Ashardio's breath stilled the moment the bond was made.
He stood in a ruin of twilight — a place between pulse and prophecy, between one heartbeat and the next. To the outside world, he hadn't moved. But within him, something ancient — something entombed — shattered like a mirror that had forgotten it was glass.
The relic had chosen.
And worse… it had remembered.
His hand clenched as though grasping a blade, but there was no weapon.
Only a tremor in the fabric of his soul, like some invisible chord had been plucked — not by him, but by Kaelith.
"So… she wears it," he whispered, eyes closed, voice heavy with knowing.
"Then the veil must fall."
And with that, he allowed the lock to break.
Not the one in the world.
The one within himself — forged by his own mother to protect what even he was never meant to recall.
Pain came first.
Not the pain of the body — but of remembrance.
A sharp, guttural wound that split his consciousness and dragged him back into a moment he had sealed beneath layers of time and untruth.
He saw it again:
The Tower of Fire-Song.
The eve of the first celestial rebellion.
And the betrayer with his name on her tongue.
"Don't do this," his mother had pleaded, her fingers still smoldering with divine heat as she held the dying flame of another Celestial. "They will unmake you."
He had been younger then. Less rage. More mercy. But no less dangerous.
"They've already tried," he had said coldly. "I'm simply showing them how to fail better."
But he hadn't said it to her.
He'd said it to the one standing behind her — the first to bend the knee, the first to lie.
A Celestial who had worn friendship like armor.
A Celestial he had once called brother.
"Tirameon," Ashardio whispered now, the name like ash on his tongue. "You were the first betrayal. And you still breathe."
The memory deepened.
Sank.
Opened.
Ashardio remembered the binding circle — the sigils designed to fracture prophecy, carved into the walls by his own hand. He remembered the chains. The flame. The screams of the innocent as the Architects turned on their own.
And he remembered his mother — not as legend told her, but as she truly was:
A keeper of forbidden futures.
A weaver of lost truths.
And the only one who had ever told him no and meant it.
"You were not meant to be a god," she had once told him, brushing fire from his brow like a lullaby.
"You were meant to be free."
But even freedom had a price.
And he had paid it in memory.
Back in the now — if such a concept still held meaning — Ashardio opened his eyes.
They no longer burned red.
They shimmered with fragments of the broken seal, pale silver and burning black.
His voice was quieter now, but it rang with finality:
"She knows."
He didn't mean Kaelith.
He meant his mother.
The relic's bond had stirred her voice from beyond time — and through Kaelith, she was speaking again.
He staggered once, not from weakness but from volume.
Her presence echoed like a storm in his ribcage.
Not angry.
Not proud.
Just aware.
"Why now?" he asked aloud, unsure if he meant it for the gods, the stars, or her.
The answer came not in words, but in a feeling:
Because she remembers what you forgot.
In the distant reaches of the fractured sky-temples, the Veil-Wardens stirred.
Something had pierced the realms between fate and rebellion.
Something born from memory.
Something waking.
And in the deepest corner of Ashardio's mind, a second seal pulsed — untouched, but now weakened by the awakening.
He would remember the rest soon.
The true betrayal.
Not Tirameon's blade.
But his own mercy.
Kaelith stirred far below, her breath syncing unknowingly with Ashardio's. She felt a new shiver down her spine — not hers, not fear.
But the echo of a choice she had once made, in a time rewritten so violently the stars themselves forgot it happened.
A name came to her lips.
One she hadn't spoken since before she was Kaelith.
"Tirameon…"
The relic in her palm pulsed once.
And in the ruins of the rebellion's first bloodbath, a forgotten prophecy whispered its first line once more.
"The first betrayal was not a fall… but a promise broken between two who once loved like fire."