Before the wars.
Before the exile.
Before the Void even whispered his name.
There was only a boy… and a girl… chasing light between ruins older than memory.
Ashardio was ten the first time Kaelith punched him.
He remembered it vividly — the sting across his jaw, the way he'd gasped in more surprise than pain, and her furious scowl as she hovered over him, hair a mess of wind and dirt.
"You don't get to cry alone," she'd said, fists clenched.
His mother had vanished a week prior. The house had fallen quiet. The halls echoed like tombs. And Ashardio, prideful even then, had locked himself in a shattered observatory and pretended the stars were more important than grief.
Until Kaelith kicked down the door.
He didn't cry after the punch. Not right away.
But later, when she brought him a slice of honeyfruit cake stolen from the priest's table, and they sat on the broken balcony beneath a sky full of whispering constellations — he broke.
Quietly.
Not sobbing. Just… leaking.
And she didn't say a word.
Just leaned her head against his shoulder.
Even then, she felt older than her age. Not in body, but in knowing. Like the world had already shown her the shape of loss. And she'd accepted it, not with surrender, but with steel.
⸻
There were games, too.
In the gardens of the Loomspire's western edge, where golden reeds grew in spirals and elemental wisps flitted between stalks, they'd play Threads of War — pretending to be kings and queens, commanding legions of imaginary soldiers.
Ashardio was always the strategist, the planner.
Kaelith, the storm.
She'd leap from boulders with a stick-sword, yelling like thunder incarnate, landing beside him with laughter that startled birds into flight.
He always let her win.
Except once.
When she fumbled, and he pinned her hand with his.
She'd stared at him, breathing hard — eyes wide with something neither of them understood.
And just before she twisted away, she said:
"If I ever die, you have to remember me. Even if the stars fall. Even if you fall."
He'd laughed nervously then. "You're not dying, Kael."
But her face stayed serious.
"Promise me."
He did.
He never broke it.
⸻
That same summer, they found the Veilstone Pool — a mirror of still water hidden behind one of the older crypt gardens.
The elders said it was cursed. That it reflected not just the face, but the truth of one's soul.
Naturally, they went.
Standing beside each other, they stared into it.
Ashardio saw light — silver and soft — coiling around his form like unborn stars.
Kaelith?
He never forgot what she saw.
Her eyes had widened, face draining of color.
When he asked, she didn't answer. Just ran.
He caught up to her hours later, sitting beneath the Tower Elm, her face blank.
"It showed me a version of me I don't want to be," she'd whispered. "Someone who forgets. Someone who lies."
He'd wrapped his arms around her.
Neither of them knew, then, what futures would be etched in stone and flame.
But even that day, something old stirred between them — not love, not yet.
But gravity.
The kind that pulls suns apart and remakes them into new stars.
⸻
Now, in the present, Ashardio stood alone beneath that same elm tree — older, heavier, his hands stained with forgotten histories and near-forbidden power.
Kaelith was nearby, asleep.
But as he pressed his hand against the bark of their childhood refuge, he whispered into the wind:
"I didn't forget. I never did."
What haunted him wasn't the past they shared.
It was what came next.
Because the girl he remembered…
Was becoming someone else.
And his heart, bound to her, would follow —
Even if it meant falling into shadow once more.