The land beyond the Vale had no path.
No roots.
No birdsong.
Only silence—so complete it made sound feel like a memory.
The Trifold Flame walked without speaking.
Each step was heavy.
As if the ground itself resisted them.
The farther they went, the more the threads around them dimmed—gold turning to gray, gray thinning into black wisps that barely held shape.
Only Oryn's flame still flickered strong.
But it no longer warmed him.
It whispered.
The Mouth of the Threadgrave
By the third day, the trees ended.
Stone began.
Not walls or mountains—but pillars.
Ancient, cracked, reaching like dead fingers into an ash-colored sky.
In their center: an open mouth of stairs, spiraling into shadow.
Above it, an inscription in a language that wrote itself as they read:
"Here lie the threads that defied the story."
"Here lie the names that were never given."
"Here begins the place that does not end."
Thera stepped forward first.
Lira followed.
Oryn paused.
And the voice came again, clearer now.
"Oryn was never your name."
"Say what you were before."
He shook his head.
And descended.
The Weight Below
The Threadgrave was not death.
It was memory… forgotten wrong.
The walls wept with ink.
Not water.
Ink filled with broken glyphs—fractured letters, symbols that once held power, now crumbling.
The deeper they went, the more the flame dimmed.
Even Thera's breath began to slow.
Only Oryn's pace remained steady.
Unshaken.
Almost drawn.
At one landing, Lira grabbed his arm.
"Where are you going?"
He turned—and for the first time, his eyes held a light not entirely his.
"I think… I'm going home."
The First Mirror
They found the first mirror on the seventh level.
But it didn't reflect.
It remembered.
Thera stepped before it—and saw herself as a child again, trembling before her first flame.
Lira stepped forward—and saw a version of herself who had never spoken at all.
When Oryn stood before it… the mirror cracked.
And from it stepped a figure.
His height. His face.
But his eyes were threadless.
And it spoke first.
"You left me."
Oryn didn't move.
"You were never real."
"I was more real than the name you stole."
"You left me in silence, and now I am the silence."
The others drew their flames.
Oryn raised a hand.
"Let him speak."
The Other Oryn
The double circled him.
Not threatening.
Curious.
"When you called yourself Oryn," it said, "you buried me."
"But I remember our true name."
"Do you want it?"
Oryn hesitated.
And for the first time, the whispering thread that had followed him unraveled—stretching between the mirror and his chest like a line drawn between two truths.
"Say it," he whispered.
"Let me know what I was."
The double leaned close.
And breathed a single word:
"Arren."
Oryn staggered.
The name hit like memory, like a fall, like a door cracking open.
He remembered.
The days before the Circle.
Before his voice.
Before his fire.
A child named Arren, lost in the Graywind Slums.
No story.
No home.
Only hunger and watching.
He dropped to his knees.
Not in defeat.
But in recognition.
Thera's Touch
Thera knelt beside him.
"Does it change who you are?"
He shook his head.
"It explains who I was."
"But now I get to choose."
He stood.
Looked at the mirror.
At the version of himself that never got chosen.
"You were always part of me."
"But you don't own the future."
The mirror fractured—
Not shattered.
Healed.
And the thread between them turned soft.
Gold at the edges.
It curled into Oryn's palm.
Waiting.
Lira's Warning
Lira looked ahead.
The spiral still went down.
And now she could hear something below.
Not voices.
Not footsteps.
Breathing.
"Something waits."
"And now it knows we're coming."
The envoy's voice echoed in memory:
"You woke healing—and woke the consequence, too."