The days after the chamber changed him.
Ashardio still trained, still meditated, still kept up the mask of control — but something had splintered beneath the surface. He carried the weight of bloodline truths like glass beneath his skin.
And then, she arrived.
Without fanfare. Without heralds.
Just a quiet figure in the garden at dusk — standing near the Loomblossoms, those rarest of flowers that only opened under dying starlight.
She didn't speak when he approached.
Didn't need to.
Her presence struck him like a forgotten scent, like the shape of a melody once heard in a dream. Something deeper than memory stirred — a feeling that had no name, no logic.
Just ache.
"…I know you," he said softly, before he could think better of it.
She turned.
Eyes like storm-kissed bronze. Hair the color of midnight soil after rain. And a faint scar beneath her lower lip — like a pause in a sentence never spoken aloud.
"You should," she replied with a smile that hurt him.
Like returning to a place that once felt like home… now hollowed by time.
"I'm Kaelith," she said. "We used to chase fireflies behind the lower sanctum, remember?"
The name ignited something in him. A thread, once buried so deep beneath the weight of power and exile and duty, that he hadn't felt it stir in years.
Kaelith.
The daughter of one of the old scholars who vanished during the first Loomfire Collapse.
The girl who used to bring him stolen sweets. Who held his hand when his mother disappeared. Who made him promise—at six years old—to protect her "when the stars fell."
He had thought she died.
And now she stood before him, fully grown, with a presence that both soothed and shattered.
"But… how?" he asked, stunned.
Kaelith only looked past him, toward the Loomfire towers, where the embers reflected in her irises.
"They hid me. When the collapse happened, my father—he knew something was wrong. Said the kings were lying. Said there were eyes watching even beneath the earth. So he sealed me. Froze me between seconds. Told me I'd return when someone strong enough to burn the veil would awaken the old blood."
Ashardio felt his heart twist.
"You're… part of this?"
She nodded, her voice tightening.
"We both are."
⸻
They walked through the garden as night settled in. Words came slowly — hesitant, tender, like walking barefoot over shattered glass. But they did come.
Kaelith remembered things he didn't. The way he used to braid silver thread into her hair. How he'd cry at night for his mother but pretend he wasn't afraid. How he once said:
"If I ever become dangerous… find me. And remind me who I am."
And now, she had.
Ashardio's chest ached with a new kind of pain — not from fear, or rage, or Void tremors.
But from hope.
⸻
Later that night, he stood alone in his chamber, staring at the cracked scroll bearing his mother's name.
Kaelith slept nearby, in the guest quarters. Yet her presence lingered, anchoring him more than he understood.
And that's when the Void stirred again — softly, like a question.
If she had returned now, who sent her?
Was it fate?
A design by the Withered Crown?
Or worse—did Kaelith know more than she let on?
Could love be a planted thread?
He shook the thought away.
No. Not Kaelith.
Not her.
But even as he closed his eyes, the whisper from his past self returned:
"Fear the thread you cannot cut."
And in that moment, he knew.
Kaelith was the thread.
The one he could not sever.
The one that would either save him…
Or undo everything he was meant to become.