The chamber of audience within Vahryn had once been a war room. Its walls, once etched with battle maps and siege runes, now shimmered with flowing script living history inscribed in spiraling silver lines, adapting with every change in the Realms.
But as the doors opened, none of that mattered.
Because the girl who stepped through was an impossibility.
She wore no crown, no blade, no sigils. Her clothes were of no known culture woven with threads that shimmered in and out of visibility, laced with symbols from dreams never dreamt. She moved not like a warrior nor a priestess, but like someone displaced dragged by fate into a world that had no place for her.
Her eyes, though…
Zeirion met them and staggered inwardly.
They were his.
Not metaphorically. Not spiritually.
They were his eyes shaped by his blood, sharpened by the same burdens.
He rose from the throne, and all the air left the chamber.
Aralya stood by his side, still and regal, but her aura tensed like the string of a warbow.
The girl bowed. Not low, not submissively but as one who understood respect, not hierarchy.
"I am Elyra," she said, "of the Last Threaded Dawn. A world that once lived… until it was unmade when you shattered the Spiral."
Zeirion descended the steps. "You claim to be of my blood."
"I am. But not from your past. I am from a version of your future that was never allowed to exist."
Silence.
Even the chamber's living walls stilled.
Elyra continued. "When the Spiral broke, all forbidden timelines collapsed. Echoes, shards, and ghosts were swept into the Abyss Between Threads. Most perished. Some those who bore strong enough causality survived. I did. I remember my death."
She looked at Aralya.
"I remember yours, too."
Aralya's expression didn't flicker. "Speak your warning."
"The Spiral's destruction freed the Realms. But it also loosened the last gate. Behind it sleeps the one thing even the Spiral feared. The Unborn Sovereign. He is not your opposite. He is not even your reflection. He is your absence."
Zeirion's voice was quiet steel. "I do not fear empty thrones."
"This is not a throne," Elyra said. "It's a womb for negation. He does not conquer. He erases. Where you rule with might, and where you now seek balance he dreams of a world where even the concept of power never existed."
Aralya spoke, her voice like moonlight turned sharp.
"And how do we find what was never born?"
"You don't," Elyra said. "He finds you. And he's already waking."
She stepped forward and opened her hand.
A fragment floated between her fingers: black as sorrow, cold as silence.
Zeirion's eyes narrowed.
"The Spiral?" he whispered.
"No," Elyra replied. "This is from a world he erased. A timeline that never even formed. And it's bleeding through. Already, the Realms are fraying again not from war, but from forgetting."
She looked up, pleading now.
"You need me. Not just because I'm your descendant. But because I remember what the worlds are trying to forget."
Zeirion looked to Aralya.
She nodded slowly. "The Spiral gave us balance. But it may also have unsealed a wound older than fate."
Zeirion turned back to Elyra.
"Then stay, Pilgrim of Forgotten Time. You are now of this Realm. And if the Unborn Sovereign truly rises…"
His hand closed around the shard.
"…he will learn that oblivion has no dominion over those who remember who they are."