The air beneath Vael'Arion had no scent.
No weight.
No memory.
It was the kind of silence that only the gods dared bury — the kind that screamed if you listened too long.
Kaelith descended alone, her boots echoing softly against the spiral obsidian steps that led to the Hollow Spire's root. The torchlight didn't follow her. It bent away, as if the very structure refused to witness what waited below.
Each step bled with the weight of memory that was no longer foreign.
Each breath carried remnants of a lullaby she never learned — a melody sung by a woman she never met, and yet whose sorrow pulsed like a second heartbeat in her bones.
She knew the relic was real now.
She didn't know how.
She just knew.
The chamber greeted her like an open wound — black stone walls veined with dormant starlight, sigils faded by time or deliberate erasure. The altar at its center was no longer whole. Something had cracked it from within, as if the truth had once tried to escape and failed.
There it rested.
Not in a display.
Not in containment.
Just… waiting.
A simple circlet of woven star-iron and memory-ash — a relic of the First Era, untouched since the Fall of the Thirteenth. It looked impossibly delicate. Yet Kaelith knew the stories whispered that it had once resisted the will of a dozen Celestials.
She didn't touch it.
Not yet.
This is her voice, something in her mind whispered.
This is what they feared most — not the son, but the mother who refused to forget.
Kaelith stepped closer, and the air changed.
Not in temperature.
In presence.
A hum stirred through the chamber. Ancient. Feminine. Wounded.
And then—
"Child of ruin… why do you wear my son's pain like a mantle?"
Kaelith froze.
The voice hadn't come from the relic.
It had come from within her.
And with it — a memory so old it bled silver.
She was no longer in the chamber.
She stood in a field of dead light.
The stars above were frozen mid-collapse.
Before her: a woman cloaked in constellations — not made of them, not shaped by them, but older than their first spark. Her face was veiled, yet somehow too clear.
Ashardio's mother.
But not as legend had recorded her.
Not mad.
Not broken.
Not silenced.
Just furious.
"They turned him into a prophecy to protect their lie. And you… you helped hold the blade."
Kaelith tried to speak — to deny it. But her voice was not permitted in this place.
The woman reached out. Not to touch Kaelith. But to place something into her hand.
It was the circlet — but alive, flickering with fragments of grief, defiance, and a single moment of love so powerful it could still wound the divine.
"Wear this," the mother said. "And remember who you were before obedience."
Kaelith blinked—
—and she was back in the chamber.
Sweat beaded her brow. Blood ran from her nose. Her hands trembled.
The circlet no longer rested on the altar.
It was already in her grip.
And for a moment too brief to measure — she remembered Ashardio's first scream.
Not his war cry.
His birth.
Above, far in the towers of Vael'Arion, alarms whispered. Not sounded — whispered.
A shift had occurred.
An artifact had bonded.
A memory had been stolen back.
The Architect narrowed her eyes.
"The mother's voice has returned to her," she said, voice like a cracked bell.
To which the high seer replied, hands trembling against the fatescroll:
"And the relic has recognized her soul."
The Architect stood.
"Then seal the Hollow Spire. Lock time if you must. She cannot be allowed to wear all of it."
The seer hesitated. "But it's already begun. She's hearing everything now. Even the parts she shouldn't survive."
The Architect's eyes glowed with ancient fury.
"Then make her forget. Or pray that she does not forgive him."
Back in the chamber, Kaelith whispered one word — not aloud, but in thought, deep and buried.
"Mother?"
And in response, a thousand fractured stars wept in silence.
Because she had remembered something the gods had tried to erase.
Not who Ashardio was.
But who she could have been — if she had loved him first.