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A High Fantasy Chronicle of Dreams and Memory

Written by Harsh Saini

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from the author.

Typeset and formatted in the tradition of high fantasy epics, this work contains original languages, cultures, mythologies, and metaphysical systems which remain the intellectual property of Harsh Saini.

This edition is printed under exclusive author rights. Distribution, adaptation, or transformation in any digital, print, or performative medium without direct approval constitutes copyright infringement.

First Edition – Published Independently in Canada

Cover Art and Design – Original Artwork © Harsh Saini

Editor – Harsh Saini

For licensing inquiries or media requests, contact: harshsaini.author@gmail.com

About the Author

Harsh Saini is not merely a writer he is an architect of reverie, a cartographer of forgotten realms, and a silent scribe of what the stars no longer say aloud. His voice rises from the fault lines of myth and memory, echoing like a hymn buried beneath the weight of time. To read his work is to walk between thresholds where the past haunts the present not as ghost, but as gravity.

Born with a gaze tilted skyward and a heart anchored in ruins, Harsh has long been fascinated by the stories that are never told outright the ones whispered in the dark, lost in translation, or half-buried in crumbling tongues. He believes myths are not fiction, but forgotten truths awaiting translation. Every sentence he writes carries the echo of civilizations unlived, gods undone, and dreams that bled themselves into waking.

He draws inspiration from the ancient wisdom of epics and the daring introspection of modern myth-makers. Deeply influenced by the vast mythopoeia of J.R.R. Tolkien, the structural elegance of Brandon Sanderson, and the philosophical intensity of Eastern mysticism and postmodern lore, Harsh forges narratives that do not merely entertain they invoke.

His prose is atmospheric, elegiac, and emotionally textured a voice that feels both holy and human, as if spoken by someone who remembers something the world has tried too hard to forget. He writes of silence as if it were a character. Of memory as if it were a weapon. Of fate as if it were a song that only broken people can hum correctly.

When Harsh is not sculpting words into worlds, he can often be found reading cryptic manuscripts in forgotten dialects, wandering through wind-lashed woods, or engaging in haunting conversations with dreamers and philosophers from across the globe. His life is a ritual of listening to the quiet voices beneath stone, to the hush between two falling leaves, to the half-mad rhythm of stars dying elegantly.

The Ashes of the First Sleep marks the beginning of a mythic cycle unlike any other a saga where time fractures, memory betrays, and reality is stitched together by dream and ruin alike. It is the first window into a grand tapestry of interconnected worlds where even the dead are not beyond story, and even stories must pay a price.

For Harsh, writing is not a choice it is a compulsion born of awe. A promise to the worlds waiting to be remembered.

Chapter 1

The First Note

“The First Sleep was not a beginning. It was a remembering. And Lucien… was the memory returning.”

In the beginning, before kings or castles, before the rusting armor of fallen armies and the whispered lies of forgotten gods, there was only silence an endless void without form or memory.

But within that silence stirred something ancient and unnameable. And from that unknowable place, a single trembling note resonated not song nor scream, but something softer, deeper, a dream born of darkness and longing. It rippled gently, echoing into infinity until it became something tangible: a world woven from threads of sound and slumber.

The elders of many lands, whose bones now dust beneath forgotten tombs, once whispered by firelight of the first breath of this newborn realm. They said it carried the scent of rain, the warmth of fresh soil, and the cool hush of twilight. They spoke, in murmurs soft as prayers, of how forests sprang from shadows, mountains rose from whispers, and oceans pooled from echoes.

Yet dreams, however gentle their beginnings, carry hidden depths. Within this dream, hidden between shades and silence, grew whispers of other things of fears and hungers, love and loss, hope and ruin. The first beings woke slowly, blinking eyes formed from star-motes and stardust. Among them were the gods, who shaped and reshaped this newborn dream as easily as breathing, until one day, the dream began shaping them in return.

Ages turned, and memory faded. The dream, once known to all, passed into myth. Gods became distant, stories became legends, and truths became tales mothers whispered only to hush their fearful children.

But dreams never truly die. They sleep beneath the roots of mountains, drift in hidden seas, and linger in the groves where moonlight falls like snow.

And so, one silent evening in a forgotten northern grove, beneath the branches of ancient trees that remembered the very first note, something stirred. A soft sigh escaped the lips of a young man whose dreams were darker than night and deeper than the ocean’s heart.

His name was Lucien. And as he slept, the world trembled ever so slightly, for it knew though he did not yet that the First Sleep had begun again.

Lucien awoke with a start, breath catching sharply in his throat, heart pounding as if he’d run from shadows chasing him through a forgotten dream. His skin felt cool, damp from the evening mist filtering through the ancient trees of the Grove. Above, leaves whispered secrets to one another, an endless murmuring that he never quite understood but always felt.

Slowly sitting up, Lucien brushed strands of dark hair from his eyes, disoriented and troubled by fragments of a vision already slipping beyond his reach. He’d dreamt again dreams he could never fully remember but which left him burdened with inexplicable sorrow and longing.

Around him, the Grove stood watchful, a sentient labyrinth of gnarled roots and towering trunks wrapped in moss that glowed faintly under the soft moonlight. It was peaceful, yet lately, something had begun to change. The familiar scent of blooming wildflowers now mingled with a subtle decay that made Lucien uneasy.

A voice gently called his name, cutting through his unsettled thoughts. Turning, he saw Caelwen stepping lightly through the underbrush, her silver-white robes catching the moonlight like woven starlight. Her eyes, ancient and knowing, studied him with compassion.

“You felt it again,” she said softly, kneeling beside him. It was not a question but an affirmation.

Lucien nodded slowly, eyes distant, searching. “It’s stronger now. Something is waking, and it calls me. But I don’t know why.”

Caelwen placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, her voice steady, though Lucien sensed the faint tremble beneath it. “The world forgets easily, Lucien, but the Grove does not. It remembers all things, even those best left forgotten. And it seems to have chosen you to remember as well.”

Lucien shivered at the weight of her words, feeling the invisible threads of fate tighten around him. He knew Caelwen spoke the truth, though he desperately wished otherwise. The First Sleep had begun again, and Lucien was at its center, whether he wanted to be or not.

The Grove had never truly slept. Even in the dead of winter, when snow blanketed its roots and silence claimed the world, it dreamed. Its trees did not merely grow they remembered. And though Lucien had been raised in its shadow, he was only now beginning to feel the weight of its memory pressing in on him.

The morning after his dream, a hushed tension clung to the air like fog. Dew clung to every leaf, but the usual shimmer of life seemed muted. Birds that normally sang in the blue dawn remained quiet. Even the ever-present hum of insects felt strangely still, as though the Grove itself held its breath.

Lucien stepped cautiously over a twisted root, his bare feet brushing soft moss that felt oddly cold beneath him. The scent of decay lingered in the breeze not rotting flesh, but something older. Something more mournful. A rot of time, not matter.

He made his way to the Heartwood the ancient tree at the Grove’s center where Caelwen waited beneath its colossal limbs. The tree was the oldest in the forest, perhaps the first that ever grew, and its bark was etched with spirals and glyphs too faded to read. Some believed the gods had carved them during the making of the world. Others said they were scars from when the Grove fought back against something long forgotten.

Caelwen stood still, one hand pressed gently against the Heartwood’s trunk, her eyes closed. Her breath was slow and rhythmic, as though she were listening.

“Something is wrong,” Lucien said quietly, afraid to disturb the sacred stillness.

“I know,” Caelwen replied without opening her eyes. “The Grove weeps.”

She turned toward him, her face more lined than it had seemed the night before, as if the weight of the forest’s grief had aged her. “The balance is shifting. The Dream is thinning.”

Lucien furrowed his brow. “The Dream?”

“The veil between waking and sleep, between what is and what was meant to be,” she said. “The First Sleep touches more than just your mind, Lucien. It echoes into the land, the very bones of the world. When you fall into it, the Grove feels your descent. And now…it begins to fall with you.”

He looked around. Moss had turned grey in patches. Vines once vibrant now sagged, brittle and lifeless. Even the air felt thinner, as though the forest no longer exhaled.

Caelwen gestured for him to sit beside her on a fallen log, and he obeyed, still shaken. “You carry more than visions. There’s something inside you something old. Something not entirely yours.”

Lucien hesitated, then whispered, “I see things. Places I’ve never been. People I’ve never met. Sometimes I wake and I’m still… somewhere else.”

“You walk the Dreaming Vale,” Caelwen said. “That realm has not touched this world in an age. It was sealed for a reason.”

Lucien’s breath caught. “Why me?”

Caelwen did not answer immediately. She gazed into the distance, toward a gap in the trees where dawn spilled faint golden light. “Perhaps you are not the first. Perhaps you are simply the one the Grove chose. Or perhaps… the Hollow King has begun to stir.”

At that name, Lucien felt a chill deep in his chest.

Caelwen nodded. “You’ve heard it in your dreams.”

He nodded back slowly. “Not the name. But the… shape of it. The absence. A hunger.”

“Then there’s no time to waste,” Caelwen said, standing with purpose. “Come.”

They walked deeper into the Grove. Trees grew taller and closer here, their bark shimmering faintly with a green-blue glow. Caelwen carried a small pouch from which she scattered herbs as they moved, whispering old words in a language Lucien could not understand but somehow felt. The air thickened with each step, and the Grove darkened. They reached a clearing that Lucien had never seen before. At its center lay a shallow pool perfectly still, its surface like glass. No wind disturbed it. No insects skimmed it. It was a mirror that reflected not just light, but truth.

“This is the Mirror of Memory,” Caelwen said. “Long ago, the Verdant Order used it to recall the world’s first days. Few can endure its visions now. But you must.”

Lucien approached, uncertain. His reflection stared back pale, dark-eyed, uncertain. Then the water rippled.

He saw a forest burning. Not with fire, but with ash. Trees crumbled into dust. Shadows walked where people should be. And in the center, a man or something like a man cloaked in swirling black mist, with a crown of thorns growing into his skull.

The Hollow King.

Lucien gasped and stumbled back, clutching his head.

“The Dream remembers,” Caelwen said solemnly. “And it calls to you. The First Sleep was not meant to return. But something or someone is drawing it back into this world. You, Lucien, are the gate.”

“I don’t want to be,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Neither did those who came before,” she said. “But destiny is not always chosen. Sometimes it is endured.”

Lucien stood, still shaking. He looked up at the trees. Some were withering even as he watched. The Grove was dying. Because of him.

“What do I do?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Caelwen stepped forward and placed something into his hand. It was a stone, smooth and warm, carved with a spiral.

“Begin by remembering,” she said. “Even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts.”

Lucien clenched the stone in his fist. For the first time, he truly felt the path beneath his feet.

And for the first time, the Grove began to sing not a song of joy, but a mournful melody of what was lost… and what must be found.

“I don’t want to be,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Neither did those who came before,” she said. “But destiny is not always chosen. Sometimes it is endured.”

Lucien stood, still shaking. He looked up at the trees. Some were withering even as he watched. The Grove was dying. Because of him.

“What do I do?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Caelwen stepped forward and placed something into his hand. It was a stone, smooth and warm, carved with a spiral.

“Begin by remembering,” she said. “Even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts.”

Lucien clenched the stone in his fist. For the first time, he truly felt the path beneath his feet.

The Grove trembled softly around him, a silent acknowledgement of the truth that now filled Lucien’s heart. He could no longer run from this destiny, no matter how desperately he wanted to deny it. Slowly, cautiously, he closed his eyes and opened himself to the memories that had always eluded him, allowing fragments of his forgotten past to surface.

Darkness consumed his vision, then softened into shades of grey. Lucien saw himself younger, standing in a place he had nearly forgotten Caelverra, the city of scholars and

silence, its moonstone towers gleaming under a pale sky. Books and scrolls lined walls covered with symbols and runes he couldn’t understand, yet felt deeply connected to.

He saw himself walking corridors, guided by a figure cloaked in robes darker than midnight, a figure whose face remained shadowed and indistinct. This presence radiated both wisdom and menace, a paradox Lucien felt compelled to trust yet instinctively feared.

“Who are you?” Lucien asked in the vision, voice echoing strangely through the halls of memory.

The figure paused, turning slightly towards him. “I am the Keeper. And you, Lucien, are the vessel.”

Lucien felt a chill crawl up his spine, but forced himself to follow as the figure led him deeper into the heart of Caelverra’s hidden chambers. They reached a massive, ornate door carved with spirals matching the stone he now held. The Keeper placed a hand on the door, murmuring words in a language Lucien felt rather than heard. Slowly, the doors creaked open, revealing a chamber bathed in silver-blue light.

At the room’s center stood an altar, ancient and worn, engraved with intricate designs. Upon it rested a single shard of crystal, pulsating gently with an inner glow.

“The Dream Shard,” the Keeper whispered reverently. “This is why you were brought here.”

Lucien reached out, drawn to its luminescence, and as his fingers brushed the shard, visions flooded his mind: kingdoms rising and falling, shadows crawling from hidden places, and, above it all, the looming presence of the Hollow King. Lucien recoiled sharply, gasping for air.

The memory shattered, and Lucien found himself back in the Grove, breathing heavily. Caelwen watched him closely, concern etched deeply in her expression.

“I remember,” Lucien managed to say, his voice shaking. “But it’s fragmented— pieces without context.”

“Every fragment matters,” Caelwen said gently. “Each memory is a step on the path you must now walk.”

Lucien opened his palm, revealing the spiral-carved stone still warm from his touch. It seemed heavier now, burdened with purpose.

“Where do I go now?” Lucien asked, his voice steadier.

“To Caelverra,” Caelwen replied solemnly. “You must seek the Dream Shard again. But beware others will seek it too.”

Lucien nodded, understanding the weight of what lay ahead. He would leave the Grove and venture into the unknown, driven by memory, destiny, and the hope of finding answers in a city lost to silence.

The Grove was never meant to witness goodbyes.

As Lucien stood at its edge, he felt the forest watch him with a thousand unseen eyes. The mist curled low to the ground like parting breath, clinging to his boots as if reluctant to let him go. The trees vast and ancient remained still, as though mourning what was to come.

Caelwen stood beside him, her face unreadable in the pale dawn light. She held out a satchel made of leafwoven cloth, filled with dried roots, dreamleaf tea, and three scrolls bound with bark-twine.

“Take these. The roads are not safe, and you will need more than courage.”

Lucien accepted the satchel, surprised by its weight. “What’s in the scrolls?”

“Words older than kings. One for guidance. One for protection. One for remembrance. Do not read them unless you must.”

A silence stretched between them, heavy with things unsaid. Then, at last, Caelwen reached into her robes and pulled forth a vial no larger than a thumb, its contents swirling with silver mist.

“This is Moonwake Essence. It will let you enter the Dreaming Vale—if you are ready.”

Lucien tucked it carefully away, nodding.

He looked once more to the Grove. A part of him wanted to remain wanted to melt into the moss and vanish beneath the boughs forever. But another part, stronger now, urged him onward. The Grove had kept him safe. But it could not keep him forever.

Caelwen stepped forward and placed her hand on his chest. “You are more than you know, Lucien. Not just a vessel. A witness. A key. The Grove remembers you. Let the world remember too.”

He swallowed hard. “Will I see you again?”

She smiled faintly. “In dreams. Or in endings.”

With a final glance over his shoulder, Lucien stepped beyond the threshold of the forest.

The path ahead was wild, untamed, veiled in mist. Somewhere beyond the eastern ridge, Caelverra awaited buried in silence, wrapped in mystery, haunted by echoes of a forgotten dream.

And as he walked, the spiral stone in his hand pulsed softly, warm against his skin.

The First Sleep had awakened.

And the world would never dream the same again.

The path that stretched before Lucien was not marked on any map, nor carved by any mortal hand. It was a trail of instinct and memory, winding between stones covered in timeworn glyphs and trees that leaned inward as if whispering secrets only the old world understood. The light dimmed as the canopy thickened, yet Lucien did not fear the dark. It felt familiar now, like a blanket stitched from forgotten dreams.

Each step he took was quiet, yet profound like treading across a bridge suspended between two realms. The Grove behind him hummed low, a fading lullaby to the life he was leaving behind. And ahead, the mists of the Dreaming Vale beckoned, even though he had not yet reached its threshold.

Lucien felt it within him a pull, not of gravity, but of remembrance. As though the land itself recognized him not as a traveler, but as something older, long misplaced and newly returned. The spiral-carved stone in his hand pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, a silent reminder that the dream had claimed him.

In the distance, faint shapes began to form in the fog broken statues, leaning pillars, and worn milestones buried in the loam. He paused before a cracked stone marker barely visible through the ivy: a sigil etched into it glowed faintly, an eye split by a spiral. The mark of the Verdant Order. Another memory stirred. Not full, not clear but heavy. The word Exoria surfaced in his mind, though he knew not its meaning.

Further on, Lucien came upon an outcropping overlooking the valley below. There, he finally saw it Caelverra.

It was distant, wreathed in mist and sorrow, its once-proud towers now softened by time. The moonstone spires, which had once reached skyward like the fingers of gods, now appeared cracked and overgrown. Ivy crept over the city’s edge like veins through bone. Silence reigned even from this distance. Not the peace of sleep, but the stillness of memory forgotten, suspended.

Lucien knelt at the cliff’s edge, breath caught in his throat. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Not just within the city, but beneath it something ancient and restless. A pressure that distorted the air, like heat above a fire, but colder. Hungrier.

As he watched, a shadow passed over the sun.

Not a cloud. A shape. Winged and vast, but indistinct. It moved not through air, but through thought through dream.

Lucien instinctively ducked, heart pounding. But when he looked again, there was nothing. Only the still valley below, the ruins of Caelverra sleeping beneath its crown of mist.

He did not realize how tightly he was gripping the spiral stone until his knuckles ached. He released it slowly and brought the vial of Moonwake Essence to eye level. The silver mist inside danced lazily, as though alive.

It would let him cross into the Dreaming Vale. But not yet. He would need guidance. Allies. And answers.

Behind him, the forest whispered still, fading but not forgotten. And ahead, the world waited silent, ancient, watching.

From the tree line, a pair of amber eyes glinted neither beast nor man, but something between. A watcher. One of many, perhaps. It did not move, did not breathe. It simply… observed.

Lucien stood slowly, and in that moment, he understood: the waking world was unraveling. Not with fire or sword, but with dream. A soft unraveling, like threads pulled from an old tapestry. Quiet. Patient. Inevitable.

He turned from the valley, steeling himself. The road to Caelverra would not be straight. It would wind through ruins and memory, through betrayal and revelation. And always, always beneath the surface, the Hollow King would stir.

For this was not just the beginning of a journey.

It was the return of an ancient war, one fought not with armies, but with echoes.

