Kaelith dreamed in colors she didn't recognize.
They weren't part of any spectrum — not Celestial, not mortal. These were shades pulled from a mind unraveling… or from another's past.
At first, it was subtle.
A flicker of golden starlight behind her eyelids. The scent of salt and ash, like the birth of a forbidden truth. Then — the sound of a child laughing.
A boy's voice.
His voice.
But it wasn't from her memories.
Because Kaelith had never known Ashardio as a child.
She jolted awake in her chamber within the ruined hall of Vael'Arion — her breath jagged, her skin tingling with something unearned.
And still… the memory clung.
Not like a dream, but like a bruise. Pressing from beneath.
Kaelith moved to the obsidian mirror etched with timeline sigils, trying to orient herself — but her reflection shimmered, then fractured.
In its place, she saw Ashardio again.
Younger.
In chains.
Surrounded by Celestials with faces veiled in light too bright to name. They circled him like architects around a blueprint that resisted its own creation.
"We bind the Thirteenth."
Her hands trembled.
She had never witnessed that moment.
But she remembered it.
Every breath brought more fragments.
Memories like glass shards pushed through the folds of her mind: • Ashardio reaching for a woman with burning eyes — his mother — as her screams were drowned by celestial silence. • The ritual altar lit by flame that didn't burn but erased. • And Kaelith herself… not watching from the gallery, but standing closer, eyes wide, torn between loyalty and something she would never admit: pity.
Her heart thundered.
Because the Kaelith in that memory — the one watching Ashardio be bound — wasn't this version of her.
It was another. One the Architects had edited out. One who might have cared.
And now, the timeline was bleeding her back in.
She stumbled away from the mirror.
Whispers curled at the edge of her hearing — too many voices speaking in unison. Ashardio's pain, his confusion, his hatred — all crashing into her mind like waves against a wall that no longer stood.
And through it all… one phrase repeated:
"If they take this from you, fight to get it back."
Kaelith fell to her knees.
Not from weakness.
But from a truth she had never let herself consider.
She hadn't been chosen to hunt Ashardio because she was incorruptible.
She'd been chosen because she had already betrayed herself once.
And now — she was remembering.
⸻
Outside, the moons of Vael'Arion trembled in their orbits.
And far above them, in the shattered Observatory of Threads, the Architect whispered to her high seer:
"The fracture is spreading."
To which the seer, without looking up from the cracked mirror of fate, replied:
"She's beginning to sync with him."
The Architect's lips thinned.
"Then destroy the shared frequency."
The seer hesitated. "If we sever it now, it may drive her mad."
"Then let her go mad. But do not let her remember everything. Not yet."
Back in her chamber, Kaelith pressed her forehead to the cold stone floor.
The voice in her mind was no longer hers.
It was Ashardio's.
But not present. Not dominant.
Just echoing.
Just aching.
And in its deepest whisper, one question lingered:
"Why did you let them make me into this?"
She opened her eyes.
And for the first time in a thousand years… she had no answer.