the water, and the image vanished, leaving only ripples.
"Lysander…" she whispered, her voice trembling. "She's not dead. The silence lives."
He came to her side, gripping her shoulder. "Then we end it together."
Arenne's gaze lifted toward the moon — full now, red at its edges, as though bleeding back into the sky.
"No," she said quietly. "Not end. Silence cannot be destroyed. Only transformed."
She turned to him, her eyes glowing faintly. "To destroy it, I must remember all that I've forgotten — even the pain I buried when I chose to be eternal."
"Then I'll help you remember," Lysander vowed.
"You can't," she whispered. "What I buried was not a memory, Lysander. It was a love."