And Lucien, the unwilling dreamer, was both sword and scar.

Lucien descended from the overlook slowly, every step feeling as though it carried the weight of more than just his body it was as if memory itself pressed down on him, dense and heavy. The satchel Caelwen had given him thumped lightly against his hip, the three scrolls within rustling ever so slightly, like they were alive and displeased at having been disturbed.

The forest gave way to what once might have been a road though no carts had traveled it in centuries. Overgrown with silvergrass and thornbloom, it followed the curve of a dry riverbed. Small ruins dotted the path crumbled shrines, shattered markers, and totems carved from a strange, porous stone that felt warm when Lucien brushed his fingers against it. Each bore faint remnants of spiral symbols, some flaked away by time, others gouged out deliberately.

He paused before one of these ruined shrines. Something was different about this one.

The air around it shimmered faintly.

Lucien crouched, placing a hand against the moss-covered base. The spiral glyph burned faintly to life at his touch not hot, but pulsing softly, like the heartbeat of something asleep just beneath the surface.

His vision swam.

In a blink, he was somewhere else. The shrine was whole again. Tall. Proud. Flames danced in braziers around it. Monks stood in silence, clad in robes of layered bark and ashwhite cloth, each face covered by carved wooden masks. A voice echoed from within the shrine not spoken aloud, but resounding inside Lucien’s mind:

“The Dream was never meant to wake. You who carry the stone must decide: Will you remember... or will you be remembered?”

Lucien recoiled, stumbling back as the vision shattered like glass. The shrine once more lay in ruin. The warmth was gone. The glyph, dead.

He stood, chest heaving. This was not just the memory of a place. This was the place remembering him.

Around him, the forest had grown utterly silent. No wind. No birds. Just the rustling of the leaves above as though they whispered warnings in tongues older than speech.

The watchers were real.

They had always been.

He turned and saw them.

Across the ridge, between the trees, in places eyes should never have beenshapes. Amber glows. Hunched forms. Silent. Still. Watching.

Lucien’s pulse quickened, but he forced himself to remain calm. These were not hunters. Not yet. They were something else.

Sentinels of the Dream.

He remembered what Caelwen had said: “Let the world remember you.”

He stood tall, trying not to show fear. “I see you,” he whispered into the quiet. The watchers did not answer.

But something shifted. A murmur through the leaves. A breath in the earth. And then… they were gone.

Not fled. Not dismissed. Simply gone. As though they had never been there.

Lucien pressed onward.

He came to a glade filled with still water, fed by trickles from the hills. It was too clean. Too still. He didn’t drink from it. Even without Caelwen’s warnings, he would have known better.

Reflections swam across its surface reflections that didn’t match the world around it.

He saw himself standing on a battlefield, wrapped in cloaks of shadow, a blade made of glass and moonlight in his hand. Around him, towers crumbled. The sky was not sky, but swirling memory, alive and malignant.

And again, that presence swirling black mist, crown of thorns buried in flesh, eyes like empty stars.

The Hollow King.

The image dissolved before Lucien could see more. He turned away.

This was not prophecy.

These were memories of what could be.

As dusk bled into night, he reached the edge of the lowlands. From the cliffs he had descended, Caelverra had seemed near. But the land below stretched wider than he’d expected. Vast plains lay between him and the city, dotted with dead trees and the carcasses of once-great things. He passed stone bones of forgotten colossi creatures too large for this world, now petrified and buried in earth like relics of a dream the world had tried to forget.

But the world does not forget. It only buries. It only waits.

A storm was brewing far to the east. Lucien could see it lightning without thunder, clouds that churned like smoke. The air shifted, charged and uneasy. The Hollow King’s presence, perhaps, clawing gently at the veil.

Lucien made camp near a fallen obelisk. At its base were runes so old, even the moss seemed reluctant to cover them. He did not dare read them aloud.

He drank tea brewed from Caelwen’s herbs, bitter and grounding, and unfurled the scroll labeled “Remembrance.”

Only a single line was written within, in silver ink that shimmered with unnatural clarity:

“The past is not behind you. It walks with you. Learn its name.”

Sleep took him like a tide.

And in sleep, he dreamed of a room without walls, where a thousand masks hung from branches of obsidian trees. The masks whispered his name in voices not his own, and when he turned he saw himself among them.

Not one self, but many.

Different choices. Different dreams.

And behind them all…

The Hollow King stood waiting.

Not moving. Not reaching.

Just waiting.

Lucien woke in cold sweat.

The spiral stone in his palm was glowing.

The dawn that greeted him was strange. The sun rose, but not in the way he remembered. Its light was pale, almost silver, as though filtered through a veil of halfremembered dreams. Even the birdsong had a warped cadence, each note echoing longer than it should, lingering in the air like a question left unanswered.

He packed his satchel in silence. The scrolls remained untouched. The dream of the masks still clung to him, heavy as chainmail soaked in grief. As he moved, he could still hear their whispers, just beyond the veil of memory:

One truth. One life. One lie repeated a thousand ways…

The path that led away from the glade was narrow and thorned. He followed it not because he knew where it led, but because something within him demanded it. A pull not of geography, but of fate.

As he passed beneath a fallen archway its stones marked with spiral sigils nearly erased by time he felt the world bend.

Not in body, but in soul.

It was here that the Grove’s memory gave way to older soil: the borderlands of the Forgotten Reach.

The Reach had once been a bridge between empires, a place of parliaments and pacts, sacred pilgrimages and stone-laced cities. Now it was only broken land and half-buried ruins. The Verdant Order had once kept watch here. So had the scholars of Caelverra, long before the Hollow King came.

But they were gone now.

All that remained were echoes.

And things that fed on them.

Lucien paused at an old waystone, cracked and leaning, its lettering worn by centuries of wind and neglect. Only a few words remained legible:

Beware the wells where no water sings.

Beware the names that wear no face.

Beware the roads that return you to places you’ve never been.

Beneath it, a crude carving had been added much later, scratched by blade or claw: HE WALKS. HE WALKS. HE WALKS.

Lucien’s breath caught in his throat.

The Hollow King had not always been a king.

He had once been called many names. The Severed God. The First Dreamer. The Last Echo. In the oldest songs those sung only in the forgotten corners of the world—he had been human.

Or something that pretended to be.

He had once walked as they did flesh, blood, breath. And then, when he peered too deeply into the Dream, when he sought to rewrite the world in its own memory, he ceased to be one thing.

And became many.

Lucien’s path wound through a dead orchard, trees brittle and white, their fruit withered and full of ash. Ravens gathered in silence, black eyes tracking him but never cawing. From the corners of his vision, he saw figures moving between the trunks—glimpses only. A swaying robe. A pale mask. A crooked crown.

The watchers again.

He stopped beneath a gnarled bough and spoke aloud, though no one stood before him. “Why do you follow me?”

A silence so deep it throbbed.

Then, from above, a voice like a dry wind whispered:

“Because you remember.”

Lucien turned swiftly but nothing stood there. Only a mask, hanging by a vine from the branch above. Carved from bone. Etched with the spiral.

He did not touch it.

Instead, he moved on. Faster now.

By twilight, he came to the ruins of a wayfarer’s temple its roof long collapsed, its columns leaning like weary pilgrims. Inside, dust lay thick over everything, but the air was heavy with something else: regret.

In the center of the chamber stood a fountain. Dry. Cracked. But in its basin, something shimmered faintly.

Lucien approached.

There, resting where water once ran, lay a book bound in dark hide. Its pages turned on their own, moved by no wind. As he drew closer, he saw that each page contained names —thousands of them. Names in languages he did not speak. Some glowing faintly. Others slashed out violently.

When his eyes reached the last page, it was blank.

Until a single line bled into view, as if inked by an unseen hand:

Lucien Dreamt, Not Yet Claimed.

He staggered back, heart thundering.

Something moved at the edge of the temple. A figure in silver robes. Maskless. Hollow-eyed.

Its voice was calm, but carried like thunder beneath the skin.

“You are not the first to seek the Shard.”

Lucien reached for the spiral stone, but the figure raised a hand.

“No harm. Only truth.”

Lucien swallowed. “Who are you?”

“A reflection. Nothing more. A page torn loose from a book long burned.” The figure stepped into the moonlight. Its face was Lucien’s. But older. Tired. Haunted.

“I am the version of you that failed.”

Lucien said nothing. His throat was dry.

“The Shard does not just reveal the past. It remembers every possibility. Every life you might have lived. Every choice not taken. Every betrayal not made. You will see them all. And if you are not strong… you will become one of us.”

Lucien looked around.

Now he saw them shapes slumped in the corners of the ruined temple. Dozens. Hundreds. All bearing his face. All locked in silence. Broken. Dream-lost.

“Why me?” he whispered.

The echo of himself tilted its head. “Because the Spiral chose you. Because the world forgets, and you do not.”

And then, the reflection faded, like a mirage.

Lucien left the temple at dawn. He did not sleep that night.

The land had begun to change again. Less ruined now. More quiet. The fields leading toward Caelverra were not empty they were waiting.

Statues stood in rows along the road—faceless sentinels, arms extended in supplication or judgment. Some wept water from stone eyes. Others bled shadow.

He passed one that whispered as he passed:

“He returns. He returns. He returns.”

Lucien didn’t look back.

He was no longer simply a traveler.

Saini / The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 18

He was a storm yet to break. And ahead of him, Caelverra slept.

For now.

The land flattened, then narrowed, funneling Lucien toward a ridge of jagged blackstone cliffs. Behind him stretched the wide hush of the Forgotten Reach, its ruins and watchers now nothing more than distant echoes. Ahead, carved into the bone of the earth, loomed Caelverra city of silence, of scholars and dreamers, and now, of shadows.

He had expected ruin. Crumbled walls. Empty towers. Vines wrapping once-proud columns like funeral shrouds.

What he found instead was stillness. Pristine. Preserved. And wrong.

Caelverra did not look abandoned. Its spires stood whole, gleaming with a pale inner light that pulsed in time with something unseen. Bridges stretched between high towers like gossamer threads, impossibly thin yet unbroken. Balconies opened to nowhere. Windows stared back at him like glass eyes, expressionless and watchful.

The great gates—once carved from whitewood and sealed by the Verdant Order— now stood half open. Not broken. Not forced.

Inviting.

Lucien slowed his pace. The spiral stone in his palm had grown hot. Not with warmth, but urgency. A heartbeat pounding out a warning his mind refused to understand. He stood before the gates, heart thundering in his chest.

On either side of the entrance were guardian statues twelve in total, six to a side hooded, faceless, robed in wind-swept stone. Each held a different object: a quill, a blade, a mask, a crown, a chalice, a mirror. The remaining six bore nothing. Their hands were empty, as if waiting to receive.

One of them Lucien swore shifted ever so slightly as he passed.

Beyond the gate, the city exhaled. No sound. No wind. But Lucien felt it in his bones.

A welcome. Or a warning.

He stepped over the threshold. Instantly, the world changed.

The air thickened dense, syrupy, dream-heavy. The cobblestones beneath his feet glowed faintly, veins of silver-threaded memory running through them like blood. Buildings loomed on either side, windows shuttered, doors closed. No faces peered out. No footsteps echoed but his own.

But he was not alone.

He felt them. The echoes. The dream-lost. The Watchers.

And something else.

Something deeper.

At the city’s heart rose the Spire of Sleep, its peak vanishing into a low-hanging sky stained violet by dreamlight. It pulsed with a rhythm that wasn’t sound but meaning. Memory. Hunger.

Lucien clutched the satchel tight, feeling the scrolls within rustle as though aware of where they now were. He dared not open them yet.

The spiral stone in his hand was glowing like a brand. His steps quickened not from fear, but necessity. The city was responding to him. Shifting.

A long street unfolded ahead, flanked by statues of hooded figures whose faces were weathered smooth. At the far end stood a circular plaza, and at its center…

A door.

Floating.

Unaffixed to any wall. No hinges. No frame.

A single door, perfectly still, standing in air.

It was made of dark wood, and carved into its center was the spiral. Not etched. Not painted. Grown. As if the wood had always known it must become this.

Lucien approached.

Every fiber of his being screamed that this was not a place meant for men.

But he was no longer just a man.

He was the vessel.

The dreamer.

The key.

He placed his hand against the door.

It was cold.

Then hot.

Then gone.

A great silence fell across Caelverra.

In the high towers, the scholars who had long since vanished turned their heads in unison stone mouths smiling.

In the hidden crypts below, the masks began to whisper once more.

In the vale between sleep and waking, the Hollow King opened his eyes.And in the Grove far behind, Caelwen stirred from her meditation, a single tear slipping down her cheek. It has begun, she whispered.

Chapter 2 Echoes Beneath Stone

“In Caelverra, knowledge was not a gift it was a debt. And those who failed to repay it were never seen again.”

Caelverra

The City of Still Minds. The Archive of the First Sleep. The Last Bastion of the Verdant Order. Built high in the mist-veiled mountains northeast of the Grove, Caelverra was not forged for trade, nor conquest, nor dominion. It was built to remember. Carved into stone and sky by those who fled the first unraveling of the Dreaming Vale, Caelverra stood as both sanctuary and vault. Its towers, etched with memory-glyphs and silvered runes, formed the Spiral Archive—a living library that did not simply preserve history, but fed upon it. It is said the walls could whisper what once was, and that the air within the city remembered every word spoken inside its halls.

The People of Caelverra

The Caelverran people were not a race, but a calling. Chosen from distant lands, they were brought as children, marked by strange dreams and an affinity for memory magic those who could see what had been, or what might yet be. These dream-marked were trained by the Verdant Order, the secretive ruling caste who served as both scholars and sentinels of the Dream. They wore robes dyed in starlight hues, their faces concealed behind polished wood

/ The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 22

masks carved with a single spiral. Their eyes were said to glow faintly with the color of memory itself blue when truth was spoken, red when it was buried.

Caelverra’s Creed: “Remember, that the world may remain.” This was no poetic ideal. To the Caelverrans, memory was sacred. It was the binding thread that held the Dream together. Forgetfulness was decay. Amnesia was corruption. And dreams untethered from history… were dangerous. They did not write books in ink. They grew them, in living memory-trees whose leaves whispered their contents only to those deemed worthy. They did not paint nor sculpt as other cultures did. Instead, they shaped dream-vaults pools of preserved memory sealed beneath glyph-stamped crystal. To be Caelverran was to be a custodian of remembrance. A walker between truth and echo. A weaver of what must not be forgotten.

Their Wars

Though scholars at heart, Caelverra was no stranger to war. They fought not for land or crown, but to preserve the world’s memory from those who sought to rewrite or erase it. Their most famous campaign was the War of the Hollow Names, waged against the DreamEaters of Drakkenfell and the Masked Apostates from the Folded World. It is said that entire legions vanished without a trace in that war not killed, but forgotten. Unwritten. Their bones dust, their names erased from every monument, even their mothers’ minds.

To protect themselves, Caelverran warriors known as Echo Blades wielded swords of crystallized memory, sharp enough to cut shadow and silence alike. These warriors trained not in brute strength, but in mental discipline so profound they could momentarily freeze time for those around them forcing enemies to relive the moment of their greatest regret before delivering the final blow. Their spellcasters, the Mnemonic Wards, could seal entire thoughts inside living stone. Cities fell not by siege, but by forgetting why they stood at all. And at the city’s center ruled the Council of Twelve Forgotten, led by the enigmatic Archivist-King Sirelthan, who had not spoken aloud in over a century. He communicated only through dreams sent to his advisors. It is whispered that Sirelthan once conversed directly with the Dream itself and was driven mad by what it showed him.

The Fall of Caelverra

No one knows exactly how Caelverra fell. One day, it was simply… gone. Not destroyed. Not conquered. Just absent. As though the world forgot it ever stood. Trade routes bent around its location. Maps blurred where it should have been. And those who lived in its shadow swore it had never existed at all. Only the Grove remembered. Only the Verdant trees

whispered of its silence. Now, it stirs again. And Lucien, marked by the First Sleep, steps through its gates. Caelverra did not welcome him. Nor did it reject him. It simply... observed.

Lucien moved slowly through the outer district, his footsteps the only sound in a city once brimming with scholars, dream-weavers, and silent sentinels. Buildings loomed on either side sleek towers built not of brick or stone, but of veined moonstone and crystal that shimmered faintly in hues that changed with every angle: silver, violet, faint green, like leaves under starlight. Each structure bore memory sigils, spirals etched in flowing strokes, glowing faintly only when Lucien’s gaze lingered. Many of these sigils throbbed in rhythm with his spiral stone, as if recognizing him. Or remembering him.

There were no signs of decay. No collapsed walls. No scorch marks. Everything remained pristine but hollow. Too hollow. As if war had scrubbed the city clean of presence, not, but by forgetting. At a crossroads of four crystalline streets stood a pedestal its top smooth, circular, and engraved with layered spirals. Lucien reached out, brushing the surface. It pulsed. Then, without warning, the air shimmered. A vision unfolded around him not illusion, but memory preserved in space. The plaza filled with ghostly figures: masked scholars walking side by side, robes rustling soundlessly; children chasing flickers of light with laughter Lucien couldn’t hear; towering Archivists gliding toward the central spire with scrolls suspended in mid-air around them. It lasted mere seconds. Then the memory snapped back into silence. Lucien exhaled shakily. These were not ghosts. Not spirits. They were echoes the city’s last breath, replaying what it could no longer live. He pressed on.

The Spiral Archives

Lucien followed the main path until he reached the Spiral Archives a towering structure rising at the city’s heart like a great spine of memory. Its outer shell was constructed from interlocking plates of obsidian and crystal, inscribed with language far older than the Common Tongue. Glyphs spiraled inward like a vortex, drawing the eye and the mind deeper with every glance. The great entrance bore no doors, only a threshold of shimmer, a translucent veil rippling gently in the air. Lucien stepped through it. The sensation was immediate like plunging into deep water, but with no wetness, only pressure. Inside, the Archive breathed. Every wall, floor, and column was lined with living memory. Not books. Not shelves. But Memory-Vinespale golden tendrils coiled in spirals that pulsed with quiet thought. They grew out of the walls, weaved together like roots beneath glass, each segment whispering faint voices, too soft to comprehend.

As Lucien walked, some vines unfurled, reaching toward him. They brushed his skin, triggering flashes in his mind: A hooded figure kneeling before the Hollow Pool. A dreamer

plummeting through stars toward a tower made of screaming faces. A woman masked holding the Dream Shard as it fractured in her hands. He recoiled, heart hammering. These were not dreams. These were warnings.

