— Illuminara of Stars Before Memory
Night descended in quiet splendor, stars kindling overhead while wind stirred the forest into a gentle motion.
He woke beside a narrow stream, its water catching starlight like scattered glass. The forest rose around him in a vast, ancient silence — towering trunks, silver-veined leaves, and roots that broke the earth like ribs of stone. Above, the sky was deep and crowded with moons and distant stars, their light filtered through drifting canopies and slow-moving clouds. He lay half in shadow, half in moonlight, breath shallow, skin cold against damp soil.
And for a moment, he did not move.
He did not know this land that held him,
nor the path that had carried him there —
and even the name that should have answered within him lay silent.
Yet, as his eyes adjusted, a warmth stirred beneath his skin — faint, restrained, like a buried ember refusing to die. It did not burn. It waited. And with it came something stranger still: a sound, not quite heard, not quite remembered. A name, carried on with no voice at all, brushing the edges of his thoughts like a half-forgotten dream.
Rhaen…
As the sound brushed his thoughts, moonlight grazed his hands — and for the briefest moment, a pale pulse stirred beneath the skin along his veins, slow and restrained, visible only where the light did not touch him
The forest shuddered.
Not with wind — there was little of it — but with a low, unseen pressure, as if the world itself had drawn a breath and held it too long. The stream beside him rippled without cause. Pale motes of light flickered between the trees, then vanished. Somewhere deep beneath the ground, old foundations stirred. The air grew heavy, thick with unseen force, and Rhaen felt it press against his chest, his bones, his pulse — a wrongness woven not into the land itself, but into the way he met it.
Instinct moved him before thought did.
He pushed himself upright, one hand braced against the earth as the ground trembled beneath him. The other closed around a familiar weight at his side — a simple one-handed blade, worn but whole, resting where it felt as though it had always belonged. His heart hammered, not with fear, but with a sudden, wordless exhilaration, as though something long-dormant had stirred at last. The stars above seemed too distant. The forest too still. This place — whatever it was — did not feel abandoned.
He rose unsteadily to his feet.
To remain unlost beneath the turning stars.
This urge did not belong to thought or will, but to something deeper that stirred within him. He moved with the stream's silver whisper at his side, guided by a gentle inner warmth, until moonlight brushed stone shaped by hands long forgotten.
Ruins.
Half-buried pillars of pale crystal and gold lay fractured among roots and moss, their surfaces etched with flowing sigils that glowed faintly, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. The architecture was elegant, impossible — curves that defied gravity, angles that felt deliberate yet unreal. Ancient. Far older than the forest itself. Untouched. Unremembered. And wrong.
The air around the structure hummed, low and constant. Light bled from fractures in the stone, seeping into the ground like spilled starlight. As Rhaen stepped closer, the warmth beneath his skin answered — not pain, but recognition.
The ruin awakened.
The glow intensified. The hum rose into a sharp, resonant chord that rattled his being and blurred his vision. Light answered light — and for a breath, faint runes flared beneath the skin of his hands, tracing pale, unfamiliar paths along his fingers before dimming once more.
Rhaen did not have time to even think.
The moment the light took him, the world fell away — and he fell with it, into a dream not meant for sleep.
Fire.
Wings of light torn from a burning sky.
A city falling in silence.
And through it all, a voice — clear, aching, familiar.
"Rhaen Eirwyn… remember."
— Illuminara of Ash Beneath a Starlit Sky
Cold.
This was the first feeling the world gave back to him.
Not the cold of water or forest shade, but the wide, unguarded cold of open land at night — a chill that crept across stone and skin alike, unbroken by canopy or shelter. He lay still for a breathless moment, the echo of light and falling silence fading from his senses, until the world settled around him with quiet indifference.
Stars burned overhead.
Not dimmed. Not hidden.
They shone in uncountable numbers, sharp and brilliant against a vast, open sky — unfamiliar constellations scattered like broken promises across the heavens. No forest hemmed them in here. No leaves filtered their glow. Their light fell freely upon rolling plains of dark grass and cracked earth, silvering the land in ghostly hues.
