The path to the Temple of Forgotten Threads was not carved into the world—it was woven into its bones.
Kaelith moved through the Vale of Dimming Echoes, her footsteps muffled by the heavy stillness that cloaked the land. Trees grew sideways, defying gravity, their leaves whispering names in dialects no longer spoken. Beneath her boots, the earth pulsed faintly, like a dying heart. The deeper she went, the thinner the veil between thought and memory became. She began to hear voices—her own, Ashardio's, and those long silenced. Some begged to be remembered. Others pleaded to be forgotten.
And above it all, the Ascendants loomed like distant thunderclouds—growing closer.
The Temple was hidden within a wound in the world, its entrance veiled behind a cascade of suspended time. A waterfall of reversed moments flowed upward across jagged stone, glistening with past light. As Kaelith reached out, her fingers shimmered, briefly turning translucent—her form flickering between now and never.
She stepped through.
Inside, the Temple was endless. Pillars rose like threads of thought, connecting nothing to everything. Murals shifted on the walls, painted with stolen memories—moments torn from the dying, the forgotten, the rewritten. Some showed her as a hero. Others, as the villain who undid fate. None were entirely true. And all of them were fading.
At the heart of the Temple stood the Loom—a massive construct of entangled memory-threads, pulsating with light and shadow. Each strand was a life, a choice, a moment. The Loom did not judge. It remembered.
But it was unraveling.
Kaelith approached the Loom with reverence and dread. Her hands trembled as she pulled from within her cloak a silver locket—broken, blackened by ash, and impossibly heavy for its size. Inside it was a piece of Ashardio's soul. Not his power. Not his voice. Just… a moment. A memory.
The way he once said her name.
She reached into the Loom.
Pain lanced through her arm like fire in reverse, searing her nerves into cold steel. The Loom resisted, rejecting the locket as a corrupted fragment. Her memories weren't simply fading—they were being targeted.
The Ascendants were already inside the weave.
Gritting her teeth, Kaelith pushed harder, invoking the forbidden rite her mother once whispered in a dying breath: "To keep truth, let blood remember." She bit her tongue until iron filled her mouth and marked the thread with a line of crimson.
The Loom paused.
And then, it accepted.
The memory locked into place—a fragile sanctuary hidden in the deepest strand, beyond the reach of cosmic cleansing.
But Kaelith had not gone unnoticed.
A cold wind slithered through the chamber.
From the mirrored wall stepped a figure wrapped in robes of ever-shifting constellations. Lyraeth. The Ascendant. She did not raise a blade, nor summon light. She only looked at Kaelith—and in her gaze was sorrow.
"You think this changes your fate?" Lyraeth's voice was barely a breath. "Memories are illusions. They will betray you."
Kaelith turned, eyes alight with fire. "Then let me be betrayed by my truth—not your obedience."
They stared at each other, two echoes of opposing design.
Lyraeth did not strike.
She faded.
For now.
But as Kaelith fell to her knees beside the Loom, tears mixing with the dust of forgotten names, she knew time was running out. The Temple had granted her one thread, one tether to the truth of Ashardio.
But to protect it, she would have to defy the Ascendants again.
And next time, they would not arrive with hesitation.
They would arrive to erase.