The name lingered like smoke.
Tirameon.
It wasn't just a name. It was a pressure behind her eyes. A splinter in her soul. A silence her heartbeat suddenly avoided — as if some part of her already knew what it meant, and was trying not to remember.
Kaelith stood atop a dune of crystallized ash, staring at the relic still pulsing in her palm. It had gone quiet now, but not dead. No, it listened — like a heart that remembered a different rhythm.
Wind carried no sound in this part of the realm. Only echoes. Whispers trapped in time.
And beneath them all… that single name again:
Tirameon.
She began her descent toward the Forgotten Archives — a place sealed beneath the ruins of the Temple of Mirrors, forbidden to all but the Architect's inner choir.
She had once believed this place lost to the Sundering. Now she suspected it had merely been hidden from her.
The doors to the Archive did not resist her.
They recognized her.
Or rather, they recognized who she once had been.
Torches lit on their own as she entered, burning not with flame but with memory — each fire a vignette of history the gods had chosen to silence.
And in the center of the main hall stood an obelisk of obsidian — identical in hue to the relic Ashardio's mother had left behind. The moment Kaelith neared it, the relic in her hand flared.
And the obelisk opened.
It unfolded like thought, revealing a column of silver strands — threads of erased time, sealed within a cocoon of void-ink.
One strand pulsed.
She touched it.
And the world fell away.
The vision came in pieces.
Disjointed. Fractured. Terrifyingly familiar.
She stood in armor of violet and white, not her current garb — older, ceremonial, edged in gold filigree reserved only for high generals of the Celestial Vanguard.
Ashardio stood at her side.
But it wasn't this Ashardio. His eyes burned blue, not red. His hands were bare. His voice was steady.
They weren't enemies.
They weren't even lovers.
They were allies.
"We can't win without him," Kaelith had said.
"We can't trust him," Ashardio had replied.
But she had insisted. She had believed. Tirameon had promised unity. Diplomacy. Peace through unmaking the tyrants without destroying the entire Celestial Codex.
She had vouched for him.
And when the betrayal came — when the spell-script that unraveled their cause was traced back to Tirameon's hand — it had been Kaelith who bore the shame.
It had been her name in the trial songs.
Her face edited from the rebellion's final records.
She didn't fall from grace.
She was scalpel-removed from it.
"You were erased," a voice whispered in the vision.
Not Ashardio.
Not Tirameon.
"But you were never wrong."
She gasped — and the vision shattered like a mirror dropped into black water.
Kaelith staggered back into herself, heart pounding like war drums. Her skin burned. Not from heat — from remembrance.
Her fingers trembled as she turned to the fire-vault, its light now dimming.
But before she could move, a second strand pulsed. Dim. Hesitant. Younger.
A voice spoke — not aloud, but into the marrow of her being.
"You once told me I was more than prophecy."
Tirameon's voice.
Not cruel. Not kind. Just… regretful.
"I wish I had believed you."
Kaelith fell to her knees.
And for the first time since her soul had been bound to loyalty and rewritten into certainty — she wept not from confusion, or fear.
She wept for herself.
The version of Kaelith that had trusted.
The version that had once fought to change the fate of gods — not as a warrior, not as a weapon.
But as a believer.
And now that version stirred again.
High above the ruin-temples, the constellations shifted.
The celestial map — rewritten during the rebellion to remove Kaelith's constellation entirely — trembled.
A single star blinked back into existence.
Not from the Architect's command.
But from memory.