Veltharion, Three Days After the Shadow Hour Collapse
Wind moved strangely in this place.
It carried no scent, no sound — only weight. The kind that settled behind your ribs and made you forget what you were about to say.
Charles, Zara, and Rahul stood before the blackened creststone that marked the edge of the Exclusion Zone. It wasn't a warning. It was a sentence:
"Here Ends All That Was Never Written."
The Kingdom of Null Names had not fallen.
It had been erased — from maps, from memory, from history itself.
Only the Hollow Eye remembered it. And Charles… Charles had begun to remember too.
"Why is it so quiet?" Rahul asked, voice half-swallowed by the stagnant air.
Zara's grip tightened around her blade. "Because even echoes aren't allowed here."
They stepped forward.
The earth beneath them shifted — not physically, but conceptually. Trees twisted in reverse patterns, stones bore glyphs that spelled nothing, and the wind murmured names no one could say.
As they crossed into the outer perimeter, a glyph carved itself into the dirt by Charles's boots. Black ink bled from the soil — forming a shape:
The sigil of the Hollow Eye.
But it was different this time. The circle blinked.
Charles knelt, touching the mark. His fingertips sizzled—not with pain, but recognition.
Rahul flinched. "It reacted to your blood…"
Charles looked at his hand. His veins glowed faintly. Not blue. Not red. Something older.
"Because it remembers what I was before I was born," Charles said, voice steady.
Zara's eyes narrowed. "What are you saying?"
"I think…" He looked ahead, toward the shattered palace rising from the ash like a forgotten dream. "I think I'm not just carrying the Hollow Eye."
He stood.
"I think I am Nullborn."
---
They entered the ruin.
No roof. No doors. Just thresholds — memories of architecture left behind after time had been stripped away.
Walls shimmered with anti-light. Like they had once been color, but the concept of color had been removed. The throne room had no throne.
Only a tear in reality.
A wound where royalty had once sat.
Zara stepped forward. "This isn't a palace. It's… hollow."
Rahul reached toward one of the pillars, fingers brushing a strip of sigil-tape woven like old papyrus.
It peeled back with a whisper:
"She never ruled. She was erased."
The voice wasn't male or female. It was historical. The voice of an event.
Charles stumbled. The tear at the center of the room blinked — and from it, a woman stepped forward.
Her body was an outline. A human-shaped shadow cut from memory. Her dress moved like melted glass. Her face was blurred like a photo you were never supposed to see.
And her voice—
"You should not be here, Nullborn."
Zara raised her sword. "Who are you?"
The woman turned slowly.
"I was once called Erah. Queen of the Nameless. I ruled nothing. Because my kingdom was a sin against chronology."
She looked at Charles.
"You carry my blood."
Charles staggered. "You… you're—"
She placed a translucent hand on his chest.
"Nullborn Royalty. But your inheritance is not power. It is erasure."
---
Scene Three: "The Fail-Safe"
Erah waved a hand, and the room changed.
Not visibly — but contextually. The palace now remembered itself.
The walls no longer shimmered with nothingness. They told stories in glyphs — images of war, loss, and betrayal. Sigils swirled, depicting an ancient spell.
Zara turned.
On one wall, the Hollow Eye was engraved. Not as a symbol of fear — but as a crown.
"That… that's a royal mark," Zara whispered.
Erah nodded.
"The Hollow Eye was our greatest invention. A fail-safe. A memory anchor."
She looked to Charles. "It was designed to store erased memories. It was never meant to be a curse."
Rahul stepped closer. "Then why did everyone who bore it go mad?"
Erah's form flickered.
"Because the prison beneath it… began to whisper."
Zara's pulse quickened. "The Shattergate."
Erah turned toward her, her form growing more unstable with every moment. "The Shattergate is not a door."
She faced Charles.
"It's a lock. And you, heir of my blood, were born to keep it closed."
Charles's heart thundered in his chest.
Zara looked between them. "A lock on what?"
Erah's expression — a memory reconstructed — broke.