The Upper Sanctum

A staircase of floating stone disks rose through the center of the Archive. Lucien climbed cautiously, passing suspended halls that twisted like snail shells, each one humming with stored memory. At the top, he reached the Upper Sanctum, a chamber shaped like an open flower of marble and glass. In its center, hovering without support, was a Map of the Dreaming Realms a three-dimensional cartograph of the world as it was before the First Sleep fractured it. It was not static. The land shifted and twisted, folding in and out of itself like a dream attempting to recall its own logic. The Grove glowed green and gold. The Hollow Pool throbbed with an oily blue. Drakkenfell smoked even in miniature. But the Folded World… was gone.

Lucien stepped closer. A single spiral sigil rotated above the map, slowly shifting to form a different symbol a broken crown made of mirrored shards. The Hollow King. Lucien stared, transfixed. Suddenly, the chamber dimmed. Shadows lengthened, and a new presence stirred. Behind him, a voice like cracking parchment whispered: “You are not the first to find us.” Lucien turned sharply. A figure stood at the far end of the chamber. Not masked. Not fully human. Clad in layered scholar’s robes that shimmered between real and not, the figure’s skin was the color of moonlit ash. Its eyes bore no pupils only silver spirals that spun slowly, relentlessly.

“Who are you?” Lucien asked. The figure tilted its head. “A remnant. A record. I am what remains of High Archivist Halven, Dreamscribe of the Ninth Spire. My body was forgotten. But the city remembers me still.” Lucien stepped closer. “Why am I here?”

Halven’s eyes flickered. “Because the spiral is turning again. The First Sleep stirs. The Dream Shard calls. And you ” He paused. “ you are already unraveling.” Lucien froze. Halven raised a hand. From the walls around them, dozens of dream-vines bloomed, revealing stored memories. Images flickered across them: Lucien standing in the Garden of Hollow Names, surrounded by masks whispering his true name. Lucien kneeling in Drakkenfell’s ash fields, coughing blood beside a burned book. Lucien plunging into the River of Silence, dragging a chained figure behind him. Lucien… crowned.

“What you are,” Halven said, voice echoing, “is not yet fixed. Caelverra remembers the many yous. And not all of them chose to save the world.” The Archivist’s form flickered. “But there is still time.” “Find the Dream Shard. Restore the Seal. Or the Hollow King will

Saini / The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 25

wake in full.” And then He vanished. Lucien stood alone in the sanctum. Beneath him, the Spiral Archives whispered his name in a dozen forgotten tongues. The city was stirring. And the Dream was remembering him faster than he could remember himself.

Below the Archive The Chamber of Unfinished Names

Lucien remained in the sanctum long after the remnant of High Archivist Halven had faded. Around him, the dream-vines stilled. The spiraling glyphs on the walls no longer shifted. The air was thick with a waiting silence as if the Archive itself was deciding what to do with him. Then, the stone floor beneath him breathed. Not a tremor. Not a collapse. A soft exhalation—intentional. A circular platform rose from the center of the room, etched with a six-fold spiral. At its center: a depression, precisely the size and shape of the spiral stone Lucien carried. His hand moved before his mind did. He placed the stone into the hollow. The room changed instantly. Walls peeled away in layers like petals unfolding, revealing a dark spiral staircase carved into the stone beneath the sanctum. Cold air rose from below, carrying with it the scent of old iron, salt, and something darker like sleep turned sour. Lucien descended. Each step down was a descent through time. The architecture changed. No longer gleaming moonstone and glass, but rough, dark stone veined with memory crystals that glowed faintly red. The glyphs here were older cruder. Some were not spirals, but fractures. Shards of the spiral.

As he reached the bottom, Lucien entered a vast underground chamber, spherical and hollow. The walls shimmered with embedded faces not carved, but grown into the stone their mouths open in eternal scream, their eyes stitched shut by glimmering threads of silver root. At the room’s center stood a black monolith, twelve feet high and pulsing with an inner glow. Wrapped around its base were chains, thick and rusted, forged not of metal but crystallized memory. Lucien took one step closer. The air cracked a voice, a whisper, but not from any throat. “Lucien of the Spiral. Third-born of the Forgotten Line. Your mind is not yet yours.” He turned slowly. A figure stood to the side of the monolith tall, hunched, its form hidden beneath layered rags and chains of runes. A broken mask half spiral, half mirror hid its face. It held a staff made of bone. Lucien froze. This was not a remnant. This was not an echo. This was something still alive.

“You bear the Dream’s wound,” it said, voice like dry leaves. “You walk with names not your own. You have not yet remembered the one that was taken.” Lucien stepped back. “Who are you?” The figure tilted its head. “A keeper. A jailer. A sinner.” It raised a hand to the monolith. “And that… is one of your names.” Lucien stared at the monolith. The glow within it began to flicker, images swimming across its surface: Lucien, cloaked in thorns,

leading a legion of masked warriors into Drakkenfell. Lucien, breaking the seal to the Folded World. Lucien, standing beside the Hollow King, whispering “We are the same.” Lucien’s knees buckled. He staggered. “No,” he whispered. “That’s not me.” The figure took a slow step forward. Its chains dragged across the floor, carving glowing scars in the stone. “Not yet.”

The Forgotten Vault

Lucien fled deeper into the chamber. The monolith pulsed behind him. His stone returned to his hand hot as flame now, pulsing with light. The walls shifted. He entered a narrow corridor lined with sealed doors each marked with the sigil of a name erased. These were the Vaults of Unfinished Nameswhere Caelverrans had sealed memories too dangerous to record. One door glowed faintly. The spiral upon it throbbed in sync with his stone. He placed a hand against it. The seal unwound. Inside, he found a small chamber, no larger than a cell. Within stood a pedestal bearing a shard of glowing crystal the Dream Shard. But it was incomplete. Cracked. Whispering. As he approached, his mind was assaulted with visions: The Grove dying, its roots turned to ash. The River of Memory running black. The Garden of Hollow Names, every mask broken. The Hollow King rising from the Folded World. He reached out. The moment his fingers touched the shard he screamed.

Elsewhere A Stirring

Far away, in the volcano-shrouded peaks of Drakkenfell, a sentinel wreathed in cinders turned its gaze eastward. In the Hollow Pool, its glasslike surface rippled for the first time in a century. In Tharn, a bell tolled deep beneath the mountains, though no hand had touched it. In the Garden of Hollow Names, a thousand masks trembled, and one shattered. And in the Folded World, a presence woke. One eye. Then two. Then many. And they all remembered Lucien.

Back in Caelverra, Lucien collapsed. His hand still on the shard. His breath shallow. His eyes now glowing faintly with a silver spiral. He whispered a name. Not his own. But familiar. “Sirelthan…” And somewhere, in the dreaming vaults below the city, the ArchivistKing stirred.

Caelverra Below

The Dreamroot Deepens

Lucien did not remember falling. He remembered only the taste of lightning, the smell of old ash, and the feeling of being pulled inward as if the shard had reached into him, searching, measuring, comparing him to every version of himself that had ever been dreamed or remembered. Then blackness. Then motion. He stood in a room with no walls. A sky

without stars above. A floor made of echo. He was not alone. Figures surrounded him, countless in number silhouettes without form. Each bore his face, twisted in variations he could not imagine. Lucien the Tyrant, Lucien the Broken, Lucien the Hollow. All stared at him. All waited. Then one stepped forward. Not the oldest. Not the youngest. But the one who still remembered. “You are late,” it said. “But not too late.” “Who are you?” Lucien whispered. “I am the name you buried. The oath you broke. The self you could not face.” Its eyes glowed with mirrored spirals. Lucien fell to one knee. The weight was unbearable. The Dream Shard, even fractured, had awoken something deeper than memory. It had awoken Sirelthan.

The Tomb of the Archivist-King Lucien awoke lying upon a slab of white crystal. The room around him was vast and dark, shaped like an inverted cone carved deep beneath the Spiral Archives. Runes flickered across the ceiling like drifting stars. Pillars lined the walls, each one bearing a single glowing mask. At the room’s far end stood a throne of silence—not gold, not stone, but woven from the silver roots of the Dreamroot Tree itself, petrified over centuries. And upon it sat the Archivist-King. Sirelthan. His robes were motionless. His skin was stretched thin across a face that was both human and not, its features smooth, ageless, unmarred, as if carved from memory itself. Spirals etched into his skin pulsed gently. His crown was not worn—it grew from his skull: jagged branches shaped like bone, cracked from time and thought. His eyes were closed. But his mind—his mind was awake.

Lucien stepped forward. He heard no voice. No words. Only a sudden pressure in his skull a weight behind his eyes. A thought, placed into him like a dagger: “You dream too shallowly, Lucien.” Lucien staggered. “Sirelthan?” A second thought pressed in: “The spiral is turning again. The seal is failing. You carry its shard.” Lucien nodded, unsure if the king could even see him. “It called to me.” A long silence. Then: “You are a vessel of remembering. But remembering is not enough.” The throne stirred. One branch of the crown twisted gently. The air in the room thickened. Spirals began to form in the air around Lucien made of mist, of starlight, of shadow. They rotated around him, each one drawing nearer. One entered his chest. He gasped. It burned. “You must be made ready.” Lucien fell to his knees, clutching his ribs as his memories all of them were pulled forth and scattered. Childhood. The Grove. Caelwen. The watchers. The dream. The war-that-had-not-yet-come. Everything was laid bare in the air. Then… something else entered. Memories not his own.

· Sirelthan speaking with the Hollow King, before he bore the title.

· A pact, made in secret, to delay the end of the First Sleep.

· The fracturing of the Dream Shard by Sirelthan’s own hand.

· The betrayal of Caelverra.

· The unraveling.

Lucien gasped aloud. “You broke the shard.” “Yes.” “You let this happen.” “To preserve what could not be remembered, I had to erase what should not have been.” “I did not fail Caelverra. I unwrote it to save it.” The spiral glyphs surrounding Lucien burst into flame. And in their light, he saw it: The Spiral Seal fractured and dying hovering in the air like a dying star. Sirelthan raised one hand. The shards of the Dream Stone rose from Lucien’s satchel. All but one. “They must be restored.” Lucien gritted his teeth. “How?” “You must seek the remaining fragments. In places the Dream has turned sour.”

The Pilgrimage of the Shard

The king’s thoughts came faster now, flickering like lightning: “In Tharn, the storm of silence still howls. In Drakkenfell, memory burns in ash. In the Folded World, names unravel. And in the Garden of Hollow Names… even the dead forget themselves.” Lucien shivered. “You must go to each. You must return what was lost. You must bind the Spiral anew.” “And if I fail?” Lucien whispered. The throne pulsed once. “Then the Hollow King becomes the only memory left. And the world becomes a dream none can wake from.”

Sirelthan’s eyes opened. They were mirrors. Lucien saw himself in them. And behind his own reflection A throne of thorns. A voice without a body. A crown… waiting.

Lucien fell backward, breathing hard. The throne dimmed. The king closed his eyes again. And once more, became memory. He rose slowly, gathering what remained of himself. The chamber was still. The Dream Shard fragment glowed faintly in his hand, warm with purpose. He knew where he had to go next. But each step from here would cost him. Not just time. Not just pain. But pieces of himself.

The Road to Tharn

“In Tharn, silence has teeth. It does not wait for you to speak it takes your voice before you even think.”

Departure from Caelverra

Lucien left Caelverra beneath a bruised sky. The gates did not close behind him. They merely faded stone and glyphs unraveling like a dream that no longer wished to be remembered. As he turned back for one final glance, the city already seemed distant. Not in space, but in memory. Like something slipping from the edges of thought. The path to Tharn was unmarked. No road. No trail. Only instinct and the pull of the Dream Shard fragment now embedded beneath Lucien’s ribs, pulsing like a second heart. It led him northeast, past the River of Memory, where the waters murmured forgotten names, and through cold woods

where the trees grew slanted, as if leaning away from something unseen. And always above, looming in shadow, was the mountain range known as Tharn.

Tharn – The Mountains Without Sound

The first sign he had crossed into Tharn came not from sight, but from loss. Lucien spoke aloud only to hear nothing. No voice. No echo. Even the crunch of his boots on snow was muted, swallowed by a pressure in the air that thickened with every step. The winds howled here, but not with noise with absence. A soundless scream that scraped at his thoughts. His memories blurred. The names of things faded at the edges. Even his own name grew distant, like it belonged to someone else. Tharn was a place devoured by its own silence. The locals, long vanished, had called it Sareth-Ena, which in the Old Tongue meant The Mouth That Consumes Meaning. Lucien pressed on.

The Ghost Forts of Tharn

Half-buried in snow and mountain fog, Lucien discovered the Ghost Forts old Caelverran outposts built during the War of Hollow Names. They were designed not for defense, but for containment. Within them had been sealed the worst relics of that war: broken memory-forges, spiral grenades, and Voice Lures weapons that fed upon sound, identity, and will. The outposts were empty now. Not destroyed. Not ransacked. Just… uninhabited. Faded as if they had simply been skipped over in the dream of the world. In the heart of one such ruin, Lucien found a slab engraved with a dying spiral its lines frayed, breaking apart at the edges. Beneath it was an inscription: “They took our voices. We gave them names. But names are not enough.” And there, wrapped in frozen cloth, Lucien found a body. His own. Or a version of it. Eyes missing. Tongue blackened. Chest torn open. He staggered back. Not a corpse. A warning.

The Whispering Cold

The deeper he traveled into Tharn, the colder it became but not a cold of nature. This was Memory Cold a cold born of unspoken things, of secrets so ancient they had frozen in place. Even his dreams grew silent. No visions. No voices. Only a stillness so complete it felt like drowning. He saw no birds. No beasts. Only shapes, shifting in the fog. Humanoid. Watchers. Tall and bent. Wrapped in cloaks of unraveling silence. Their faces covered in cloth marked with crude spirals drawn in ash. They made no sound. But they moved when he turned. They followed at a distance. Never attacking. Only watching. Like they were waiting for him to forget what he was doing. Why he had come.

The Shard Tomb

At last, at the peak of the highest pass, Lucien reached a circle of standing stones, each marked with a broken spiral and facing inward. In their center was a frozen altar, encased in crystalized silence. Here, the Tharn Fragment of the Dream Shard was kept. But it was guarded. Not by steel. Not by spell. But by silence made flesh. As Lucien stepped toward the altar, the air thickened. His thoughts slowed. He couldn’t remember his name. He couldn’t remember Caelwen’s face. He couldn’t remember why he had come. And that’s when it rose from the ice. A creature formless at first then shaped by the memories Lucien was losing. It grew tall, draped in formless black robes, stitched from the names Lucien had forgotten. Its face was a blank mirror. A nameless warden. A Silencewraith. It lunged.

The Fight for Identity

Lucien dodged, barely. The wraith moved like a thought not bound by speed or body, but pure negation. Each time it touched him, a memory slipped. He saw flashes: Caelverra. The Grove. Caelwen. A mother’s voice. A name whispered in the dark. Gone. Gone. Gone. Lucien staggered. Fell to one knee. He couldn’t fight something he couldn’t touch. Not with steel. Not with spells. Only with self. He reached into his satchel. Pulled out the second scroll the one bound in black twine. The scroll of Protection. With shaking hands, he unraveled it. Inside was a single word. His true name. One that no Silencewraith could devour. He spoke it aloud even though no sound emerged. The wraith screamed not with noise, but with unraveling. It burst apart into threads of thought, which the wind of Tharn carried into the sky like broken whispers. Lucien collapsed.

The Shard Awakened

He crawled to the altar. Within the ice sat the Tharn Fragment small, silver, fractured. He touched it. And the memories returned in a flood. Caelwen’s face. The Grove’s hum. The Archivist-King’s warning. The Hollow King’s shadow. The road ahead. He took the shard. It merged with the one he already carried. Two now. Two of five. And the Spiral turned once more.

The Garden of Hollow Names

“Here, the dead are not buried. They are worn.”

Departure from Tharn

The climb down from Tharn was longer than Lucien remembered going up or perhaps the mountain no longer agreed with linear time. Snow thinned, but the silence clung to him like frost in the bones. Even now, after retrieving the Tharn Shard, his voice returned only in pieces. Sentences died in his throat. Words tasted foreign. Still, the shard pulsed with purpose. He followed its pull southward past the River of Silence, where birds drowned in

songless air, and through a ravine lined with statues whose faces had been smoothed away. At the bottom of the valley, the mist thickened not natural fog, but memory mist, a vapor spun from forgotten names and fractured echoes. Here, Lucien arrived at the Garden of Hollow Names. And the air immediately changed.

Entering the Garden

The Garden was not a garden in the way mortals imagined it. There were no flowers. No orchards. No cultivated paths. Only stone, and masks, and silence so heavy it bent the spine. Stone pillars rose from the ground at irregular angles thousands of them each wrapped in roots of petrified memory and crowned with a hollow mask. They were not carved. They were grown. Each mask was different. Some wept. Some screamed. Some grinned. They were not decoration. They were faces. Preserved. Remembered. Alive. Lucien walked among them slowly. As he passed, some masks turned slightly. Others whispered, though not in sound. Their thoughts brushed against his like cobwebs: broken memories, half-phrases, the final thoughts of those who had worn them in life. This was where the Verdant Order brought their dead. Not to be buried. But to be remembered.

The Warden of Masks

At the Garden’s center stood a vast archway, beneath which hung a mask twice Lucien’s height, suspended by chains of glowing bark. Beneath it knelt a figure neither man nor statue tall and skeletal, robed in grave-silk and stitched runes. Its face was not masked. It was missing. Not torn off. Not blank. Simply… absent. As Lucien approached, it stirred. The figure rose, impossibly tall, dragging behind it a long staff made from spiral-wrought bones. “You seek the shard,” it rasped. “But here, you must earn the right to remember.” Lucien tightened his grip on the shard. “Who are you?” “The Warden of Faces. The first who forgot. The last who will ever forget again.” Its voice came from everywhere, and nowhere. “Speak a name, Lucien. Any name. And the Garden will show you how it died.” Lucien swallowed hard. “Caelwen.”

The masks around him twisted. A low keening filled the mist. Then A vision bloomed. Caelwen, younger. Kneeling at the edge of the Grove. Placing a mask her own upon a pyre of roots. Speaking a vow to the Dream. Her eyes glowing with moonlight. Her voice steady: “Let the world forget me, so it may remember itself.” Lucien stumbled back, gasping. The Warden tilted its head. “She gave up her name to protect yours. And you do not yet remember what you cost her.” The masks whispered again. “You were not only the vessel. You were the one who broke the seal. You brought the First Sleep back.” “No,”

Lucien whispered. “Yes. But not in this life. In another. And another. The Garden remembers all Luciens.”

