Ashardio stood upon the edge of the Obsidian Vale, where once a city of whispers had thrived — now reduced to glassed ruin, its memories scorched into the soil. The wind carried remnants of lost voices, threads of time unraveling like old silk. The sky above churned with unnatural brilliance, a false dawn heralding not salvation, but the arrival of judgment.
The Ascendants had awakened.
And they were coming.
Ashardio could feel their presence pressing against the boundaries of reality. Not yet near, but not far enough. Each moment bled faster into the next, like sand through a broken hourglass. He clenched his fists, the glyphs on his skin searing with old defiance. His scars—etched not by blades, but by erased truths—began to thrum, as though memory itself was warning him.
He had faced many horrors. Broken gods. Shattered timelines. Betrayers disguised as saviors. But the Ascendants were different.
They were purity weaponized.
And they remembered nothing but the Architects' law.
Ashardio's breath slowed as he approached the altar-stone of the Last Witness, buried beneath a half-collapsed monument. He pressed a bloodied palm to its surface, unlocking a sliver of lost history — an image burned into the stone's memory: Kaelith, bathed in moonlight, surrounded by spectral chains, crying out a name the stone could no longer recall.
His name.
That past was fading. He was being forgotten.
And that, he feared, was the Ascendants' true purpose — not destruction, but erasure. Not vengeance, but sterilization.
⸻
Elsewhere, Kaelith wandered the mirror-fields of Na'Dral, the forbidden corridor of fractured timelines, chasing truths long denied her. Every reflection showed a different version of her: a rebel, a martyr, a murderer. The farther she went, the less certain she became of who she truly was.
But the sky was changing.
She looked up, and for a heartbeat, time stuttered.
The firmament cracked open like glass, and starlight bled through. Not the soft silver of guidance, but the surgical glow of judgment. Three figures stepped through the breach — far above, yet near enough to make the air freeze in her lungs.
Ascendants.
They didn't speak. They didn't threaten. They simply… watched.
And it was worse than any warning.
Lyraeth stood among them, her veil like liquid frost, her eyes scanning the layers of Kaelith's timeline. Her voice, when it came, was not a sound, but a disruption.
"Deviation. Fragment. Redaction required."
Kaelith staggered back, the weight of cosmic accusation bearing down on her soul. Her blade, ancient and unstable, flickered in her hand. Not because she feared death.
But because the Ascendants didn't kill.
They unmade.
Her memories with Ashardio—scars, kisses, promises whispered through bleeding walls—trembled in her mind. If the Ascendants succeeded, she would lose more than her life.
She would lose the reason she fought.
Kaelith fell to her knees, not in surrender, but in clarity.
"I must remember him," she whispered to herself. "Or they win."
⸻
Far away, across the collapsing strands of fate, Ashardio carved a symbol into the earth — not of defiance, but of remembrance. A sigil that could anchor Kaelith's name, her soul, her truth into what remained of time.
Because the Ascendants were coming.
And if they reached her first, she would forget the fire.
And only the cold would remain.