Kaelith moved like a wraith through the ruins of Drah'zel, her mind a storm of fragmented thoughts and half-remembered fears. The map's absence gnawed at her, a phantom limb in a body already hollowed by secrets. The city seemed alive, breathing in the gaps between moments, its silence humming with latent power.
She paused before a pool of still water — black as the void between stars — where the fractured sky bled its dying light. Her reflection shimmered, but beneath it, something else stirred: an image twisted and fleeting, like a warning half-glimpsed before sleep.
A whisper slipped through the air, a voice both foreign and achingly familiar:
"Remember not to trust what forgets you."
The words struck deeper than any blade, unspooling threads of doubt and regret. Kaelith clenched her fists, the memory of Tirameon's betrayal burning beneath her skin, a wound that refused to heal.
Below the surface of the world, Ashardio pressed onward, the crypt's shadows folding around him like a shroud. The air was thick with the scent of dust and sorrow — echoes of lives erased, promises shattered in the dark.
He reached a chamber veined with pulsating glyphs, a silent tomb of memory where time bled in slow waves. The walls whispered secrets, voices threading together in a tapestry of dread and longing.
A figure emerged from the darkness — not Tirameon, but something older, colder. Its eyes gleamed with cruel amusement, lips curling into a smile that promised ruin.
"You seek the final fracture," it said, voice like ice cracking on a frozen lake. "But some truths are meant to remain broken."
Ashardio met the gaze without flinching, the glyphs along his arms flaring as if in defiance. "Then I will be the one to piece them together — even if the world must shatter to do it."
The chamber trembled. Shadows writhed. The past was waking.
Outside, the bleeding sky deepened into twilight, and the fragile line between memory and oblivion blurred once more — a world poised on the edge of reckoning, where every secret was a fracture waiting to be born.