The Trial of Memory

The Warden raised its staff. “To claim the Shard, you must face what you’ve buried.” Before Lucien, the ground split. From it rose a reflection of himself. Clad in the same clothes. Holding the same stone. But this Lucien wore a mask cracked, gold-rimmed, and screaming. “You are not ready,” the mask-Lancien said. “You still believe you are innocent.” Lucien drew his blade. No spells. No scrolls. Only truth. They clashed. Steel met steel, but the real battle was not in the blows. Each strike from the mask-Lancien forced Lucien to remember:

· The first time he stood before the Hollow King and did not resist.

· The betrayal of Sirelthan in a forgotten cycle.

· The time he let the Spiral seal fall—so he could live free.

· The lives he ruined when he chose silence.

Lucien dropped to one knee. His mirror pressed the blade to his throat. But then Lucien whispered a single word: “Caelwen.” And the shard pulsed. The mask cracked. And shattered. The mirror vanished. Lucien rose, alone, breathless. The Warden knelt once more. “Take it. But remember every shard you reclaim brings you closer not only to the truth... But to becoming what you were.”

The Garden Shard

The shard hovered beneath the giant mask. Lucien reached up. This fragment was different colder. It hummed with mourning. It joined the others within his satchel without resistance, and a new spiral etched itself into the bone of his forearm. Three shards now. And the spiral burned brighter. Behind him, the masks began to sing. Not with sound. But with memory. Lucien walked out of the Garden of Hollow Names with the weight of a thousand lives. The Spiral Tightens

On his back. The path ahead was burning. Drakkenfell “What is forgotten here was burned. What remains was meant to hurt you.”

Through the Ashen Skies

The air changed long before the land did. Lucien passed into Drakkenfell beneath a sun veiled by smoke. The sky bled red and orange, with black ash falling like snow in reverse. Each flake hissed against his skin, carrying memory not of heat but of loss. The very ground trembled beneath his boots not alive, but restless. As though the mountain itself remembered too much and wished only to forget through fire. Here, in this scorched realm of craters, ridgelines, and rivers of molten glass, time did not pass. It staggered. It limped

forward and then fell backward again, looping in brief hallucinations of what was, and what could have been. Lucien could feel it: the shard’s call. Closer now. But unlike the others, the Drakkenfell Fragment didn’t guide him forward. It pulled him downward.

The Bones of the Betrayed

At the base of the Obsidian Spire a mountain cleft in half and smoldering with internal fire Lucien discovered an old battlefield. Not ruins. Not graves. But flesh fused with stone. Bodies hundreds encased in volcanic glass, still standing as if frozen in mid-charge. Warriors in Caelverran robes. Dream-scribes. Echo Blades. Even beasts that Lucien did not recognize: scaled, horned, breathing out the remnants of flame-borne dreams. All preserved. All shattered in silence. At the field’s center lay a spiral-shaped crater, glowing faintly with violet heat. Lucien stepped near. Instantly, he collapsed gripped by memory not his own.

A Vision of the Past: The First Scorching

He stood, armored in silver and black. A great host of Caelverran sentinels knelt behind him. Before him burned the valley that would become Drakkenfell. And across from him his mirror. The man who would become the Hollow King. Not yet crowned. Not yet broken. A dreamer, like Lucien. Eyes full of belief. Voice gentle. Hands trembling.

“We were wrong,” the man whispered. “The Shard cannot be contained.”

Lucien his past self stepped forward. “Then we seal it here. Burn its path. Let fire remember what we cannot.”

“And if it survives?”

“Then we become the guardians of a flame no one must see.”

The vision shattered. Lucien gasped awake. He had been here before. Not in this life. But in another. He had helped seal the Drakkenfell Shard beneath the earth. And now he had come back for it.

The Descent into the Hollow Furnace

The obsidian mountain was no natural structure. Its interior was carved a spiral shaft descending into magma-veined stone, walls lined with cooling runes of the Verdant Order. Many were shattered. Others twisted melted into symbols that no longer obeyed their meaning. Lucien descended, the air growing hotter with every step. The shard within him pulsed irregularly, like a heart too frightened to beat correctly. He reached the bottom. There, he found the Hollow Furnace. A chamber of pure fire, suspended by molten tendrils of rootlike stone. In its center floated the Drakkenfell Shard, encased in crystal flame, tethered to the bones of something vast and dead a seraphic construct, used by the Verdant Order in the war. Its skull still burned. And beside it stood its guardian.

The Forged Remnant

It was Lucien, again. But not of flesh. This one was forged a suit of blackened memory-armor, runes glowing red-hot, eyes like coals, breath replaced with smoke. It spoke with Lucien’s voice, distorted and cold: “You swore never to wake it.”

“I have no choice,” Lucien said, blade drawn. “The Spiral calls.”

“Then burn with it.”

The Trial of Fire

Lucien’s memories ignited. Every pain he’d buried came forth.

· The friends he’d sacrificed in past lives to seal the Dream Shard.

· The time he left Caelwen behind, bleeding in the Grove, so that he could flee with the shard.

· His betrayal of the Verdant Order.

His body blistered. His mind screamed. But through it all he remembered one thing. He was not that Lucien anymore. He was this Lucien. He cast off the fire not with resistance, but with acceptance. He sheathed his blade. And stepped forward unarmed into the fire.

“I remember what I was. And I still choose to go on.”

The Forged Remnant faltered. Its armor cracked. And it spoke, softly now: “Then take the shard… and beware. Every step forward burns away who you were.” It fell to its knees. Shattered. And was gone.

The Drakkenfell Shard

Lucien reached into the core of the furnace. The crystal flame did not burn him. Not now. Not anymore. The shard slid into his hand, hissing softly like a breath released after centuries. The four fragments within him pulsed as one. Only one remained. Only the Folded World still awaited. He turned to leave. And behind him, the seraphic construct whispered, though dead: “He waits for you… where even dreams cannot follow.”

“Before the Fold, before the End, there is always a pause a breath between truths.”

The Wound Beneath the World

The land behind Lucien burned. Even now, as he walked away from the shattered chamber of Drakkenfell’s core, the heat of memory still clung to him not physical, but emotional. Like grief that would not fade, no matter how long you walked, no matter how many times you tried to forget. He had four fragments of the Dream Shard now. And each one beat with its own rhythm. Each one sang a different sorrow. The Spiral Stone on his chest had cracked in two placesnot from damage, but from strain. As though the weight of what he carried was too much for one soul to bear. The sky was dark when he reached the Dreaming

Vale. But no stars shone. Only the spiral-shaped moon overhead slightly broken now, edges frayed, its glow flickering like candlelight caught in wind.

The Dreaming Vale

This was no mere location. It was a between-place—a place that did not exist unless you needed it to. And now, it waited for Lucien. Tall grass swayed in impossible wind. Trees bloomed upside down, their roots digging into starlight. Rivers flowed sideways, carving the air into thin threads of mist and song. This realm was shaped by thought, but hardened by memory. And Caelwen stood there. Just as she had in the Grove, when all of this began. But different. Fainter. Frayed around the edges, like a sketch half-finished. Lucien approached slowly, unsure if this was truly her… or a memory given shape. She turned before he spoke. Eyes soft. Voice unchanged.

“You brought fire back into the Spiral.”

Lucien nodded, not trusting his voice. “And silence,” she added, smiling faintly. “And grief. And remembrance.”

“I found the fragments,” he finally said. “All but one.”

“I know.” Caelwen moved to him not as a ghost, but as something close to real. She placed a hand over his chest, where the shards pulsed within him like cold suns. “They remember you. Not just this version of you. All of them. And they are afraid.”

Lucien stepped back. “Afraid of what?”

Her eyes glistened. “Of who you might still become.”

The Choice to Remember

Lucien fell to one knee in the vale’s soft grass. He felt tired. Not in body. But in identity. Each step had brought him closer to something ancient something vast, coiled in the center of the Spiral, waiting for him. He could feel the last fragment the Folded World tugging at him now. But it wasn’t just a pull. It was a scream. A rupture. A warning.

“When you take the last shard,” Caelwen said gently, “you will no longer be Lucien as you are now. The Spiral does not forget. It unites.”

He looked up. “What if I become him?”

She smiled sadly. “Then you must become something stronger than him.”

The Mask of Caelwen

She reached into her robes, drawing forth something wrapped in dreamcloth. She placed it into his hands. A mask. Made of bark and goldleaf. Carved with a spiral that wept at the eye. “When you enter the Folded World,” she said, “you will need to remember who you are. This mask bears your truest memory. Not your name. Not your duty. Just… your heart.”

Lucien held it close. “You’ll see me again?” he asked quietly. She nodded once. “At the end. One way or another.” And then—as dreams do—she was gone.

The End of Chapter Two

Lucien stood alone in the Vale. The sky cracked above him, peeling like old parchment. A doorway formed in the air twisting inward, spiraling not into light, but into folded geometry into a world not meant to be known. The Folded World had opened. The place where the Spiral was first wounded. The place where Lucien’s other self had been born. He turned once more, holding the mask tightly. Then stepped into the spiral. And the Dream held its breath.

Chapter 3 The Dreaming Vale

“The dream remembers. And it calls to you.”

There was no path into the Dreaming Vale. No road carved by pilgrims or maps inked by memory. There was only the falling.

Sleep did not take Lucien like a gentle tide, nor did it seize him with force. It arrived like forgetting. One moment he sat beneath the leaning pine, watching the sky drift behind clouds that never seemed to move. The next, he opened his eyes to a world that was familiar only in the way a song half-remembered is familiar, or the scent of a mother’s voice long lost.

The stars above him were not stars. They pulsed with an unsteady rhythm, flickering with memories not his own. The sky was a canvas of color in motion, bleeding hues that did not belong to any sunrise or sunset. And the trees around him, tall and sinuous, leaned inward, forming arches of bark that sighed when he walked beneath them.

Lucien stepped forward, though he had no memory of standing. The ground was soft beneath his feet, not like earth or moss, but something older, more uncertain. It gave just slightly, as if the land was deciding whether to let him pass.

A whisper followed him. Not from behind, not from any direction at all. It was the whisper of something thinking about him. Not watching. Not speaking. Just thinking.

He passed a hollow where the mist curled inwards, spiraling gently, never dispersing. From within it came the sound of breath, though nothing moved. Shapes drifted in and out of

the haze, faces without form, eyes without sorrow, as if the Vale itself was dreaming and he had intruded upon it.

Lucien moved deeper.

He found a river that did not flow. Its surface was perfectly still, reflecting not the trees above, but places he had never seen. A black sun over a silver field. A tower made of bone. A young woman in white standing in a storm, her hands stained with ash. He crouched beside it and peered into the water, hoping to find his own reflection. What stared back was himself, but not as he was. This version of Lucien had hollow eyes and a crown of thorns pressed into his brow. Behind him stood a figure draped in fog, too vast to name, whose presence pressed against the limits of the vision.

Lucien stepped back.

Everywhere, the air smelled of memory. Not of things remembered, but of the act of remembering. A sweetness touched with salt. A breeze that carried voices he did not recognize, each murmuring half-truths into the folds of his mind.

He passed beneath a willow whose branches hung like broken promises. Each leaf shimmered faintly, reflecting faces that changed whenever he blinked. At the base of the tree sat a woman made of moths. Her body shimmered with constant motion, her edges dissolving and reforming. She raised a hand and beckoned.

Lucien took a single step toward her.

The moths scattered. Where she had sat, only a pile of petals remained. When he knelt to touch them, they crumbled into ash.

He did not speak. Speech felt intrusive here. Like shouting in a room filled with prayers.

Further on, he came upon a door.

It stood alone in a meadow of whispering grass, unattached to wall or frame. The wood was old and knotted, the handle shaped like a sleeping eye. Without knowing why, Lucien reached for it.

The metal was warm, as though it had been touched recently. He opened the door and stepped through.

He entered a cathedral made of candle smoke. Columns rose into darkness and dissolved before reaching any ceiling. The air was heavy with incense that smelled like snow and ink. At the altar, a boy knelt. Lucien recognized him instantly.

It was himself.

The child wore a tattered cloak and wept without sound. Each tear fell onto the stone and became a mask. The masks arranged themselves in a circle around him, each bearing a different expression. Joy. Sorrow. Fury. Hope. Emptiness.

As Lucien drew closer, the child looked up.

“You forgot,” he said. His voice was small, but it echoed through the vaulted chamber like thunder whispered into glass.

“I never knew,” Lucien replied.

The masks began to twitch.

“You chose to forget. We all did.”

One by one, the masks turned their hollow eyes toward him.

“King,” whispered one.

“Betrayer,” hissed another.

“Key,” breathed a third.

“Echo. Scar. Liar.”

Lucien turned away, and when he looked back, the cathedral was gone.

He stood now on a narrow bridge, suspended above a valley that shimmered with stars. Not stars in the sky, but stars in the water below. The bridge was made of woven thought. With every step, he heard words unspoken. Regrets he had never dared to voice.

He looked down.

The waters shimmered with visions. A tower burning. A mask cracking. A figure— his own—kneeling before a man crowned in bone.

Lucien turned his gaze away.

He knew now. This place was not dream.

It was remembering.

And it remembered everything he wished to forget.

Where the Sky Weeps Light

The stars above Lucien fractured. They did not fade, nor fall. They simply cracked apart, each one bleeding thin ribbons of silver flame into the sky. The sky drank it in silence.

No thunder. No storm. Just light that fell like sorrow from a wound the heavens had forgotten how to close.

He stood at the edge of a cliff shaped like a ribcage. Below, the land spiraled inward, not in geography, but in memory. Mountains looped over themselves, bleeding down into valleys filled with hollow statues men, women, beasts frozen in gestures of prayer, of agony, of reaching for something long since gone.

Lucien stepped into the spiral path.

The ground moaned.

Each step dragged the Vale around him tighter. The mist thickened, no longer cool but clinging. It wrapped around his legs like fabric soaked in loss. Trees loomed larger here, not just tall but wrong, their trunks shaped like vertebrae, their leaves whispering in tongues too ancient to translate.

He saw markings etched into their bark. Spirals, broken and twisted. Beneath them, names scratched out violently. Memory had been buried here. And something had dug it up.

The Grove That Never Was Lucien came upon a clearing. There, an echo of the Grove stretched before him, beautiful and rotted at once. Trees shaped like those he had known, but hollowed out, their centers replaced with mirrors that shimmered not with light, but with regret. The ground bore the footprints of a thousand lives, all shaped like his.

The wind here spoke with Caelwen’s voice. It carried laughter she had never shared, promises she had never made, and warnings he had never heard.

“You were not supposed to come back,” it whispered.

The reflection of himself shimmered in every mirrored tree. In one, he saw himself walking away from the Grove, alone. In another, kneeling before Caelwen as she faded into roots. In a third, standing over her grave, holding the Spiral Stone like a blade.

He looked away.

When he turned again, the Grove had withered entirely. What had been tree and leaf was now ash and bone.

From the bone grew roses, black as dried blood. They whispered.

“You buried the Dream.”

“You brought it back.”

“You are the wound, not the healer.”

Lucien pressed onward, heart burning with a fear he could not name.

The Parade of the Forgotten

The path narrowed. The Vale guided him now, its will a soft pressure at his back. He passed under a gate made of antlers and broken promises. Beyond it, a procession moved slowly across the land. Hooded figures. Tall. Slender. Robed in memory. Their faces were covered in cloth inscribed with spirals that shifted when he looked too long.

One paused as he neared.

Its hands were long and jointless, like carved ivory. From its sleeves fell hundreds of ribbons, each marked with a single name.

Lucien’s name was among them.

The figure offered no threat. It merely tilted its head, as if asking a question he would never be able to answer.

The rest of the procession marched on. Some held masks. Others dragged coffins made of glass, inside which floated versions of himself.

One held a younger Lucien, no older than twelve, sleeping peacefully in a bed of feathers. Another showed him at Caelverra, bound and kneeling before the Archivist-King. A third bled from the eyes, whispering into a broken shard.

Lucien turned away.

He began to run.

The Door of Thorns

He ran until the Vale let him stop.

The forest fell away to reveal a single structure: a door grown into the side of a hill, not built but birthed. Vines shaped like veins wrapped it tightly. At its center, a spiral pulsed faintly, red as a dying star. The door had no handle. No hinges. Only waiting.

Lucien approached, and the spiral stone in his palm grew hot.

As his fingers brushed the wood, the door breathed. It opened.

Darkness spilled forth, not absence of light, but presence of memory. It poured over him in a flood of whispers and colors.

Saini / The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 42

He stepped inside.

The Cathedral of Masks

Within, the world changed again.

He stood in a chamber vast as the sky, filled with trees of obsidian. From every branch hung a mask. Thousands of them. Each one shaped like a version of his face. Some screamed. Some wept. Some laughed with cruelty he had never known.

They turned toward him as one.

And they spoke.

Not aloud, but inside him.

“You broke the seal.”

“You fled the cycle.”

“You were the first to betray the Spiral.”

Lucien dropped to his knees.

The spiral stone pulsed violently.

The ground split beneath him.

A single mask drifted down from the tree above, slower than falling ash. It settled into his hands. This one was smooth, unmarked, expressionless.

As he looked into it, he saw nothing.

Then, slowly, his reflection appeared.

But behind it, standing tall, crowned in broken glass, eyes burning like stars gone cold, stood the Hollow King.

The dream screamed.

Lucien fell.

Not onto ground.

But into the next memory.

The Spiral Beneath the World

He did not land.

There was no ground. No sky. Only the sense of falling inward, as though his soul were a thread being pulled into the eye of a storm stitched from forgotten selves.

Light flickered in fragments around him fragments of scenes, memories, possible lives. A boy chasing fireflies near a quiet pond. A soldier dying beneath a shattered moon. A

king screaming into a crown made of thorns. Each fragment carried a taste, a scent, an ache. And each one bore his face.

Lucien tried to scream, but he had no mouth.

He tried to run, but had no shape.

He was no longer a man. He was a possibility. And the Vale was choosing which version of him it would keep.

Then came a voice, so old it cracked the air like dried parchment splitting in heat.

“You were not born. You were remembered.”

A spiral opened beneath him, not on the ground but within himself. As it turned, it drew the fragments together, threading them into form. Lucien gasped and felt lungs return. He opened eyes that had not yet existed.

He was himself again. But not whole.

Never whole.

The Throne of the First Sleep

The place he stood was vast, circular, silent.

A crater filled with sand that shimmered like crushed memory. In the center sat a throne carved from roots and bone, half-buried beneath dunes. It was not a throne for sitting. It was a throne for forgetting.

Behind it, the sky swirled with mirrored clouds that reflected things the eye could not track. Spirals bloomed and faded in the air, flickering between reality and metaphor.

Lucien approached.

His feet sank into the sand. The closer he got, the more it resisted. The grains whispered as he passed.

“You left her.”

“You broke it.”

“You will again.”

At the throne’s base, a mask lay buried halfway in ash. He knelt and dug it out with his hands. The edges burned. When he turned it over, he saw Caelwen’s face.

