The stranger was gone.
Vanished as quickly as he had come—like smoke remembering it had no form.
Ashardio watched the horizon for long moments before turning back to the ruined training field. The wind had died. The dust no longer moved. The Void inside him pulsed with a subtle rhythm, like a compass drawing him toward something old… something buried.
He moved to the northern edge of the field, where the earth sloped downward and was marked by forgotten stone slabs, overgrown with moss and cracked by age. It was said the original Keepers of the Loom once trained here—before the current Order, before even the Council had formalized its rule.
But that was only half the truth.
Ashardio knelt, brushing his fingers across the stone.
It was cold. Colder than it should have been.
And beneath it, something responded.
The Void whispered—not with words, but pulls. Threads of intuition.
He pressed his palm flat to the slab and spoke in the ancient tongue of Vaes'Theron:
"Vel'ar tahl run'dei. Etch to blood. Yield to kin."
The stone shuddered.
Cracks rippled outward in a pattern far too precise to be natural. Not breaking—opening. A ring of glyphs ignited around the slab in soft black flame, burning not with fire, but with absence.
And slowly, the earth split.
A staircase spiraled downward, swallowed in utter darkness.
Ashardio descended.
The air was ancient — dense with forgotten breath and the weight of hidden oaths. The torches along the walls did not burn; they flickered with Voidlight, feeding off his presence.
Dust shifted around him like it had been waiting to move.
And when he reached the bottom, the passage opened into a vast underground chamber. Circular. Endless shelves of obsidian-lined tomes, scrolls sealed in bone clasps, and murals drawn with ash on stone.
At the center stood an altar.
Its surface was a polished black mirror, reflecting not the present — but echoes of the past.
He stepped toward it. His fingers hovered above the mirror's surface — and without touching it, visions surged through him.
A war council of thirteen houses.
Twelve thrones filled. One left vacant — not out of absence, but rejection.
His ancestor, Lytheren Vaes'Theron, robed in the purest dark, standing alone.
"You dare play god," one king snarled.
"No," Lytheren answered. "I dare to remember that gods die."
The others rose in unison.
Judgment.
Banishment.
And behind them — someone else, cloaked, silent.
Watching.
Ashardio tried to focus on the face. It was blurred, deliberately obscured. Not by time — but by will.
Someone had hidden themselves from memory itself.
And they had been there when Vaes'Theron fell.
The mirror cracked.
Not physically — but in the reflection.
And Ashardio saw something far worse:
His ancestor not only survived exile — he thrived.
The chamber he now stood in was built by Lytheren after his fall. A sanctum to store what was deemed too dangerous for the world above.
Forbidden magic. Cursed texts. And blueprints for rewriting reality.
On the far wall, a massive tapestry revealed itself.
Not woven by hand.
Woven by thought.
The threads shimmered with void-stained silk, telling a story not of kings, but of conspirators.
The Council, long thought unified, had been fractured from the beginning. Some kings secretly aided Lytheren, believing the Void was not an abomination, but the original force from which all things flowed.
They were The Withered Crown — a silent faction hidden within the royal bloodlines.
And they had never been destroyed.
Ashardio's blood ran cold.
He had not been watched.
He had been guided.
The dreams. The riddles. The sudden stirrings of his power.
It had all been set in motion centuries ago — and he was the next tether in the chain.
He turned toward the shelves, scanning for more answers.
One scroll resisted his hand — sealed with the sigil of a shattered star. When he forced it open, a single name fell from its lips before he could stop it:
"Thalara…"
A name not in any celestial record.
A name that sounded like thunder half-remembered.
It was not his ancestor.
It was his mother.
Ashardio staggered.
Her records had been erased. She had vanished when he was a boy — told to him as a casualty of border raids during the eclipse wars. But this scroll bore her sigil.
She had known of the Void.
She had perhaps… served it.
And her final record, written in her hand, bore only a single phrase:
"He must not find the One Thread. Or we are all unmade."
Ashardio collapsed to his knees.
The Void within him trembled—not with power.
But with choice.
Everything was unraveling.
His bloodline, his role, even his memories were part of a deeper tapestry — and somewhere, perhaps in the present, the Withered Crown still lived.
Waiting.
Pulling.
And he was no longer just a Weaver.
He was a keystone.
⸻
Above, the surface winds stirred again.
The stranger from House Askerion stood at the edge of the tactical field, staring down into the earth.
He smiled softly.
Not in malice.
But in recognition.
"The boy opens the door," he whispered.
"Soon, the Crown returns."