Veltharion, City of Threads
Third Epoch — 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘋𝘢𝘺𝘴
It began with a scream that wasn't anyone's.
No mouth made it. No lungs pushed it. But every soul in the city felt it tear through their memory like a shard of cursed glass.
A merchant in the lower stalls stopped mid-sale and dropped a vial of sleeproot.
A student at the Arcanum's eastern tower stopped writing mid-symbol. Her quill continued on its own, carving a name into her desk: Zara Now.
A child blinked, looked at his mother—and saw her holding a knife that didn't exist yet.
And far below, in the quarantine zone that no one remembered walling off, a mirror cracked from the inside out.
---
Zara woke with blood on her hands.
Not real blood.
The memory of blood.
She sat upright in the field tent, gasping. Her blade lay beside her, unsheathed. Rahul was muttering to himself again. And Charles—still unconscious, still pale, still haunted by the sigil that had not chosen him—was beginning to stir.
Zara wiped her palms on her tunic. They still stung. As if they'd held something that refused to be forgotten.
"Zara Now," someone whispered.
She spun.
No one stood near.
Yet the sound had come from behind her left eye.
---
The city was fracturing again.
But not in stone. Not in logic.
In consequence.
All across Veltharion, people saw themselves doing things they had never done. Or hadn't yet. Or never would.
A baker ran from her shop, swearing she'd watched herself poison a loaf of bread.
A Captain of the Outer Guard arrested his own shadow.
A royal scribe tore out his own tongue before it could confess a crime that hadn't yet occurred.
This wasn't illusion. It wasn't prophecy.
It was narrative bleed.
Mirror-magic, once a tool for surveillance and reflection, was faltering. The enchanted panes across the city were no longer bound to the present.
They showed... versions.
Echoes of things that had almost happened.
And in the Council Tower of the High Mages, three words reappeared on every blank mirror-glass screen:
"THE HOLLOW EYE AWAITS."
---
The Eye of Veltharion — the mage council's surveillance lens — blinked.
It had never done that before.
And when it reopened, a fourth ring of symbols had appeared.
Unknown. Undecipherable.
Even the Visioneers began to panic.
---
Visioneers — mages gifted with the Aspect of Forescript, the rarest of the Twelve Disciplines — could see fragments of potential stories before they occurred.
But this was different.
They weren't reading futures anymore.
They were being read by them.
One Visioneer, Lethan Var, burst into flames mid-vision. His final words were:
"I saw Zara… I saw her smile when she—"
He didn't finish.
Only his scream finished.
---
Back in the makeshift tent, Charles awoke.
But something was wrong.
Zara saw it in his eyes before he moved. Not the pain. Not the confusion.
The stillness.
Charles never woke still.
His fingers flexed as if remembering something they hadn't touched in years. When he sat up, the firelight around him dimmed—as if shrinking back.
"Where… are we?" he asked.
But Zara didn't answer.
Because as he leaned forward, his tunic slipped open.
The sigil was there.
Burned into his chest.
The Hollow Eye.
Not ink.
Not chosen.
Carved. From the inside.
And it was open.
---
"Charles," Zara said slowly, hand drifting to her sword. "You didn't choose that mark."
"I know," he whispered.
"It chose me."
Zara didn't draw her sword.
But her hand didn't leave the hilt either.
"Charles," she said again, quieter this time, "what do you remember?"
Charles blinked once. Then again. His mouth opened, closed.
"Not enough," he finally said. "And far too much."
Beside him, Rahul stirred. He was sketching in his sleep again. Fingers moving like they were following someone else's memory. The charcoal scratched violently now—tearing not just through paper, but across layers of reality.
Zara glanced at the drawing.
It was a throne.
Empty.
No.
Half-empty.
As if the figure sitting in it had just stepped out… or was still arriving.
Then Rahul's eyes snapped open.
"It's begun," he said hoarsely.
---
Above the city, a great bell tolled.
But no tower moved.
Because there was no tower.
The sound came from the sky itself.
Veltharion's moons—three pale crescents—trembled and aligned.