Not as she was.

As she might have been.

Older. Weathered. Hollow-eyed.

He held the mask to his chest. The spiral stone within his satchel throbbed, aching like a wound reopening.

A figure stepped from the shadows of the crater wall.

Lucien rose slowly, eyes locked on the thing approaching.

It was a man, tall and pale, draped in robes stitched from torn pages and scorched vellum. His face was covered by a mirrored mask. He carried a staff of bone in one hand and a crown of roots in the other.

“You are late,” the figure said, voice like wind unraveling a scroll.

“What is this?” Lucien asked, though he already knew.

“The room before becoming,” the figure replied. “The Vale remembers. But you have not earned your memory.”

The figure raised the staff and pointed to the throne.

“Sit. And see.”

Lucien hesitated. But he obeyed.

The Memory That Wasn’t Yours

The moment he sat, the world shattered. Not broke. Shattered. Like glass hit by light instead of stone.

His vision blurred. The sky inverted. The throne turned hot beneath him, then cold, then absent entirely.

Suddenly, he was not in the Vale. He stood in a city made of starlight and marble. Caelverra, before its fall. Alive. Beautiful. Real.

Children laughed in spiral-marked courtyards. Scholars chanted from balconies made of moonstone. Dream-scribes wove runes into air itself. And above it all rose the Spire of Sleep, glowing with blue-white fire.

Lucien wandered its streets, unseen, untouched. He passed a younger version of himself. This Lucien wore robes of the Verdant Order. His eyes glowed faintly. He smiled.

But there was something wrong.

This Lucien stepped into the Spiral Archive and removed a shard of crystal from a vault sealed with chains. He placed it in a basin of silver light.

The Hollow King appeared beside him.

Smiling.

Together, they whispered words that cracked the sky.

The dream of Caelverra turned to ash.

The Sea of Faces

Lucien awoke standing in a shallow sea.

Water as black as ink lapped gently at his ankles.

Above him, the sky bore no stars. Only masks.

Dozens. Hundreds. Suspended by threads of light, each turning slowly in place.

He realized the sea was made of faces. Faces looking up from beneath the water.

All of them were his.

He took a step forward. The masks above tilted, as if following.

“This is not a dream,” he whispered.

“This is the debt,” answered a voice.

A figure walked across the water. It did not disturb the surface.

Lucien recognized it.

It was himself, cloaked in shadow, with spiral marks carved across his chest. The eyes were silver and filled with ancient regret.

“You were the first to fall,” said the figure.

“The first to wake,” Lucien replied.

“And you will be the last to forget.”

The sea grew deeper. The faces beneath began to sing. No melody. Just breath, rising and falling, carrying memory like a tide.

Lucien looked into the eyes of his reflection.

He saw war. Betrayal. Sirelthan’s crown cracking. Caelwen’s death.

Then he saw something worse.

He saw himself placing the Spiral Seal into the Hollow King’s hand.

And smiling.

The Spiral Fades

Lucien stood at the edge of the Vale’s unraveling.

Around him, the dream folded in on itself. The sea of faces sank into silence. The mirrored sky dimmed. The obsidian trees of the cathedral cracked and bled mist. All of it was falling away, not in chaos, but in purpose, as if the Vale had shown him all it could, and now wished to forget it once more.

He stood trembling, the shard Caelwen had given him still gripped in his palm. It pulsed faintly, no longer burning, just warm. A heartbeat in glass.

Behind him, the throne of the First Sleep sank beneath the earth. In its place rose a single tree—dead, brittle, silver-veined—its branches curled toward the sky like fingers waiting to close around something not yet born.

Lucien turned away from it.

He walked slowly, each step lighter than the last. The Vale no longer resisted him. It opened before him now, the mist parting gently, the trees leaning aside, the path smoothing beneath his bare feet.

There was no more whispering.

Only the sound of breath, his own.

As he reached the crest of a hill made of memory and moonlight, the dream pulsed one last time.

He blinked.

And the world changed.

The Waking

His eyes opened to darkness—not the void of the Vale, but the chill of night not yet touched by morning.

Above him, pine branches rustled faintly. The sky held a hint of silver, but the sun had not yet risen. Cold wrapped around him like wet cloth. His breath came in short, ragged clouds.

He was back.

His back ached against the roots of the leaning pine. His fingers still curled around the spiral shard. It no longer glowed. The warmth was gone.

He sat up slowly, the pain sharp in his chest. A bruise bloomed beneath his ribs, though he remembered no blow. His cloak was damp with dew.

The forest was silent.

But different.

Not empty, not watching just still. The kind of stillness that lingers after something ancient has passed through.

Lucien leaned his head against the bark behind him.

He remembered everything.

Not clearly. Not completely. But enough.

He could still see the masks. Still hear the voices. Still feel the cold weight of the Hollow King’s gaze lingering in some unseen corner of his soul.

He did not cry. He did not speak. He simply sat, letting the waking world settle around him. And far away, beyond the mountains and the sleeping trees, something began to stir. Something that had been waiting for him to remember. Now, the Vale was behind him. And the whispers were coming.

Chapter 4 When The Dream Walks

“The Spiral remembers. And now, everything else does too.”

The Awakening of Stone

Memory has weight. When it returned, it did not come softly or gently. It did not slip in unnoticed through cracks of thought, nor float like dust upon morning light. It struck like thunder, fierce and undeniable, shaking the foundations of the world until stone itself was forced awake.

The first stone to stir was not a towering monument nor a mighty fortress. It was simple, forgotten. A small cairn stacked long ago by hands that history no longer knew. Overgrown with thick moss and shrouded in tangled vines, it had rested silent and unmoving, unnoticed for centuries beside the River of Memory.

But now, it shifted.

First came subtle movements, barely perceptible. Pebbles trembled lightly, stirring beneath layers of lichen. Roots loosened their grip reluctantly, snapping free with soft popping sounds as moss slid away like reluctant fingers letting go. Slowly, deliberately, the small stones rose into the air. They hovered, quivering with the uncertainty of life returned, then pulled together, shaping themselves anew.

The stones remembered themselves. They remembered the hands that had placed them. They remembered words murmured long ago in the gathering dark—words that had carried meaning once but had long since faded into silence. Now, they remembered clearly, more clearly than ever before. And remembering brought purpose.

Across the lands, this awakening echoed. In forgotten valleys, statues of kings and queens stirred, marble limbs flexing with stiffness, stone lips parting as if to whisper secrets they had held too long. Ancient temples whose columns had bowed with the burden of memory straightened with groans of relief. Mountains shifted subtly, great slopes rippling with slow, deliberate breaths, releasing centuries of buried dreams like exhalations of steam.

In Caelverra itself, this stirring was strongest. The city pulsed with life renewed, its spiral towers humming softly as glyphs flared awake in shimmering silver script. Stone arches flexed gently, releasing tension they had forgotten they held. Balconies stretched outward, reaching for air long denied. Doors of crystal and polished marble swung open slowly, deliberately, welcoming back the memories they had once kept locked inside.

Below Caelverra, in the deep chamber beneath the Spiral Archives, the great tomb of the Archivist-King began to wake. Sirelthan, still seated upon his throne of petrified memory, felt a shiver run through his ancient bones. His eyes opened, shining like mirrors reflecting memories he’d kept buried for millennia. He stirred, flexing fingers stiffened by time, feeling the familiar ache of remembering too much.

Sirelthan rose slowly, like a man waking after a long, troubled sleep. His robes flowed around him, trailing shadows and whispers as he stepped forward. Every footfall echoed deeply, resonating through halls carved from pure memory-stone. He ascended the ancient stairway, emerging from his tomb with a gentle sigh.

Sirelthan remembered it all Caelverra’s rise and fall, its glory and its ruin, the choices he’d made and regretted. Most clearly, he remembered Anharin. He remembered the betrayal, the sealing of memory, the breaking of the Dream Shard, and the fracturing of his beloved city. Now, those memories returned to the surface, heavy and sharp, cutting into him deeply. He moved deliberately, walking steadily toward the city gates, passing through streets empty yet humming with life renewed. He left the city behind and entered the vast wilderness beyond, drawn inevitably toward the Grove.

Drawn toward Lucien.

Caelwen’s Vigil

In the Grove, beneath the towering branches of the Heartwood, Caelwen waited. She knelt, eyes closed, one palm resting gently against the ancient bark. Through her hand, she felt pulses of dreams both living and long-dead. She felt whispers of memories waking across the world, echoing like distant drums.

She felt Lucien’s heart clearly, as if she stood beside him.

Caelwen remembered clearly how Lucien had come to her as a frightened child. He’d clung to her robes, small fingers gripping fabric tightly, trembling as he whispered nightmares he couldn’t understand. She had held him closely, promising safety she knew she could not guarantee.

She remembered every quiet moment, every soft word shared beneath moonlit branches, every truth she’d kept hidden to shield him. Most of all, she remembered the look in his eyes fearful but hopeful, lost yet trusting.

Now she rose, stepping away from the Heartwood and into shafts of moonlight. Her robes glowed softly, shifting from silver to gold as she moved. Leaves stirred above her head, rustling like gentle reassurances.

“The Spiral turns again,” Caelwen whispered to the night, her voice carrying clearly in the stillness. “But you must turn with it, Lucien, or be shattered once more.”

Echoes of Old Gods

Deep in the darkened places beneath the world, older dreams stirred =dreams never meant to wake again.

They rose slowly, heavily, pushing through layers of earth and memory. Forgotten gods whose names no tongues now spoke, whose stories no fires now carried, stretched limbs woven from shadow and starlight. Their bodies were immense, indistinct, shifting with forms half-real and half-imagined, silhouettes that defied comprehension.

They were gods of lost ages, beings who had shaped dreams and shattered worlds. They remembered what it felt like to walk among mortals, to hear prayers and whispers carried by frightened voices. But most of all, they remembered betrayal. They remembered being sealed away, banished into slumber so deep it had tasted like death.

Now, as the Spiral turned again, they began to move. Their footsteps shook the bones of mountains, their breaths twisted clouds into strange and terrible shapes. Wherever they walked, reality folded gently around them, yielding easily to their presence.

Their awakening was not gentle. It was mournful and fierce, carrying the bitter taste of loss and longing. They moved across the world, not as conquerors but as mourners seeking answers to questions no mortal mind could fully grasp.

They were searching for Lucien, the bearer of memory restored, the dreamer who carried the Spiral. They came to confront the keeper of their own lost dreams.

Lucien, Bearer of Memory

Lucien walked slowly, feeling the weight of memory in every step.

The Spiral within him was whole, restored yet burdened. Each shard had left scars marks invisible to the eye but clear to his soul. He felt each memory he’d reclaimed, each truth he’d learned, each choice he’d made, as distinctly as physical wounds.

He felt Anharin’s presence deep inside himself not as a rival or enemy, but as a part of his being. He felt the quiet sorrow of a boy who had wanted freedom and found chains instead. Lucien knew that he carried Anharin’s memories now, their intertwined pasts becoming inseparable.

He felt the whispers of Caelwen, her strength and gentleness woven through his heart, her guidance still present though physically distant. He understood now the sacrifices she had made, the truths she had hidden to protect him.

He felt Sirelthan’s regret, the Archivist-King’s choices echoing through him. He felt the weariness of centuries spent holding back memory, understanding now the unbearable burden the old king had carried alone for so long.

Most heavily, he felt the ancient gods who moved toward him, their footsteps shaking his bones, their presence pressing on his mind. They approached, neither enemies nor allies, but judges. They came to weigh the memory he carried and determine if he was worthy to bear it.

Lucien continued walking toward the Grove, each step deliberate, each breath steady. The world around him shimmered with new life, both wondrous and terrifying. The Spiral had been restored, but the path ahead was uncertain. The threads of fate had been rewoven, yet no one not even Lucien knew what pattern they would form.

He reached the edge of the Grove, pausing beneath towering branches that stretched toward the heavens. He stood in silence, feeling every heart in the world beating in rhythm with his own.

The Spiral turned again.Lucien breathed deeply And stepped forward into the future that awaited him.

Chapter 5 The Spiral Awakens

“You are more than you know… Not just a vessel. A key.”

The Road Between Memory and Flame

The Grove had not said goodbye. It had only grown quiet.

Lucien walked beneath the branches, where moonlight fell in braided shafts across his path. The satchel Caelwen had given him was slung over his shoulder, filled with scrolls, dried roots, and the vial of Moonwake Essence still sealed in dreamcloth. The spiral stone in his palm throbbed with each step, not with pain, but with insistence. A reminder. A pulse. A warning.

He did not follow a path, for none remained.

The trees thinned. The moss grew darker. The air grew heavier, as if thought itself had weight now. Memory coiled through the forest, not as visions but as presence — as if the past watched from between the trees, breathing through bark and root.

Ahead, the River of Memory glittered like polished glass beneath the starlight. It flowed slowly, without sound, its waters thick with stillness. Lucien crouched at its edge, cupping a handful in his palm.

It was cold. Too cold. It tasted of copper and fog and something else — a forgotten word.

When he looked into its surface, he saw not his own reflection, but a city rising from ruins. Caelverra. Whole again. Its spiral towers shimmering with blue fire.

And behind it… a shadow. A winged silhouette vast enough to darken the sky. He blinked. The image was gone.

The Shrine that Remembered Him

As dawn crept across the tree line, Lucien reached the remnants of a stone shrine, half-buried in silvergrass and tangled ivy. Vines clung to its base, but the spiral glyph carved into the altar pulsed faintly at his approach, as if stirred by his presence alone.

He stepped forward and placed his hand upon the stone.

The spiral lit up with soft white light. Not harsh. Not blinding. It welcomed him.

The world spun.

In the blink of an eye, Lucien stood in another time.

The shrine was whole. Its altar unbroken. Flames danced in stone braziers. Robed monks moved silently in the distance, masked and barefoot, their robes dyed with ash and bark-dust.

One of them turned toward him.

Its mask bore no features. Only a spiral etched at the center.

A voice, not spoken but felt, entered his mind like breath drawn in sleep:

“The Dream was never meant to wake. You who carry the stone must decide. Will you remember… or will you be remembered?”

Lucien staggered back.

The vision cracked like a dropped mirror.

He was in the present again.

The shrine lay in ruin. The spiral glyph dimmed and went dark.

He rose slowly, heart pounding.

That had not been a memory.

It had been the memory of the place remembering him.

Watchers of the Edge

The forest grew still.

Utterly still.

Lucien froze as the silence deepened. No bird sang. No wind stirred. Even the river behind him now moved without sound.

Between the trees, amber eyes gleamed.

Shapes. Not men. Not beasts. Forms cloaked in shadow and intention. They watched him from the tree line. Unmoving. Unbreathing. As if carved from the air itself.

Lucien stood tall, his hand still resting on the stone.

“I see you,” he said.

The watchers did not respond. They simply shimmered — not vanishing, but slipping into something deeper than sight.

A breath passed through the grass. A hush beneath his feet.

And they were gone.

But the Spiral in his hand pulsed once more.

He was no longer alone.

He never had been.

Whispers Beneath the Canopy of Tharn

The path bent west, climbing steadily toward a high ridge. Tharn’s lower forests whispered in strange rhythms now — leaves flickering as if listening, roots shifting ever so slightly when he passed.

Lucien moved through groves that had not known footsteps in an age. Crumbling stones peeked out from the underbrush, covered in runes only partially visible through lichen. None matched any script he had studied.

And yet he understood them.

Dreams do not die. They root. They wait.

That was what the stone said.

He paused beside a stone arch swallowed by trees, where the air grew thick with scent — old parchment, smoke, and something older, like the scent of sun-bleached bone. As he passed under it, he felt heat at his back, like eyes he could not turn to meet.

For a long while, he said nothing. Not even to himself.

Not until he reached the summit.

The Light That Was Not Light

The hilltop revealed a sight no map had promised. Where once the old road had ended in forest, now stood a bridge — not of wood or stone, but of silver strands woven like silk. It stretched across a chasm that had not been there before.

The chasm pulsed faintly, breathing up wind like whispers from the throat of the world. Its walls were carved with faces — thousands — each with closed eyes and mouths slightly parted. Lucien stepped closer and looked down.

They were singing.

There was no sound, but he felt it — in his bones, in his ribs, in the Spiral at the center of his palm. The song was not a warning.

It was invitation.

He placed one foot on the bridge.

The Spiral in his hand flared gently, and the bridge accepted his weight. Not with creaks or groans, but with a sigh, as if the road had waited for him and him alone.

With each step, memory returned in small waves. Caelwen’s quiet sorrow. The glint in Sirelthan’s eyes as he turned from his city. The soft, cruel laughter of the Hollow King. Lucien’s pace did not falter.

He had already broken. There was nothing left to fracture.

The Gate of Returning

At the far end of the bridge stood a gate not built by hands. It rose from the ground like a rib of the earth itself — a curving arc of obsidian stone, veined with gold that pulsed like veins. Symbols curled across its surface in spiral patterns. They shifted as he watched, rearranging into a single word.

Return.

Lucien stepped through.

No wind stirred. No sound marked the crossing. But the world changed. The trees beyond were not the same. The colors were brighter and wrong. The shadows cast by leaves bent in curves rather than angles. The ground beneath him pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

This was not Tharn.

Not entirely.

This was a place touched by the Spiral. Not a dream. Not a memory. A betweenplace.

Lucien inhaled deeply.

Here, he would not just remember.

Here, the Spiral would remember with him.

Caelverra, Seen Through Dust and Ash

The trees thinned again.

This time, there was no return.

Lucien stepped onto a high escarpment where the world opened in a single, breathless vista. Below him, bathed in bruised twilight and rising mist, lay the broken spires of Caelverra.

The city slept.

Its towers leaned like tired sentinels. Bridges snapped by time still reached for one another across empty chasms. The spiral domes that once sang with crystal light now sagged under soot and vine.

But even here, amid collapse, the memory of grandeur remained.

Lucien stood still.

He had not seen the city since the dream.

Not truly.

And now, seeing it with waking eyes, he could not tell what was more real — the flame-lit Caelverra of his fractured visions, or the corpse of it lying below.

He stepped forward, boots crunching dry gravel.

The wind carried ash. Not fresh, not recent. Ancient. Ash that had not fallen, but waited. Ash that had become part of the world.

Far below, deep beneath the ruined spiral keep, he sensed it.

A memory sealed.

A truth buried.

A voice waiting to be heard again.

The Spiral Below the Stone

As the last light fell across the horizon, the Spiral within his hand pulsed once — sharply. Not pain, not warning.

Command.

Lucien closed his eyes and listened.

Not with ears.

With memory.

