Ashardio awoke without opening his eyes.
Not in a bed, not in a place, but in a sensation — a silent scream blooming across time. Something had shifted. Not loudly. Not with fire or force. But like a breath inhaled by a dead god.
Tirameon had spoken.
Ashardio felt it like an incision along the side of his mind — a phantom cut reopening after aeons of being sealed in ritual silence.
He sat up.
The glyphs across his arms flickered in pain. Not his own — Tirameon's. That soul, fragmented and interred in the Tower of Sorrow, was never meant to echo again. Yet now, Kaelith had gone to him. Had spoken with what remained. Had remembered what the Architects had meticulously rewritten.
Ashardio stood, his bare feet pressing into the ash-laced soil of the hollowed grove where he had hidden for three days. He looked at the sky.
It bled sideways again.
The world remembered the wound.
And so did he.
⸻
He began walking. Not with direction. But with pull.
The memory-scars called to him — remnants of history that had been sutured into silence by the Codex. They lived in forgotten places: in the rings of trees older than the current sun, in the grooves of ruined temples, in the lullabies of dying stars.
He touched the bark of a shattered tree, and it flinched.
His presence triggered an echo:
"He betrayed us all."
Ashardio stepped into it — not just into the memory, but into the place where the first fracture had been sewn.
⸻
He found himself in a corridor of lightless mirrors.
Not unlike the ones Kaelith had passed through, but older. Less reflective. These mirrors didn't show the past. They remembered the intent behind it.
Ashardio passed one pane, and his reflection didn't follow.
Instead, it watched.
He turned to face it. The reflection looked like him — younger, less scarred, without the glyphs or the stitches. But his eyes… his eyes were bleeding ink.
"You weren't supposed to survive her choice," the reflection said. "Do you remember why you did?"
Ashardio touched the glass.
And suddenly—
The betrayal came back.
⸻
Not the rebellion — no, that was a byproduct.
The first betrayal. The one no one spoke of. The one Kaelith herself had forgotten.
It wasn't that Tirameon had turned against the gods.
It was that he had once joined them.
Ashardio remembered now: it was Tirameon who had given the Architects the initial schema of their plan to rewrite Celestial memory. He had come to them under the guise of surrender… and revealed every hidden path the rebels had built.
He had knelt at the feet of the divine, wearing Ashardio's blood on his palms, and whispered:
"I'll help you rewrite her. Just leave him to rot."
Ashardio staggered back from the mirror.
He breathed like a man drowning in truth.
Tirameon hadn't just broken.
He had been the first weapon.
The mirrors shattered, unable to hold the weight of that memory anymore.
Ashardio stood among the shards, trembling with ancient fury.
"Kaelith," he muttered. "What has he shown you?"
Because if she now carried even a fraction of Tirameon's story, it meant the Architects were no longer in full control.
And neither was he.
⸻
Later, beneath a broken sky, Ashardio walked alone into a graveyard of forgotten timelines — a place where rejected versions of events curled like fossils in the dirt.
He found one memory-scar still flickering, fragile but alive. A scene of Kaelith weeping in secret, holding a blade to her own chest, whispering:
"If I forget him, maybe I'll stop loving him."
He watched in silence.
Not from cruelty.
But from a deeper pain.
Because the memory wasn't just Kaelith's.
It was his too.
She had loved Tirameon once. And tried to erase that truth.
Ashardio clenched his fists.
Not out of jealousy.
But because now, the soul she'd tried to forget had spoken again — and might twist her back into something dangerous.
"You lied to her once, Tirameon," he whispered to the void. "Try it again… and I will remind the gods what I truly am."