"The Dead Mage's Second Heart."
The sun never rose over the Exclusion Zone.
Not because it was night, but because the land had forgotten how to be morning.
Charles stood before the ruins of the Kingdom of Null Names. Pillars jutted like broken fingers from a sea of ink-stained sand, and the wind smelled like closed books. The world here didn't speak. It waited.
Behind him, Zara ran her fingers across the surface of an obsidian tablet. It pulsed faintly with residual glyph-heat. "This stone remembers something, but not us."
Rahul nodded grimly, sketchbook already flaring with autonomous ink. "We're being forgotten even as we stand here."
Charles said nothing. His fingertips brushed the edge of a shattered crest half-buried in the dust.
The Hollow Eye.
But older. Cruder. Etched into a sigil that still bled memory.
The moment his blood touched it, the sand exploded upward in a silent vortex.
---
They weren't in the ruins anymore. Not truly.
The sand became sky, the ruins inverted, and they stood in the heart of what once was — a Memory Echo, complete with scent, color, and gravity.
At the center of the palace floated a throne.
Black. Crowned in glyphs.
Sitting on it, wrapped in funeral-blue armor, was a woman whose face Charles almost recognized.
Queen Erah.
Her features were grainy, flickering like a candle's last dance. Time didn't know what to do with her.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, her voice composed of other voices — layered, faded, and real. "Not without inheritance."
Charles stepped forward. "Then tell me what I inherited."
Erah's eyes—pure void—settled on him.
"You are the last Nullborn Prince. The heir to a throne that was erased to protect the world. Your blood is the ink. Your name… is what the world tried to forget."
Rahul stepped beside him. "What is the Hollow Eye, really?"
Erah turned slowly. Behind her, mirrors flickered open — not to reflect, but to remember.
"One truth. Many filters. The Hollow Eye is the fail-safe of the Null Kings. A living archive to store erased memories. Not destroyed. Not sealed. Archived.
Zara stiffened. "You mean… the Shattergate?"
Erah's voice lost all warmth.
"The Shattergate is not a door. It is a vault. And the world has forgotten what it was meant to contain."
Rahul murmured, "The Dead Mage's Second Heart…"
The mirrors pulsed.
And Charles fell to one knee.
Glyphs spiraled from his chest — the Hollow Eye blazing open not as a mark, but as a wound in memory.
He saw fire.
He saw a boy not quite himself, standing before a mirror that wept.
He saw a throne with no king.
And behind it — a second heart.
Not beating.
Waiting.
---
When he woke, the ruins were still.
The throne had vanished. But etched into the ground where it had floated, a new sigil smoldered — half Hollow Eye, half something else.
A spiral. Like a snail's shell made of ink.
Zara crouched beside it. "It's a sealing pattern. But... it's recursive."
Rahul tilted his head. "You mean it keeps sealing… itself?"
Zara nodded. "And each cycle weakens it. Eventually, it unseals."
Charles spoke with a voice not quite his own. "They couldn't destroy the Second Heart. So they buried it in a recursive lock. And made sure no one would remember it existed."
Rahul looked at him. "Why you, though? Why are you the key?"
Zara's answer was almost a whisper.
"Because he's not just Nullborn. He's the one who left it there."
Charles froze.
"I don't remember—"
"You weren't supposed to."
A sudden quake rocked the ruins. The air fractured like glass, revealing a figure descending — not from sky, but from memory.
A Memory Cartographer, clad in golden parchment robes, his face masked by a thousand names.
He pointed at Charles.
"You opened it. You must end it."
Charles stepped back.
Rahul drew a line across his page. "We're out of time."
The sky above the Exclusion Zone tore open — and for the first time, something crawled through.
Something shaped like a heart, but with too many ventricles.
Too many voices.
Zara whispered, "The Second Heart woke up."
And it remembered everything.
---
Back in Veltharion, clocks stopped.
Not because time failed — but because time paused to watch.
The Nullborn Throne had awakened.
And with it, history began to unwrite again.