For the first time in a century, the sky over the city bent.
Not cracked. Not glowed. Bent—as though the weight of another world had leaned against the veil between timelines.
The High Mages screamed.
Half of them vanished.
The rest?
They began writing their names backward on every surface they could find.
It was the only thing that could stop them from forgetting who they were in timelines that were no longer stable.
---
Rahul stood, shakily.
"There are more than twelve Aspects," he said suddenly. "We were lied to."
Zara turned. "What?"
"The Council," he continued, trembling, "they've always said there were twelve primary magic disciplines. But there's a thirteenth. Buried. Suppressed."
He looked at Charles, whose Hollow Eye burned faintly on his chest like a sun that had learned to blink.
"The Hollow Eye is not a sigil," Rahul whispered.
"It's a countermeasure."
---
Zara staggered back, her heartbeat quickening.
Everything in her screamed to unsheathe her blade. But something older—a training no one had taught her, only etched into her reflex—told her:
Observe.
Don't interrupt the remembering.
---
Charles slowly rose.
The sigil pulsed once.
And in that pulse, the tent walls melted into memory.
---
They were standing in the ruins again.
But not their ruins.
Veltharion lay before them — unbuilt.
Streets unpaved. Towers as bones, half-summoned. Trees that shimmered with future leaves. Time itself staggered in frames—like a reel unspooling backwards.
And at the center of it all, a hole in the world.
A circular platform carved of obsidian and memory, cracked open like a wound in space.
Inside it, suspended mid-air, beating slowly—was a heart.
A heart with no body.
But alive.
Still pumping.
Still watching.
---
The Dead Mage's Heart.
---
Zara fell to one knee.
Rahul gasped.
Charles stepped forward—like a man who had seen this before in his dreams and never woken up properly since.
The heart pulsed once.
And when it did, the wind died.
A voice echoed—not from it, but through it. Woven from thousands of syllables in dozens of forgotten dialects. It didn't speak like a god or a ghost.
It spoke like a memory that had survived too long.
"You have come too soon."
Charles's voice shook. "What are you?"
The heart pulsed again. The glyphs carved into the edge of the platform shimmered with time-fire.
Then, the answer came:
"I am what remains. The heart of the one who knew the first name of Time."
Rahul stumbled. "That's not possible."
The Heart ignored him.
"I have waited three thousand years for a lie to become true."
"And now, the Unwritten Sigil has returned."
---
All three froze.
Zara stood up. "Unwritten... what?"
The Heart turned its next pulse toward Charles.
"Heir of the Unwritten Sigil."
"Bearer of the memory that was never supposed to survive."
---
Charles shook his head. "No. No, I—"
The Heart beat again.
And this time, it bled.
Ink.
Only ink.
Black lines poured from its lower valves, curling mid-air into language no tongue could speak—glyphs that twisted meaning, not sound.
Zara felt her nose start to bleed.
Rahul collapsed, clutching his head.
Charles stepped forward.
"What does it want?"
The answer did not come in words.
It came in a vision.
---
Zara stood on a battlefield of glass.
Around her, thousands dead.
Above her, a mirror sky cracked into continents.
And before her—
Charles.
On his knees.
Smiling.
As she drove her blade into his heart.
The world did not cry out.
It cheered.
---
She staggered.
The vision vanished.
The heart pulsed again.
This time, toward her.
"You survived," it said.
"But you left someone behind."
---
Zara turned to Charles.
His eyes were still open.
Still burning.
But no longer afraid.
The moons had frozen above the skyline. Not set. Not moved. Just hung.
Some said time was broken.
Others whispered: Time had simply paused to watch.
---
Charles stared into the pulsing black glyphs that bled from the Heart. They did not move like ink—they coiled like serpents, coalescing into one another, forming fragments of something deeper.
A word he couldn't recognize, and yet felt branded across his soul.
The Unwritten Sigil.
The Heart pulsed again.
"The future is not a place."
"It is a memory waiting for confirmation."
Behind him, Zara trembled.