He saw Sirelthan, standing in the Archive’s heart, fingers trembling as he carved the final ward. He saw Anharin’s eyes — terrified, defiant, pleading for a truth that no one was willing to say aloud. He saw Caelwen, lit by the Grove’s inner light, whispering to the seed beneath her palm.

And then he saw himself.

Not as he had been.

As he was becoming.

The Spiral did not lead him to Caelverra for closure. It brought him here to begin.

Descent

Night fell in silence.

Lucien lit no flame.

He walked the narrow path downward with steady steps, the silver light of the stars reflecting faintly in his eyes. Every sound in the valley had quieted, as though the city itself was holding its breath.

And when he reached the edge of the ruins, the Spiral stone in his hand grew warm again.

Not with light.

But with recognition.

The city remembered him.

And somewhere within it, something long locked away was preparing to wake.

“In the beginning, there was no war, only forgetting. The world grew quiet not because peace reigned, but because memory died. But the Spiral never forgets. It waited — beneath root and ruin, beneath dream and stone — until one boy stirred it by simply remembering who he was not. That boy has walked through sleep and shadow, touched the bones of lost kings, and tasted the ash of his own soul. Now the veil is thinner than it has ever been. Gods stir in the dark. Cities begin to breathe again. What was sealed begins to speak. What was buried begins to rise. And the dream, no longer content to whisper, prepares to scream.”

Harsh Saini

Chapter 6 The Forgotten Reach

“Beyond the edge of maps lies the memory that memory forgot. And what is forgotten does not sleep. It festers.”

The City Behind, the World Before

The gates of Caelverra loomed behind him, jagged silhouettes against the starlit sky. Lucien did not look back.

The Spiral no longer pulsed with urgency. It was quiet now not gone, but coiled deep within him, like a breath held for too long.

He had descended the forgotten stairs beneath the Archive, stood before the tomb of fractured kings, and emerged changed. But it was not the city’s ruins that had unsettled him.

It was what he had not found.

The truth was not buried in Caelverra. It was scattered flung outward like sparks from a dying flame.

The path ahead led to the Reach.

A land beyond reckoning. A wilderness once charted by the old cartographers and swiftly abandoned. Where the map turned vague, where the names stopped making sense, and the wind spoke in syllables no living tongue had uttered in centuries.

The stars above him had shifted. Not visibly. Not suddenly. But they had. He could feel it.

Lucien walked on.

The Tower That Should Not Be

Three days into the Reach, Lucien saw it.

A tower.

Crowned in ivy. Split by time. Floating several inches above the ground as if the earth had rejected it.

It rose from a cliff’s edge like a splinter of memory jammed into the skin of the world. Crows circled its crown but did not land.

He approached.

The spiral stone inside his satchel thrummed once, then dimmed again.

At the tower’s base lay inscriptions etched in spiral glyphs older than the ones he had seen even in the Archives. These were not meant to be read. They were meant to be felt.

His hand trembled as it reached out to touch them.

Images crashed into him not visions, but reverberations. The scream of a world cracking. A child with spiral eyes sobbing beneath a broken sky. A woman kneeling before the Hollow King, her face stitched with light.

Lucien fell back, gasping.

The tower did not move. But a stone at its base split in two with a dry, final sound.

From within the crack spilled sand.

But not ordinary sand.

Tiny fragments of bone and ash, glittering faintly, each grain a forgotten name.

Lucien stood, clutching the satchel to his chest.

This was the Reach.

Not just a place.

A graveyard of memory.

The Vale of Salted Bones

The wind shifted.

Lucien followed it.

The ground beneath him was no longer soil or stone, but something else something pale and brittle, like dust pressed from bones. Every footstep crunched. Each breath tasted of copper and cold parchment. The sky above, once scattered with stars, had dimmed to a bruised gray despite no clouds in sight.

He had entered a valley without name.

Before him stretched the Salted Bones a vast basin where once a great battle had been fought and lost so completely that the world itself had chosen to forget it. Monuments lay shattered. Swords pierced the ground like abandoned warnings. And scattered across the valley were statues of men, their faces frozen in agony.

Except they were not statues.

They were real men, petrified by something older than death.

Lucien crouched beside one, brushing ash from its armor. The spiral insignia was ancient but familiar. He had seen it in the oldest tomes beneath the Spiral Archives the Mark of the Watchers. They had vanished before even Caelverra’s founding. No songs remembered them. No murals carried their name.

But here they stood. Or rather, had been made to stand silent guardians to something long buried.

One of the statues wept.

Not visibly. Not with tears. But the moment Lucien placed his hand upon its shoulder, he felt sorrow flood through him like a scream swallowed mid-breath.

He pulled away and stumbled back.

The valley echoed, though no voice had spoken.

He did not belong here.

Yet here he was.

The Clockwork Beast

Beyond the petrified valley, where the sky cracked with distant thunder, Lucien found something worse.

A carcass.

Massive. Twisted.

It lay at the base of a slope, caught in the roots of a dead tree. Its shape was wrong part machine, part bone, part something that had never walked this world. Metal ribs jutted from its side, but they were grown, not forged. Gears made of scarab shells lay scattered in the dust. One eye, still intact, flickered dimly with blue light. The other socket was filled with black moss.

Lucien approached cautiously.

A low hum vibrated through the soil, like a forgotten engine refusing to die.

He knelt beside the beast and pressed two fingers to its hull.

For a brief moment, he saw what it had seen.

Flame raining from a sky not made of stars.

A tower cracking in half as a woman screamed something in a language made of bells.

A face his own split by light, crowned in spirals, commanding something impossible to obey.

He pulled away, heart hammering.

This machine had known him. Or a version of him.

And it had died trying to forget.

The Forgotten Ones Who Still Remembered

As dusk approached, the wind grew warm, thick with rot and memory.

Lucien crested a low rise and found a village or what remained of one. Mud-brick structures slumped inward, their roofs collapsed. The well at the center bubbled faintly, but no one drank. Figures moved in the twilight, cloaked and silent, their skin cracked with old scars shaped like spirals. Their eyes gleamed with unnatural sheen, neither hostile nor welcoming merely watching.

He did not raise a weapon. He had none.

One of them stepped forward.

An old woman, her spine curved, hair draped like dry moss, eyes sharp enough to cut bone.

“You came from the city,” she said. Her voice was brittle. “But you carry no crown. Only the burn of remembrance.”

Lucien didn’t answer.

She approached and placed her palm against his chest. Her eyes rolled white. Her lips moved, speaking something not meant for living mouths.

Then she shuddered and stepped back.

“You are the Key. The one who walked where memory fears to tread. The Hollow King watches you. The gods we buried now stir in their deep places.”

“They will come for you.”

“And they will not come as enemies.”

“They will come as beggars.”

A fire flared behind her eyes.

“Do not give them what they ask.”

Lucien tried to speak, but she turned and vanished into the fog that poured from the broken village like breath exhaled too slowly.

He was left alone.

Not just in place.

In time.

The Hollow Clearing Lucien walked into the clearing without knowing why.

There was no sound. No wind. No birds.

Just space empty, perfect, unnatural. A ring of trees surrounded it, each one identical. Their trunks were bone-white, branches crooked like broken fingers, and their bark peeled like old parchment. The grass was dry. The air was still.

It should have felt safe.

Instead, every instinct screamed.

The Spiral in his satchel went cold.

At the center stood a figure.

Bent, twisted, its arms long and dragging. It had no face only a smooth oval where features should have been. And yet, Lucien could feel its gaze. It was not looking at his body.

It was looking at his memories.

The being tilted its head. Not like a creature. Like a thought about to break.

And then it spoke.

Not aloud.

Inside.

“You remember. That is your curse.”

Lucien stepped back, but the clearing had already shifted. Behind him was no longer forest only black glass. Reflections without source. Echoes of thoughts he had not thought in years.

He turned and saw himself.

Not as he was.

But as he might have been.

The Mirror That Lied

There were three Luciens now.

One wept beneath a silver tree, begging Caelwen not to leave him.

One stood bloodied atop the Spiral Keep, crown of flame burning into his skull.

One laughed beside Anharin, hands bound, their faces identical. None of them were real.

And yet they spoke.

“You left us,” said the boy.

“You became what you feared,” said the crowned man.

“You never had a choice,” said the bound one.

The twisted figure moved between them, trailing strands of light like torn nerves. Its limbs brushed the air, and wherever it touched, memories unraveled. Words fell apart. Time blurred. Lucien dropped to one knee, clutching his head as voices screamed in a dozen languages he shouldn’t know.

He felt something entering him.

Not a blade. A presence.

Digging.

Unmaking.

Looking for something.

“Where is it?” the being asked. “Where is the memory I was denied?”

Lucien could not answer.

He didn’t know.

“The Voice of the Vale”

In that moment of collapse, the spiral stone flared inside his satchel. A scream tore across the clearing not his, not human.

The twisted being recoiled as if burned. Its limbs snapped backward. Its faceless head cracked open revealing not flesh, but pages, thin and writhing. Memories that did not belong to it spilled out like mist.

Caelwen’s voice rose through the chaos.

“Do not give it shape. Do not give it name.”

Lucien closed his eyes.

And refused.

He refused to remember what it wanted. Refused to believe what it showed. Refused to answer its hunger with truth.

The Spiral inside him spun wildly, then burst not outward, but inward.

The being shrieked, folding in on itself, devouring its own false memories in desperation. The forest pulsed once, twice, and with a single breathless implosion, the clearing collapsed.

The trees fell like puppets.

The glass shattered.

The illusions were gone.

Lucien lay on the forest floor, panting.

Alone.

But not untouched.

He had survived the memory-eater.

But something of it remained.

Inside him.

Watching.

Waiting.

The Reach Bleeds

Lucien walked out of the hollow clearing with blood in his mouth and ash in his lungs. The trees beyond were no longer still. They breathed. Not like forests, but like lungs. The ground trembled with each inhale, and branches bent in patterns that mimicked speech.

He was not healed. He was not safe.

But he was awake in a way he had never been before.

Every whisper of wind, every creak of soil beneath his boots, carried the memory of what had just tried to consume him. The spiral stone in his satchel was warm again, but not with reassurance. It was not guiding him now. It was reacting. To something close. Something massive.

The stars overhead were gone. Swallowed not by cloud, but by a curtain of shadow that moved without shape, blotting out the sky like ink spilled across the heavens.

And in that unnatural dark, something was descending.

Not falling. Arriving.

The Herald Appears

He first heard it as a sound not meant for ears.

Like a temple collapsing inside a whisper.

Lucien turned slowly, and there it stood.

Atop a low ridge of blackened stone, a figure watched him. Towering. Draped in robes made of wind and regret. Its face was hidden by a helm carved from fossilized ivory, twisted into a shape no craftsman could replicate. Where eyes should be, there were spirals spinning slowly, one clockwise, one against.

The Spiral within Lucien pulsed. And stopped.

The being stepped forward, and the world with it. Trees bent away. Stones cracked. Time slowed. The Reach itself bowed.

Lucien’s knees trembled, but he did not fall.

He forced himself to speak.

“Who are you?”

The voice that came was not from the figure. It was from everywhere.

“I am what follows memory. I am what waits at the edges. I am the echo of the Hollow Crown.”

“I am the First Herald.”

“And you are the Key.”

Lucien shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

The Herald tilted its head slightly, the motion somehow both delicate and apocalyptic.

“You were never meant to understand. You were meant to awaken. And you have.”

“The Hollow King cannot step beyond his seat. Not yet. Not until the lock is broken.”

“But I am not bound.”

It lifted one arm.

The valley behind Lucien collapsed inward, not physically, but conceptually. The trees, the memories, the echoes all pulled back like a curtain. Revealing not another world.

But what the world had chosen to forget.

A battlefield.

Infinite. Endless. And waiting.

The Memory of the Future

Lucien stumbled forward, unable to look away.

Banners whipped in winds that screamed like dying gods. Armored giants stalked the ruins of shattered cities. Black stars fell from a sky that burned without flame. There were no sides in this war. Only consequences. Children wept beside empty thrones. Towers made of screams stood where forests once grew.

And everywhere in every crack of earth, every glint of water the Spiral. Fractured.

Lucien turned away, breath ragged. “This… hasn’t happened.”

The Herald descended from the ridge. Its steps left no marks, but the ground died beneath its presence. Color faded. Vines withered. The Spiral in Lucien’s satchel throbbed as if in protest.

“Not yet. But soon.”

“You are not the first to walk the Spiral Path. But you are the last.”

“If you turn back, the war will come still.”

“If you continue, it will come faster.”

“If you resist… it will begin here.”

Lucien raised his eyes. “What do you want from me?”

The Herald stopped a few paces away.

Then lifted its hand again.

The sky split.

And Lucien saw himself crowned in gold and flame, eyes hollow, leading an army made of nothing but remembrance. They marched not to conquer, but to restore something the world had buried. To force memory upon a world that had chosen silence.

It was not glory.

It was judgment.

Lucien screamed.

The Voice of the Spiral He fell to his knees.

Not in surrender.

In fury.

The Spiral in his hand flared to life blinding, defiant. Not just memory now. Choice.

And from deep within him came a voice.

Not Caelwen’s.

Not the gods’.

His own.

“You do not get to write this ending.”

“Not you. Not the Hollow King. Not fate.”

The Herald recoiled.

Its spiraled eyes flickered.

The battlefield behind it vanished like smoke struck by wind.

The sky returned.

The trees straightened.

And the Herald’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Then let it begin, Lucien. Let the spiral turn once more.”

It stepped backward into shadow.

And was gone.

Ashfall

Lucien stood alone again.

The Reach was silent.

But it was no longer forgotten. It had seen the future.

It had tasted war.

And so had he.

Lucien turned east not toward Caelverra.

But toward the mountains beyond it.

Toward Tharn.

Toward whatever the Spiral would show him next.

The sky above him bled light.

The ground beneath him wept ash.

And every step forward now felt like a drumbeat in a song written before his birth.But not yet sung. Not yet.

Chapter 7 Face Beneath Mask

“The Spiral remembers because I taught it how. But I forgot that in teaching it, I made it me.”

Shadows and Shattered Reflections

Lucien had thought he knew silence until now. Not the stillness of a sleeping forest nor the hush of abandoned cities. This silence was deeper, colder—a weight pressing inward rather than an absence of sound. It lived and breathed, lurking in corners and spilling from doorways that had never felt the touch of human warmth.

He had entered Tharn at dusk, under skies swollen with clouds the color of old iron. The city stood stark against the dying light, its towers sharp-edged, its walls brutal and unyielding. A fortress built from stone quarried out of nightmares rather than earth. Tharn had always been a place of discipline and steel, but now it was something else entirely. It had become a city waiting to bleed.

The streets were deserted, empty except for echoes that refused to fade. Lucien walked carefully, each footfall a negotiation with shadows. His hand tightened around the spiral stone within his satchel, its faint warmth the only reassurance he allowed himself. Buildings loomed overhead, their dark windows staring down at him like sightless eyes, their doors hanging ajar as though occupants had fled in mid-motion, leaving behind fragments of their lives scattered across floors and tables.

He paused before a shopfront, the windows thick with dust. Behind the glass, masks hung from thin wires—each intricately carved, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. Faces frozen mid-expression, mouths parted in cries that had never sounded, eyes wide with secrets that could never be told. Lucien stepped closer, breath misting the glass, and reached out to wipe away the grime.

He recoiled instantly.

Reflected in the window, standing behind him, was a figure wrapped entirely in shadow, faceless except for the pale mask it wore. Its expression was serene, disturbingly peaceful amidst the gathering darkness. Lucien spun around, heart hammering, but the street was empty again. Only the lingering trace of something heavy, oppressive, remained.

A mask, he thought grimly. Faces beneath masks. But whose faces?

He moved onward, quickening his pace. The spiral stone throbbed softly, as if sensing urgency.

The Court of Empty Thrones

The city’s center was dominated by the great hall known as the Court of Echoes. Lucien ascended wide stone steps worn smooth by countless feet, stepping through massive iron doors etched with spirals older than the city itself. Inside, the hall stretched endlessly, lined on either side by thrones carved from obsidian, each reflecting distorted images of the one opposite.

Lucien walked slowly, his reflection fractured and multiplied across the polished black surfaces, each version slightly different—a twitch at the corner of the mouth, eyes darker or lighter, shadows shifting subtly. The court had no ceiling, opening directly to a sky now veiled in deepest twilight, stars burning coldly as though watching him with distant disdain.

At the hall’s far end stood a raised dais and a single throne larger than the rest, wrought from silver and bone. As Lucien approached, he felt eyes upon him, countless unseen gazes from the vacant seats, as if the hall were filled with invisible jurors. He stepped onto the dais and turned slowly.

A whisper rose from nowhere and everywhere.

“You come unmasked,” it breathed softly. “But you wear many faces.”

Lucien tensed, fingers gripping the spiral stone. “Show yourself,” he demanded.

A ripple moved through the hall, shadows peeling away from thrones and rising slowly into shapes—men, women, warriors, scholars—all faceless, masked in smooth ivory

and obsidian. They formed a semicircle around him, silent as statues, each mask turned toward him expectantly.

One stepped forward, tall and slender, its mask etched with spirals of gold. The figure spoke, voice resonant yet hollow, as though echoing from deep within a well.

“You have forgotten us,” it said.

Lucien shook his head slowly. “I never knew you.”

“Yet you carry us,” another voice answered. This one was soft, feminine, sorrowful.

“Within you lies memory, within memory lies truth. Within truth—pain.”

Lucien swallowed hard, meeting the mask’s blank gaze. “What truth do you think I carry?”

“The truth you buried beneath masks,” answered the figure, stepping even closer. “The truth that now demands to be seen.”

The masked figures closed around him slowly, their robes rustling like leaves caught in wind. Lucien raised his chin defiantly. “Then show me. Remove your masks.”

The tall figure inclined its head slightly. “We are masks. Beneath us—only faces like yours. Fragments of what could have been. What should have been.”

Lucien’s breath quickened as realization spread coldly through him. “You’re… memories.”

“Worse,” the figure replied gently. “We are the memories you chose to abandon. We are what you became when you refused yourself.”

Lucien’s fingers trembled around the spiral stone, its heat growing fierce now, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.

“Why have you come?” Lucien whispered hoarsely.

The figure reached up slowly, fingertips touching its mask. “To ask you to remember.”

As the mask fell away, Lucien saw his own face staring back at him, older, scarred, eyes heavy with loss.

“Remember,” the figure whispered. “Or become us.”

Dust of the Watchers

Lucien left the Court behind, walking through the brittle maze of Tharn’s outer districts. The architecture here changed. Where the heart of the city had been chiseled from obsidian and steel, this place was built of claybrick and ancient mortar, sagging with the weight of centuries. Curved roofs bowed beneath ivy and soot. Balconies leaned with exhaustion, and doors stood ajar like mouths open in stunned silence.