He stirred.
Ash clung to his clothes, fine and pale, dusted across his hands and hair like the remains of something long extinguished. Beneath him, the ground was hard and dry, fractured by old heat and older violence. The air carried no immediate flame — only the distant scent of scorched stone and something metallic, faint but persistent, as though fire had once ruled this place and never fully let go.
The warmth beneath his skin answered quietly, steady as a heartbeat.
It did not flare. It did not warn.
It simply recognized.
He pushed himself upright, breath fogging faintly in the cold night air. The land stretched outward in every direction — low savannah grasses broken by blackened rock formations, the silhouettes of ruined stone rising here and there like the ribs of a dead giant. No sound reached him save the whisper of wind through dry blades and the soft shift of ash beneath his feet.
He was not alone.
Not in the sense of presence — but in the way a place remembered being lived in.
Ahead, half-buried in the earth, lay the remnants of stone walls collapsed inward upon themselves. Scorched ruins, worn smooth by time and heat, their edges rounded and cracked as though fire had gnawed at them for centuries. Whatever had once stood here had not fallen quickly. It had endured. It had burned. And it had been forgotten.
Awe settled over him — quiet, grim but undeniable.
This land was not hostile.
It did not reject him.
Though it made no promises of mercy.
His hand drifted once more to the blade at his side, fingers closing around the hilt with unconscious certainty. The weapon offered no warmth, no hum — only balance. Familiarity. A reminder that whatever he was, he had not arrived unarmed.
The stars watched in silence.
Somewhere far beyond the ruins, beyond the reach of sight, the Emberwake breathed — vast, scarred, and waiting. And beneath that starlit sky, standing amid ash and memory, starlight caught strangely in his eyes, giving them a depth that felt less reflective than translucent.
And he understood one thing with absolute clarity:
He had crossed into a world shaped by survival.
And to endure it, he would have to move.
— Illuminara of Embers That Watch in Silence
Wind moved low across the plains, carrying with it a faint breath of heat and ash, stirring the grasses in shallow waves that caught the starlight and let it slip away again. The land lay open and exposed, its scars laid bare beneath the sky — and yet there was nothing wild in its stillness. Nothing empty.
The night itself seemed wakeful, as though the land were listening.
He stood for a long moment, letting his gaze travel the breadth of the darkened land. What had first seemed like scattered ruin resolved into pattern the longer he watched — paths worn smooth through ash and stone, not by time alone, but by passage. Old fire had shaped this place, but newer hands had moved within it. Tended it. Used it.
Far on the horizon, a dull glow pulsed and faded, barely more than a suggestion against the stars. Not the steady light of lava, nor the restless flicker of flame left untended — but something deliberate. Contained. Smoke rose thin and pale from that distant point, drifting sideways in the night wind before dissolving into the sky.
He was not alone.
Closer to him, half-buried in cinder and dust, lay remnants too recent to be ancient. Stone blackened by fire, cracked not by age but by force. Timber reduced to charcoal stumps. The outline of structures that had not simply fallen, but had been unmade. Whatever had happened here had been purposeful. Measured. Done by those who knew exactly what they were destroying.
A weight settled in him — not sorrow, not anger, but something heavier. Recognition without memory. The sense of a pattern he had once understood, now glimpsed only in fragments.
The warmth beneath his skin remained steady. It did not urge him forward. It did not pull him back. It waited, as it always seemed to do, allowing him the choice it never explained.
He rested his hand against the hilt of his blade, feeling its balance, its quiet certainty. The land did not react. The night did not recoil. Somewhere beyond sight, embers continued to glow, unseen eyes tended their fires, and Emberwake breathed on — vast, scarred, and indifferent to his arrival.
Curiosity stirred.
Neither idle. Nor innocent.
The kind born of standing at the edge of a living world, and sensing — without knowing why — that it would not remain distant for long.
He turned toward the faint glow on the horizon and began to walk.
Behind him, the ash settled once more.
Above him, the stars held their silence.
And ahead, unseen, the embers watched.