She hadn't said a word since her vision. Her face was pale, eyes locked on Charles like she had seen his death not once, but a thousand different ways.
Rahul sat on the edge of the cracked dais, sketchbook shaking in his hands. He was drawing again—but this time, the pages seemed to be sketching themselves.
Tower. Mirror. Blood. Gate. Crown.
The Hollow Eye appeared again and again. And again.
Until it finally moved on the page.
A sigil, twisting on paper.
Alive.
---
High above, in the spires of the Chronocrypt, Visioneers screamed into mirrored wells. They had tried to see too far.
Each one had beheld the same vision:
Zara, standing on a battlefield made of fractured glass.
Charles, kneeling. Smiling.
Her blade through his heart.
And she smiled as she did it.
One Visioneer took her own eye out. Another forgot her name.
One simply began writing:
"The Hollow Eye sees not who you are, but who survives you."
Over and over.
---
Zara took a step back.
She could still feel the phantom of the vision in her chest, the phantom weight of the sword. The cheers.
The betrayal.
"This can't be real," she whispered. "That's not me. That's not me."
The Heart pulsed once more.
"It doesn't matter."
"What is seen is now remembered."
Charles blinked. His hand went to his chest.
The sigil was there.
Burned. Branded. Unchosen.
A mark of the Hollow Eye, etched into his skin like fire-ink. It pulsed in sync with the Heart.
One-two. One-two.
He could feel it now. The thing beneath memory. The ache behind identity. He was changing.
Or rather, being remembered differently.
"I never asked for this," Charles muttered.
"But it remembered you," the Heart answered.
Zara's blade was half-drawn now. Not out of threat. But instinct.
The kind of instinct that came from dreams she hadn't had yet.
---
Elsewhere.
The Mirror Walker passed through the courts of Veltharion unnoticed. Every reflection twisted in its presence.
One guard watched himself kill a friend. Another saw his child age into a tyrant. One mirror refused to show a reflection at all.
The Mirror Walker did not pause.
Because it was not looking.
It was remembering.
---
Rahul snapped his book shut. "We need to seal it."
"Seal what?" Zara asked, her voice cracking.
"The Heart."
Charles looked at him. "You heard it. This thing is three thousand years old. It waited for me. How do you seal something that remembers you before you were born?"
Rahul looked up, and for a moment, he wasn't afraid.
"We write it out."
Zara blinked. "You mean the ledger."
Rahul nodded.
"You think that can overwrite this?" Charles asked, gesturing to the burning brand on his chest.
Rahul didn't answer. Instead, he drew his charcoal pen again and whispered:
"Let me try."
---
He opened the sketchbook and wrote one sentence on a clean page:
"Charles never opened the Shattergate."
The moment the sentence formed, the world shook.
Reality flexed.
The sigil on Charles's chest shimmered—faded—and for a heartbeat, it was gone.
Zara gasped. "It's working."
But then the Heart screamed.
Not sound. Not music. A memory howl.
A dozen timelines convulsed.
Charles staggered back, clutching his chest.
Zara drew her sword. "Stop writing!"
But Rahul had already scribbled again.
"We never found the Dead Mage's Heart."
The chamber flickered.
Stone melted into fog. Light turned into mirrors.
Charles vanished.
Zara turned to Rahul.
"Where is he?"
But Rahul's eyes had gone blank. His lips moved, but his voice was not his own.
"The ledger writes back."
A final page turned in his sketchbook.
Words formed in ink not from his hand:
"Do not rewrite again. I'm watching."
---
Charles opened his eyes in a world not his own.
The Hollow Eye still burned.
But no one knew his name.
(Veltharion) once a city of arcane order and ancient tradition, had begun to unravel.
It began subtly — with mirrors refusing to reflect, their surfaces rippling like disturbed water. Candle flames bent toward the floor instead of the ceiling. People forgot the names of their children, then remembered different ones entirely. And then came the visions.
Civilians across the lower and upper districts began seeing themselves.
Not reflections.
Not illusions.