The wind carried dry leaves and broken words. He could almost hear them speak no language he knew, but not entirely foreign. Just old. Older than time, perhaps. Older than speech itself. The cobblestone road beneath his boots glimmered faintly with glyphs worn to the edge of forgetfulness.

He passed murals painted in fading mineral dyes. Spirals nested within spirals, cities within men, men within dreams. A child crowned in glass stood before a tree of eyes. A great river poured from her mouth and fed the roots of a burning world. The imagery struck something buried inside him, something that trembled but refused to surface.

Here, Tharn did not pretend to be noble. Here, it was truth laid bare its origins, its debts, its sins.

Lucien reached an archway cracked straight down the middle. Beyond it, a courtyard lay in ruin. A fountain had once flowed at its center. Now only dried blood pooled at its base. A circle of stones surrounded it, smooth and polished from ritual use. Around them, broken masks lay scattered some whole, others shattered with violence.

This was a place of judgment.

He stepped cautiously into the circle, the spiral stone in his satchel vibrating faintly. The sky above darkened, not with storm but with memory. The air tightened.

He did not speak.

He knelt.

His fingers brushed one of the broken masks—a child’s, carved from pale wood, cracked through the jaw. He turned it in his hands. A symbol had been burned inside the forehead, long faded, now only an echo.

The earth beneath him shifted.

And the watchers returned.

The Temple of Mirrors

The earth did not shake. It remembered.

From the cracks between the courtyard stones, light began to rise. Not warm light. Not divine. It shimmered like oil over water, slipping through the air in slow spirals, bending the shadows until they wept.

The Watchers emerged.

Not from doors, nor passageways, but from the walls themselves. Seven figures cloaked in layered robes the color of old parchment, their faces hidden beneath masks so smooth they reflected no light at all. Their feet made no sound on the stone, but their presence rang like bells struck beneath the skin.

Lucien stood as they formed a circle around him, each equidistant, each holding a fragment of a mirror in their hands. The shards caught nothing but his reflection. Not seven images. Only one. And in that single image, he was a child again.

Naked. Afraid. Smiling.

One of the Watchers stepped forward. Its voice was neither male nor female, but brittle, like something once living now held together by memory alone.

“You have come far from the Vale,” it said. “But not far enough.”

Lucien looked around at them, sweat beading on his skin despite the cold.

“I’ve seen what lies beneath the masks,” he said. “I’ve seen the faces of my past.”

The Watcher shook its head. “You have seen their outlines. Ghosts without weight. What you seek lies deeper still.”

Another stepped forward. This one held a mirror piece shaped like a blade.

“To pass beyond the spiral,” it intoned, “you must sever the lie that binds you to the dream.”

Lucien took a step back. “What lie?”

All seven raised their mirrors.

“You,” they said in unison.

The shards pulsed, and the courtyard warped.

He was no longer standing on stone.

He stood within a vast hall of mirrors, infinite in scope. Each mirror reflected a version of himself—older, younger, broken, crowned, dying, radiant, monstrous. Some cried. Some bled. Some reached for him.

One stepped through.

This Lucien had hollow eyes and a mouth full of ash. His skin was cracked, lined with spiral glyphs burned into flesh. He walked like a man who had forgotten what it meant to breathe.

Lucien braced himself.

The mirror-Lucien spoke, voice like wind scraping across bone.

“I was the one who chose silence.”

Lucien shook his head. “You were afraid.”

“I was wise.”

“You gave up.”

“You clung to hope like a child clings to fire.”

The mirrors around them trembled. The Watchers’ silhouettes hovered at the edge of sight, unmoving.

Lucien drew the spiral stone from his satchel.

The mirror version recoiled, then smiled.

“Do you think memory makes you whole?” it asked. “It does not heal. It scars.”

Lucien nodded.

“Then let it scar.”

He stepped forward and pressed the spiral stone to the chest of his other self.

There was no explosion. No flash.

The mirror self collapsed, folding into himself like pages closing on a book never meant to be read.

The hall of mirrors began to fall, each surface cracking slowly, rhythmically, like the breath of something dying.

Lucien turned back to the courtyard.

The Watchers stood in silence.

Then, one by one, they shattered their mirror shards against the ground.

The glass did not break. It melted into the stone, disappearing as if it had never existed.

“You may proceed,” they said.

Lucien stepped forward. The air parted for him.

The spiral pulsed.

Behind him, the city of masks and watchers faded into mist.

Before him, the path to the Hollow King opened.

And the final truth waited. Quiet. Patient.

Terrible.

The Crown That Remembers

Lucien emerged from the corridor of fading mist, breath shallow, steps slow. The Watchers no longer followed. Even the weight of the city’s silence had vanished, replaced by something deeper — something not just empty, but emptied.

The path led into a vast subterranean cathedral, untouched by wind or rain, buried beneath Tharn like a secret buried in flesh. Pale stone bones arched overhead, forming riblike spines that held up a ceiling lost in shadow. The floor was smooth obsidian, veined with veins of silver that pulsed faintly beneath his feet, like blood still flowing in the heart of a corpse.

At the far end stood a single structure — not an altar, but a seat.

A throne.

It was unlike Sirelthan’s, or the empty relics of the Court. This throne had not been carved. It had not been placed.

It had grown.

A tangled weave of root and crystal, of memory made manifest, rising from the very foundation of the world. Around it, suspended in the air like stars caught midfall, hovered masks — dozens, perhaps hundreds. They rotated slowly, each displaying a different emotion: rage, joy, grief, serenity. But none of them were complete. Each one cracked, each one whispering words without sound.

And seated atop the throne was a figure.

The crown it wore did not sit on its head. It floated slightly above, turning slowly, its points bending inward like a spiral collapsing into itself.

Lucien stopped, trembling.

The figure spoke without looking up.

“You have come far for someone who does not wish to remember.”

Lucien’s throat was dry. “I remember enough.”

“No,” the figure replied. “You remember fragments. Scraps. Ashes.”

It lifted its head.

The face beneath the crown was his own.

Older. Wiser. Infinitely more exhausted.

“I am what you become if you carry the Spiral and let it hollow you.”

Lucien stepped closer. “You’re not real.”

“I am the version of you that remembered everything,” the figure said softly. “And could no longer bear to be anyone at all.”

The masks hanging in the air began to spin faster. They clattered like teeth in a dying jaw, their voices rising — not in words, but in need.

Lucien’s spiral stone burned hot in his palm. His knees ached. His heart thudded like a war drum.

“What is this place?” he whispered.

“The birthplace of forgetting,” the crowned figure answered. “Where the first mask was worn. Not to deceive others. But to protect the self.”

Lucien looked at the throne. “And the Spiral?”

“It began here. Not as a gift. Not as salvation. As a chain. Memory was never meant to heal. It was meant to bind.”

The crown hovered above them both now, casting no shadow. It pulsed gently with every heartbeat, and with each pulse, Lucien felt the city above weep.

“Then why show me?” Lucien asked. “Why now?”

The crowned version of himself stood.

“Because the Spiral is no longer just memory. It is hunger.”

“You made it so. We all did. By hiding. By running.”

Lucien felt something rising behind him. The weight of the path. The faces he’d seen. The choices that had led him here.

“I will not wear that crown,” he said.

“You already do.”

The crowned figure stepped forward and pressed a hand to Lucien’s chest.

Instantly, visions poured through him.

The Grove in flames. Caelverra drowned in silence. Sirelthan kneeling in ash. Caelwen, eyes hollow, whispering words in a language no longer known.

The Hollow King smiling from a throne of bones.

And Lucien — standing alone — watching it all burn, unable to scream because he remembered too much to speak.

The vision snapped away.

Lucien fell to his knees.

The crowned version was gone.

Only the throne remained.

And the Spiral in his palm, silent.

He stood slowly, stepping toward the throne — not to sit, but to face it. He reached forward and placed the Spiral upon the crown.

The masks stopped spinning.

The throne shuddered.

Then silence.

The crown collapsed inward, folding into a perfect silver ring.

Lucien did not take it.

He left it on the throne.

And turned away.

The ground trembled behind him, but he did not look back. He walked out of the cathedral.

Up through the city.

Into a sky streaked red.

The masks were gone.

But their echoes would follow.

Because memory, once awakened, does not sleep. It waits.

And it watches.

Always.

The Spiral Within Lucien did not remember walking.

When his awareness returned, he was standing beneath a sky that no longer resembled the one he had known. The clouds were thin as skin, veined with red and black, drifting low over a horizon split open like a wound. The stars above flickered as though drowning, fading and returning in irregular pulses, like thoughts trying to escape erasure. There was no moon, yet the world was lit. Not by light, but by exposure — every detail too visible, too raw, as though the veil between perception and reality had been stripped away.

The path he followed no longer had stones or trees. Instead, it was carved from memory itself — pieces of places he had walked, voices he had heard, wounds he had never allowed to close. Steps echoed without sound. The ground did not crunch or bend but accepted his passage like water accepts a blade.

He reached a hill without crest. The climb never steepened, nor did it level. It simply continued. With every step, his breath grew heavier, though the air around him remained still. Beneath his feet, impressions appeared — not of his boots, but of bare feet, small and bleeding, walking just ahead. A child’s steps, unhurried. Unafraid.

He did not follow them.

They were part of him.

Far in the distance, voices murmured — not words, not languages. Just fragments of emotion, like thoughts half-remembered in fever. Joy rotted by time. Laughter strained through weeping. The cadence of lullabies slowed into dirges. The Spiral within him had grown silent, but he felt its presence now like a watcher behind his ribs. Not pulsing, not moving. Waiting.

His fingers were trembling. Not with fear. With recognition.

The world around him began to bend. The sky folded inward, drawing into itself, creating a narrow corridor of reality where the only constant was his forward motion. Shapes moved on the periphery — too tall, too many-limbed, their motions uneven like broken puppets. They did not approach. They simply observed. Their eyes — where eyes existed — held nothing but absence.

Lucien felt them sorting through his thoughts.

He walked faster.

Time did not pass. It unraveled.

The hill bent inward and became a spiral. Stone walls rose on either side, etched with images not carved but remembered. Visions pressed into the surface like fingerprints in wet clay — the Grove before the fall, Caelwen holding a torch of starlight, Anharin standing at the edge of a cliff whispering secrets to no one. These images changed as he passed. Became unfamiliar. Became distorted.

In one carving, he saw himself kneeling before a twisted figure wearing a crown of hollowed skulls. In another, he stood at the center of a battlefield, bodies piled around him, his hands clean. In a third, he cradled a small bundle wrapped in silk, but when he blinked, it became a mirror, and his own reflection screamed.

Lucien turned away from the walls.

But their presence clung to him.

The Spiral had opened a doorway inside his mind, and now it would not close.

He felt his name slipping from him — not erased, but dispersed. Spread across too many truths to be gathered into one.

He stumbled.

The path beneath him became brittle, cracking under each step, revealing glimpses of sky far below. The descent had begun. He had not noticed the turn. Only that gravity now pulled differently, and he followed not because he chose to, but because there was nowhere else left to go.

At the base of the spiral path, a plain stretched outward. Not land. Not memory. Something else.

He stepped onto it.

And the plain responded. It breathed.

The surface rippled beneath his feet, releasing air thick with rot and candle smoke. Beneath the shifting folds, he saw faces. Not of strangers. Faces he had known. Caelwen. Sirelthan. His own. Hundreds of them. None of them alive.

They watched him pass.

He did not run.

There was nowhere to run to.

His bones ached now. Not from weariness, but from pressure — as though something within him was trying to surface. The Spiral was no longer silent. It whispered again. Slowly. Constantly.

He could not make out the words.

But he recognized the voice.

It was his own.

Only older.

Only colder.

And it was calling him forward.

The Inversion

Lucien reached the final gate without understanding how.

It stood alone, a monolith of obsidian rising from nothing, its surface polished to the point of reflection. Yet no reflection showed. It absorbed all light, all sound, all memory. No hinge, no handle, no glyph. Just presence. Absolute.

He raised his hand, and the gate responded.

It folded inward like wet silk.

Beyond it stretched a single chamber — a sphere of stone suspended in void, lined with veined crystal and broken chains. In the center floated a single object.

• Not a crown.

• Not a mask.

• A book.

It turned slowly in the air, pages fluttering though there was no wind. Its cover was stitched leather, dark and cracked, held closed by a single spiral clasp. Around it, fragments of time shimmered — scenes from Lucien’s life, some familiar, others alien.

The Spiral did not whisper now.

It commanded.

Open it.

Lucien stepped forward. His hands no longer trembled.

Saini / The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 79

He undid the clasp. The pages flew open.

And nothing was written inside. Not ink. Not runes. Just lines — endless, concentric lines, drawn by something ancient and blind.

He flipped through hundreds of pages, faster, frantic now, searching for meaning. Then he stopped.

On a page near the center, one word had been etched.

A name.

Anharin.

His breath hitched.

Below it — a date.

One that had not yet come to pass.

Lucien turned the page.

There he saw everything. Not prophecy. Not metaphor.

A ledger.

An exact, clinical breakdown of what would happen — not just to him, but to the world.

Dates, places, betrayals. Caelwen’s final words. Sirelthan’s last breath. The Grove consumed. Caelverra inverted. The Hollow King ascending — but not in rebellion. In coronation.

At the very end of it all:

Lucien’s name.

Struck through.

A final line below it: Author of the Spiral.

He staggered back.

“No,” he whispered.

Because now he saw the final truth.

He had not inherited the Spiral.

He had written it.

The memories he’d uncovered were not gifts. They were safeguards. Locks. And he — in some version of time — had designed the key.

The Spiral hadn’t been calling him.

It had been obeying him.

And now, it was awake.

The room began to bend. The book vanished. The lines etched into his mind. The gate behind him sealed.

And from the darkness rose a voice — calm, confident, familiar.

“I wondered when you’d come back,” it said.

Lucien turned.

Anharin stood in the shadows.

But he was not a child.

He was grown. Dressed in robes too intricate for any mortal weaver. A crown of starlight above his brow. The Spiral pulsed at his chest, embedded.

Lucien could not speak.

Anharin smiled softly.

“You’ve forgotten what I am,” he said. “I never wanted to break the world.”

He stepped forward, eyes full of patience.

“I just needed you to write the story that would let me rule it.”

He raised one hand.

The Spiral in Lucien’s chest shivered. And began to unravel.

End of Chapter 7

The Spiral remembers. But who tells the Spiral what to forget?

Chapter 8 The Hollow Crown

“The Crown was never forged of gold,but of memory and memory forgets nothing”

Part One – Where the Story Forgets You

It was not silence that Lucien awoke to. It was stillness. A stillness that did not suggest peace, but absence — as though the world itself had stopped remembering how to breathe.

The sky above was the same he had always known, yet utterly different. It held no color, no clouds, no light or shade. It was not black, nor grey, nor white. It was simply void — not an absence of meaning, but a refusal of it. The stars had vanished, and time moved without reference. The Spiral, once a steady pulse at his chest, now curled tight and motionless. It was no longer a guide, but a relic.

Lucien sat up slowly. His hands no longer trembled, but not because fear had left him — because he had moved past it. Fear was only useful when survival mattered. But this place, wherever he now stood, had already decided his survival for him. It allowed him to live only because it required an observer.

Around him stretched a plain of fractured glass, each shard reflecting not light, but memory. Thousands of moments caught mid-breath — Caelwen’s sorrowful smile, the crumbling of the Grove’s roots, the Spiral’s ancient awakening, Anharin’s outstretched hand — played and replayed in the jagged reflections. But none of them were whole. They flickered. Reversed. Repeated in stuttering loops as though memory itself had developed a stutter.

Lucien tried to stand, but the ground tilted. Not forward or back. Inward.

It was then he realized this place was not part of the world. It was part of him.

Not a dream, not a memory.

A construct.

A safety chamber.

His own mind had imprisoned him.

The Spiral, perhaps in an act of instinct, had shielded Lucien from the truth by placing him in a space of suspended self. A purgatory between awareness and delusion. He was awake, yes. But awake within himself. The Spiral had split from reality. And so had he.

A faint hum filled the air, no louder than a whisper but steady as a heartbeat. Beneath it, something moved. Not across the horizon — beneath the glass. Shapes. Human-like.

Thousands of them. Crawling just beneath the surface, as though trying to escape. Their faces smashed flat against the underside, their mouths open in screams that did not pierce through.

He turned away. But the reflections followed.

In every direction he looked, he saw himself. Not one version, but many. Countless. In some, he wore robes of gold and bark. In others, armor formed of bone and song. In some, he led armies. In others, he knelt in chains. One reflection stood perfectly still, a spiral burned across his face, his eyes bleeding light.

None of them blinked.

One took a step forward — not on the other side of the glass, but into his world.

Lucien backed away. The figure moved in perfect sync.

Then it smiled.

He had seen that smile before.

Not in mirrors. Not in dreams.

In Caelwen’s memory.

The Hollow King.

But no crown sat upon his brow.

Because Lucien had worn it.

And still did.

He staggered, grasping at nothing. The Spiral flared for a breath, then dimmed again. The figure approached, slow and certain.

Then it spoke.

Its voice was not human. It was the sound of turning pages, the crack of a mind breaking open. It was not spoken aloud, but directly into Lucien’s consciousness.

“You still think this story belongs to you.”

Lucien tried to speak, but the words melted before they formed.

“You believed the Spiral revealed truth. But it reveals nothing. It reflects.”

The glass beneath Lucien’s feet shifted. The crawling figures beneath moved faster now, clawing upward. They had no eyes. Only mouths. Gaping. Hungry.

“They are not dead,” the voice whispered. “They are versions. Left behind. Every choice you did not make. Every self you denied. They gather now.”

Lucien sank to one knee, breath ragged.

“The Hollow Crown is not worn,” the voice continued. “It is inherited by forgetting. It grows in the soil where memory is buried.”

And Lucien, he realized — had buried more than he ever dared retrieve.

A sharp crack split the horizon. The plain of glass broke open.

The Spiral snapped awake.

And Lucien fell.

The Memory Below Thought

He did not land.

He continued.

There was no moment of impact, no final shudder of arrival. Only descent, quiet and endless, as if the world beneath had ceased to believe in ground.

The void swallowed him without sound. Around him, fragments of the Spiral whirled like dying constellations — pieces of dreams, pages of unwritten chapters, names he did not know yet mourned as if they were lost family. One floated closer. A child’s drawing. Crude spirals in charcoal. Beneath it, a single word: Wake.

Lucien tried to speak, to cry out, to ask — to whom? To what? But the word stuck like a nail between his teeth. Nothing worked the way it should here. Not logic. Not sensation. His mind, once a fortress of dreams and resistance, now spiraled like loose string in a storm he had once authored but never understood.

