The Temple of Forgotten Threads pulsed with ancient sorrow.
Stone columns whispered with memories once severed from history, and beneath the floor—woven of cracked mirrors and dusted star-blood—Kaelith knelt, breath sharp, throat burning from her scream. But she did not scream out of fear.
She screamed because she remembered.
The relic she had touched in the temple's heart had undone seals etched into her soul long before she bore a name. Fragments of Tirameon's truth. Her own hands, years ago, guiding rebellion. Her voice swearing allegiance not to the Codex… but to something far more dangerous: the possibility of unmaking it.
And now… the others had come.
The first to step through the broken gate was Sevrion, once her teacher, now wrapped in silence like armor. His eyes glowed with Codex light, but there was a tremble in his steps. Behind him came Maera, whose blade had never drawn innocent blood—until the Architects rewrote her definition of "innocence." And then came the others, too many to count, all cloaked in obedience.
Ascendants.
Once her kin.
Now her tribunal.
Kaelith stood slowly, one hand pressed against the cold wall of the temple as if to steady her unraveling fate. The threads on the floor pulsed with memory—her own footsteps etched across a dozen timelines, none of which the Codex acknowledged. And above them all, the fractured sky shifted. Watching. Judging.
Sevrion stepped forward, his voice the sharp chime of finality.
"You've broken seals meant never to be touched. You've entered the forbidden vaults. You've communed with Tirameon's ghost. Kaelith… do you deny these truths?"
Her voice came low, yet clear. "I don't deny what I've remembered. What I do deny is the lie you still follow."
Maera flinched. Another stepped back. Sevrion's jaw tightened.
"This place… it was sealed for a reason."
"And you never questioned why," Kaelith answered. Her fingertips lit with residual memory-light as the relic behind her pulsed once more, showing flickers of a child torn from prophecy, a woman made into a vessel, and a rebellion that had always been prewritten to fail.
"This temple holds the first thread ever cut by the Architects," she continued, turning to face them fully. "A truth they couldn't erase, so they buried it in this oubliette of time. But the thread still sings."
The wind howled.
And from the temple's inner sanctum, a whisper arose—not hers, not theirs. A voice deeper, older.
"She remembers."
A tremor passed through the Ascendants. Some tried to advance.
The temple recoiled.
Reality split at the seams. Memories spilled across the chamber—visions of Celestials tortured into obedience, of timelines sacrificed to preserve a single narrative. A past not rewritten, but bleached, so only the Architects' version could remain.
Kaelith stood in the center of it all.
"I won't kneel."
Sevrion hesitated.
"Then you will fall."
But before his blade could rise, something interrupted. A force, distant yet intimate. A tether unraveling.
Ashardio.
His presence thundered across the broken ley-lines, his bond with Kaelith reigniting through the thread of chaos itself. Not as a savior. But as an unbound force of divergence. The Codex flared—its seals shivering.
Maera gasped. "He's broken his path."
"No," Kaelith whispered. "He's writing one."
The Temple's walls trembled. The relic behind Kaelith bloomed open, no longer just a memory-vessel—but a key. A path not yet walked.
The Ascendants faltered. Sevrion's blade cracked with uncertainty.
Kaelith stepped forward, cloak rising with wind pulled from lost timelines.
"If you still follow the Codex, then know this—its grip is weakening. And soon, we won't be fighting to change fate. We'll be fighting over who gets to shape it."
Behind her, the relic spun.
And from within its core, a symbol emerged—the broken sigil of Tirameon, overlaid with something else: a rune never recorded in the Codex.
Ashardio's mark.
Kaelith reached for it.
The Temple ignited.
And everything the Architects feared began to move.