But real, tactile, bone-deep doubles. One woman screamed in the marketplace, stabbing her own double who had tried to smother her baby. A nobleman was found strangled in his study — his killer identical down to the scar above the eye. No trace magic worked. No memory wards held.
In every case, the victim and the attacker had the same blood.
Something deeper than time was fraying.
And in the city's center, beneath the Scholar's Rotunda, the Hollow Eye began to burn.
---
Zara stood on the parapets of Veltharion's west wall, breath shallow, eyes scanning the horizon. Her sword hummed, alive with unrest. The sigil on her arm, once dormant, now flickered with warmth. Below her, citizens panicked in organized chaos, clinging to curfews and magical denials.
But the air told another story. It smelled of ink. Of rewritten pages.
"They know," she murmured.
Charles stood beside her, his hands still wrapped from the battle near the Ashvault. The burns hadn't healed.
"They?" he asked.
"The shadows. They aren't just outcomes. They're versions. Versions trying to overwrite us."
Charles nodded slowly, his eyes distant. Since the Ledger, he hadn't spoken much. Not after the warning:
"Do not rewrite again. I'm watching."
---
Elsewhere, at the Mirror Sanctum near the Seventh Spire, magic began to implode.
Mirror spells — once stable illusion constructs used for communication and protection — faltered violently. One scribe attempted to summon his future reflection for strategic advice; instead, his internal organs inverted, mistaking past for future. A child summoned a guardian spell from her pendant mirror. It protected her — but from her mother.
The Mirror Guild went silent by sundown.
Of the seventy-seven Vision Mirrors across Veltharion, only two remained functional. One cracked every time Charles's name was spoken near it. The other began weeping black ink.
---
Rahul sat in the abandoned workshop where he once painted sigils and traced glyphs with the ease of a prodigy. Now, his hands shook. His sister — alive now, thanks to the rewrite — had grown distant.
Something about her memory didn't fit. Her laugh was wrong. Her lullaby was… different.
"She remembers me wrong," he whispered. "Because I forced her to remember me at all."
He touched the edge of the Hollow Eye, burned into his wrist during the second breach. It pulsed once — like a heartbeat inside a tomb.
He knew what it meant.
They had awakened something.
And it was watching.
---
In the Arcanum Core, the High Seer held emergency council. Nine Visioneers, draped in veils and eyes tattooed along their arms, entered with blank scrolls and trembling lips.
Visioneers — the new tier of power. Gifted, or cursed, with the ability to see not just future events — but narrative futures. Futures shaped by choices in meaning, not chronology.
"What do you see?" the Seer asked.
The eldest Visioneer, eyes blistered and red from prolonged gaze into the Mindglass, whispered:
"The Queen of Flame smiles as she stabs the boy with two names."
Another Visioneer fell to her knees, tears of ink bleeding down her cheeks.
"The Gate is not closed. It's been walking beside us the whole time."
The youngest, only fifteen, said nothing. She simply held up a mirror.
It showed Zara — smiling.
And Charles — dead.
---
Zara woke in a sweat.
She'd seen it. Not in a dream, but in a vision. A narrative one.
She was standing before thousands. On the broken steps of Veltharion's palace. Charles on his knees. Her blade through his chest.
And she smiled.
Not cruelly. Not vengefully. But calmly.
As if she were finally free.
She turned to find Charles watching her. No anger. Just understanding.
"You saw it," he said.
"Yes."
"Was I afraid?"
Zara hesitated. "No."
Charles nodded, as if that was the worst answer she could've given.
---
The Hollow Eye opened at midnight.
Not in the sky. Not in the walls. But in Charles.
He screamed.
Zara bolted up. Rahul froze. The sigil burned itself across Charles's chest — not drawn, but branded from within. The skin seared away in spirals, forming a perfect, three-pointed eye with a vertical slit in its center.
Charles collapsed.
But the Eye blinked.
Not metaphorically.
It opened.
And through it, they saw themselves.
Millions of selves.
Some dead. Some mad. Some godlike. Some… smiling.
---
The Hollow Eye was awake.
And it remembered everything.