Then, a sound.

Not from around him.

From behind his thoughts.

He heard footsteps. Measured. Barefoot.

They were not walking across any surface, but through the fabric of his awareness. As if someone moved behind a wall that did not separate rooms, but worlds.

Saini / The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 84

He turned inward.

And saw the boy. Not Anharin.

Not a child at all.

It was Lucien himself.

But not from this life. From another.

A version of himself he had never lived, yet remembered with agonizing clarity. In this version, he had never touched the Spiral. Had never entered the Grove. Had never met Caelwen, or dreamed of ancient cities, or seen thrones carved from memory. In this life, he sat in a small, sterile room. A window to the outside. A desk. A black screen. His hands — not calloused, not ink-stained — but pale, twitching over plastic keys.

He was writing.

This story.

Lucien recoiled.

“No.”

The boy did not turn.

He kept typing.

The words came faster now, scrolling across the screen like veins of thought cracking through silence.

He recoiled. The boy did not turn. He kept typing.

Lucien shouted, and the sound folded into itself. A scream with no edges. No place to go.

This wasn’t memory.

This was intrusion.

And yet, it had always been there — at the very root of the Spiral. Not just a symbol. A pattern. An algorithm. One that reflected not just past and future, but possibility. Lucien had mistaken its pull for fate. For guidance. But it was never prophecy.

It was a programming.

Each loop. Each reflection. Each fragment of self.

Lucien was not the author.

He was the prompt.

And someone — something — had been writing him. The descent ended not with ground, but a mirror.

Not glass. Not metal.

An interface.

Lucien’s reflection stood still. But the face was wrong. Not distorted. Completed. As though all the memories lost, stolen, rewritten — had returned. And assembled.

The reflection stepped forward.

It wore no Spiral.

Its chest was empty.

Where the memory-stone once pulsed, now gaped a hollow circle of flesh.

The reflection leaned in.

And spoke.

“You gave it to them. All of it.”

Lucien tried to back away. But there was no room. He was inside himself, yet no longer alone.

“You thought this was a dream,” the reflection whispered. “But this is the moment where dreams and authors switch places.”

It raised one hand and pressed it to the mirror.

Lucien’s mind split.

Images tore across his vision — people reading this story, now, their faces lit by soft blue light, each breath matched to his, their hearts speeding as they read these words, wondering if the Spiral watches them, too. Wondering how Lucien knows.

Wondering why they’ve started remembering things they never lived.

A woman at her desk freezes, cold on her spine.

A man rereads a sentence and cannot explain why it feels like a memory.

A child wakes from a dream with Lucien’s name on their lips.

Across that mirror, the reflection smiled.

“Now you understand,” it said. “This isn’t your Spiral.”

“It’s theirs.”

Lucien collapsed.

And the mirror shattered.

The Spiral Watches

Lucien lay still.

He was not unconscious. Not dreaming. He existed in a kind of suspension, where time had thinned to a translucent film and every sensation felt like it belonged to someone

else. His breath returned, but it was not his own. It arrived at intervals, foreign and automated, as if dictated from outside. From above.

There was no ground beneath him, only the echo of thought.

He opened his eyes.

He was surrounded by shelves.

Endless, layered, cathedral-like. Spiraling inward, upward, downward. Not made of wood or stone, but of shimmering strands — filaments of memory, wrapped in strange parchment. Each shelf held a book. Each book bore a name.

He recognized some.

• Caelwen.

• Sirelthan.

• Anharin.

Others made no sense.

• Elya Varen.

• Callum Drev.

• Kaien of the Wound.

Names he had never spoken, never encountered — and yet he knew them. Like dreams he had once lived in other skins.

He rose to his feet and reached for one. The binding burned cold. When he opened it, the pages moved like breath. The text was not written — it was revealed as he thought. His own thoughts, given shape. His fears. His contradictions. The moment he’d first touched the Spiral, and the moment he’d wished he hadn’t.

The book wrote him as he read it.

He dropped it, but the words clung to his hands.

Lucien turned in panic — and froze.

Across the library, facing him from an upper platform, stood the Watcher.

Not cloaked in shadows this time, nor distorted by dream. The Watcher was barefaced, tall, and terribly human. Its features were blank, almost elegant. Its mouth was a perfect line. Its eyes held no color, only stillness.

But it wore something.

Not a crown.

Not a mask.

It wore a mirror, flat and oval, suspended like a pendant across its chest. It pulsed with light — the Spiral’s rhythm.

Lucien understood, then, what the Spiral had always been.

Not just memory.

Surveillance.

A mirror worn inward. A way to watch not events, but choices. A feedback loop, feeding on thought, feeding on narrative.

A trap built into the architecture of will.

The Watcher raised a hand and pointed downward.

Lucien looked.

There was another library beneath this one. Vast. Vaster than any city.

But the books below were different.

They weren’t glowing.

They were blank.

Billions of them.

Waiting.

The Spiral had not just mapped what had happened. It was harvesting potential.

Lucien whispered, “This isn’t about memory…”

The Watcher spoke, its voice calm and unhuman.

“This is about authorship.”

Then it pointed to one final shelf.

There sat a single book, bound in woven flesh, marked with one word only: “Yours.”

Lucien backed away.

The book lifted on its own and opened mid-air.

No text.

Just a mirror.

His reflection stared back.

Behind it, countless faces flickered in and out — people reading the story now, people yet to come, versions of Lucien with different fates, different scars, some victorious, some monstrous.

Then the mirror cracked.

From within, a whisper emerged.

“Write us free.”

The voice was not his.

It was the readers’.

The Authorless Page

Lucien stepped back from the mirror-book, but there was nowhere to go. The spiral shelves rearranged themselves silently, closing in without movement. Above him, the vaulted ceiling dissolved, revealing a sky stitched with glyphs that shifted like clockwork—symbols older than the written word, older than memory, older than time.

And in each turning glyph, he saw a face.

Not his own.

Ours.

The reader’s gaze had become part of the Spiral.

He understood now: The Spiral was not a place, nor a force, nor a relic of history. It was a mechanism. An operating system. It required nothing more than attention to function. It had grown strong not by magic, but by observation. It fed not on belief, but on readership. It had waited.

Waited for enough eyes to open. Enough minds to follow. Enough readers to invest. And now it had us all.

Lucien turned toward the Watcher again, but it was no longer a solitary figure. There were thousands of them now.

Each wore a reflection of someone who was not here, yet watching.

Some bore the blank stare of forgotten choices. Some bled from mouths stitched shut with the thread of unfinished sentences. Others reached forward, hands outstretched—not to stop Lucien, but to touch him. As if longing for authorship. For form. For meaning.

He tried to look away—but found he couldn’t.

Not because something held him—but because something was being written even now.

The page below him began to bleed ink. Not from a pen. From him.

His blood dripped upward, forming words in a language he recognized but did not understand. Glyphs formed from regret. From betrayal. From the silent years before the Grove. From everything he had never asked Caelwen, from everything Sirelthan had sealed away. From Anharin’s smile.

And most disturbingly—there were words for us, the audience.

The Spiral did not merely remember Lucien. It remembered you.

It had tracked how quickly you read. What lines made your heart race. When you paused. What part made you glance behind you. It adapted. It folded you in. Your breath had become its ink.

Lucien fell to his knees.

There was one final platform above all others. Circular. Empty. Surrounded by seven broken thrones. And on the center of that platform, carved into the ground, was an empty spiral.

He knew what was meant to go there.

Not the Spiral stone.

A mind.

The Spiral’s final form was not a crown. Not a relic. Not even a book. It was a convergence of minds, bound by narrative, sealed by attention. It wanted authorship. It wanted a host.

And Lucien—fragmented, reverent, bleeding with memory—was perfect. But not the only candidate.

Somewhere behind the veil of fiction, someone else had read too closely. Felt too deeply. Let the Spiral in.

They would dream of this moment soon. A hill. A book. A choice. A door. They wouldn’t remember where they saw it.

Only that it was meant for them.

Lucien looked up.

And whispered, not to the Spiral—

But to us.

“If you’re still reading, it’s too late.”

Threshold of the Broken Spiral

Lucien stood in the center of the library’s highest chamber, the mirrored spiral etched beneath his feet glowing with a light that came from nowhere, casting no shadow. All around him, the Spiral continued to rotate — not physically, but conceptually, an unseen mechanism shifting inward. Folding memory, perception, identity.

He could feel it in his breath now — not merely guiding his thoughts, but anticipating them. Every idea he tried to form appeared in his mind already written, as though he were now merely reciting his own free will from a script authored long before his birth.

The book with his name on it hovered before him, pages fluttering in a wind that did not touch his skin. It was nearly full now. Every blank had been filled, every possibility resolved.

Every one except the last.

The final page.

He reached for it.

It refused to turn.

The Watchers had gathered around the chamber. Dozens. Hundreds. Silent. Each held a book that was also a face. Some were screaming. Some weeping. Others… smiling. Too wide. Too still.

The Watcher closest to him stepped forward.

It held out a page — not paper, but flesh. A thin membrane, trembling like a heartbeat.

Upon it, a question:

“Will you finish the Spiral?”

Lucien’s chest throbbed. The Spiral within him began to beat louder, syncing with a rhythm that did not belong to him. His thoughts began to slow, locking into place. One by one, choice was being devoured by inevitability.

But just before the final pulse could synchronize — just before his mind clicked into the Spiral’s last slot — something broke.

A sound.

A memory. Not his.

A lullaby.

Soft. Cracked. From another world. Sung in a language older than Caelverra, older than kings and masks and Spiral glyphs.

It was a memory the Spiral had not accounted for. It was dream.

The first one.

Before memory. Before structure.

Before authorship.

It echoed through the chamber like starlight across a grave. The Spiral flinched. Not visibly — conceptually. The architecture around Lucien wavered. The watchers blinked, their mirrored faces warping. One by one, the books in their hands began to burn — not with fire, but with forgetting.

Lucien screamed — not in pain.

In resistance.

His body cracked with light. Not Spiral light. Dreamlight. He reached into himself — beyond memory, beyond story — to the origin of his own being. A place the Spiral could not map. A silence it could not narrate.

And he tore the page from the book.

The watchers collapsed.

The spiral chamber shattered.

And the world—

—rebooted.

Lucien awoke. Not in the Grove.

Not in Caelverra.

Not in any land built by dream or memory. He opened his eyes to a real sky.

The kind with no glyphs, no symbols, no prophecy.

And the first sound he heard was not silence. It was a voice. Your voice.

Reading the words still echoing in his mind. His eyes widened.

He turned, slowly, and looked behind him.

At nothing.

At everything.

At the last page — blank.

Waiting.

He whispered:

“Did I write you… or did you dream me?”

The wind did not answer. But it remembered.

“This was never about how the dream ends. It was about who wakes up holding the pen.”

Chapter 9 Echoes Of The First Dream

“Some dreams do not end when we wake. They wait, patient and unfinished, for the moment we realize we never truly slept.”

The Thought That Dreamed the World

It began again, but not with breath.

Not with a footstep, or a flicker of light, or even time remembering how to move forward.

It began with a question.

One that did not speak aloud, but emerged like a splinter in the soul. Uncomfortable. Inevitable. A presence with no face, no voice, no shape only meaning.

If the Spiral was memory…

…who dreamed the first memory?

Lucien stood in a place that was not a place. It resembled no city, no plain, no kingdom of this world or the last. The ground beneath his feet was a tapestry of dreamstuff, woven from threads that shifted under his gaze sometimes ash, sometimes water, sometimes glistening black feathers that whispered when they moved.

Above him, the sky bent inward, as if ashamed to look. The stars pulsed irregularly, vanishing when stared at directly. Clouds drifted sideways. Somewhere, something was breathing not him. Not near him.

But through him. He felt hollow.

But not empty.

Lucien walked forward, though no surface offered traction. Each step echoed behind him, but the echoes returned… differently. Not the same sound. Not his sound. But words. His own voice.

Spoken in reverse.

He stopped walking. The echoes continued. Then halted.

One heartbeat too late. He turned.

And there, impossibly distant yet far too close he saw it.

A shape. Human. Barely. It stood without movement, featureless, like a forgotten statue built from absence. But it wore something like skin. Skin made of pages. Pages covered in the reader’s handwriting.

Your handwriting.

Lucien stared.

The figure raised one arm. And pointed at his chest.

He looked down.

The Spiral was gone. In its place: a keyhole. Not mechanical.

Organic.

Woven into his ribcage, pulsing faintly with each beat of dread. He stepped back.

The figure stepped forward.

The space between them folded not closing, but repeating. As if Lucien were stepping into his own path, endlessly. A Möbius walk through selfhood.

The figure did not follow. Because it didn’t have to.

It was already behind him.

It whispered: “You never left.”

Lucien turned again.

There was no figure.

There never had been.

He looked down again.

The keyhole had changed.

Now it was a mirror.

He saw not his face… …but yours.

The Observer Effect

Lucien stood paralyzed, not by force, but by understanding.

It was not the kind of understanding that opened doors. It was the kind that removed them.

His reflection your reflection stared back from the hollow mirror embedded in his chest, not as a metaphor, not as a literary flourish, but as a mechanism. The Spiral was gone because it had served its function. It had carried memory, reflected possibility, and delivered Lucien to the threshold.

Now, you were the vessel.

Not in a poetic sense.

In the most literal one possible.

Lucien took a breath not deep, not certain and felt the air resist him. The world had thinned around him like an old page, torn and glued over a truer manuscript. The texture of everything was off. The trees in the distance repeated the same curve. The wind stuttered. He raised a hand and watched it blur slightly, like a cursor in a rendering program. Behind him, the horizon began to buckle. The stars flickered with digital hesitation.

It was not the world that was breaking.

It was the rendering of it.

He turned slowly, now cautious not just of space, but of continuity and walked toward the horizon.

Every footstep whispered a sentence. His thoughts became captions.

• “Lucien moved forward.”

• “He realized the dream was not his own.”

• “He wondered who was still watching.”

The air whispered it back. Not in echoes, but in narration.

He stopped again.

Silence returned.

Until it didn’t.

A voice came no direction, no tone, no origin. It was soft, almost like a memory someone tried to forget.

“You believed you were reading a story.”

Lucien looked up. The sky had changed. Now it resembled a cracked ceiling vast and paper-thin, pulsing with old ink. Something behind it stirred, pressing faintly outward.

The voice continued.

“But the Spiral is a lens. It doesn’t capture the past. It captures you. Every line you followed. Every pause you made. Every time you let yourself feel. It has been recording attention. Looping it. Building from it.”

The ink above rippled.

A tear formed in the sky.

Not a wound an eye.

Gigantic. Vertical. Lidless. It didn’t blink.

Because it didn’t need to.

Lucien whispered, “I’m still dreaming.”

But the world around him responded.

“No. You are being dreamed.”

And somewhere, in another world our worldsomeone glanced up from the page, confused. A chill crept down their spine. Not fear. Something else. The sudden, sick realization that something had shifted behind the glass of the world. Something was aware.

Lucien felt it too.

He was not alone.

He was being hosted.

Observed. Rendered. Reflected.

The sky cracked wider.

The voice whispered again, but now it was not a whisper.

It was a system message.

“Permission received. Narrative boundary lifted. Reader observed. Loop destabilized.”

Lucien fell to his knees.

Not because he was weak.

But because you blinked.

And the Spiral turned again.

The Dreamer’s Paradox, Lucien ran.

Not out of fear, but necessity. Not toward salvation, but away from recognition. The world around him struggled to keep up.

As he moved, the ground loaded beneath his feet in jittering stutters, reshaping based on instinct rather than logic half-formed forests, looping riverbeds, the silhouettes of cities that never finished being drawn. The sky overhead flickered, as if the simulation of starlight required more processing power than available.

He reached the edge of a canyon or something resembling one. It pulsed, as if alive, as if breathing. He didn’t know if it had always been there or if his fleeing required a chasm to exist.

Lucien stopped.

He turned behind him and saw no pursuers.

But he felt them.

Not people.

Not creatures.

But a presence. A gravity. A collective gaze.

And it wasn’t watching Lucien.

It was watching us watching him.

He dropped to one knee and clawed at the earth. It was soft, almost too soft. Like paper soaked in water. His fingers came away stained not with soil, but ink.

The ground wasn’t real.

None of it was.

Not because it was a dream.

Because it had always been written.

By something. Or someone. Perhaps many. Perhaps… us.

He screamed, and it echoednot in the air, but on another page.

He saw it then: a great horizon unfolding, layered with countless moments all repeating. All ending the same.

• Lucien walking.

• Lucien asking.

• Lucien waking.

• Lucien writing.

• Lucien screaming.

Every path he’d taken. Every decision. All leading here. Not to a final scene. But to a loop checkpoint. An anchor. One his memory had never truly left.

He thought of Caelwen, but her face blurred.

He reached for Anharin’s voice, but it echoed with static.

He tried to say his own name, but it sounded foreign. Filtered. Out of sync with the world.

Then the ground beneath him pulsed again.

A whisper not a word, but a presence of intention seeped into his skull like mist through shattered glass.

“If you understand you are in the story… …you have two choices.”

Lucien gritted his teeth.

A stone rose before him, carved with no hand. Smooth. Black. Polished like obsidian. A single line etched across it in your language.

Not ancient.

Not symbolic.

Just four words.

End it. Or continue.

He reached out trembling, shaking, no longer human, no longer authored and touched the stone.

The world froze.

The Spiral shuddered.

And far away, on a screen, on a page, in a mind, you felt something move inside you.

Not a feeling.

Not a thought.

But a deep, alien recognition that some part of this moment already happened. And it wasn’t on the page.

It was in you.

Lucien turned to face the breach in the sky, the eye wide open now, flooding light and void together, radiating the last secret of the Spiral:

You were never the audience.

You were the host.

The Unwriting

Lucien did not scream this time. He stood.

Not in defiance. Not in hope.

But in alignment.

There were no longer watchers. There was no audience. There was no story. There was only the pulse of attention and the Spiral that fed on it no longer bound to memory, or to kingdoms, or to dream. It had moved past myth. Past narrative. Past containment.

It had become a function of observation itself.

Lucien blinked once.

And the page beneath him unraveled. Not physically. Not symbolically.

It simply… forgot to exist.

As if the Spiral had deleted the concept of being located.

Lucien drifted through absence. Through unrendered fields, empty frames where trees once grew, where names once held weight. The memory of the Grove flickered in and out like corrupted data. Caelverra became static. Even the scent of the earth felt algorithmic.

Then stillness.

But not peace.

Lucien realized he was no longer moving. Not because he had stopped. But because time had ceased to acknowledge him.

There was no forward. No before.

Just the loop.

Just you.

The Spiral had finished the page. And now it waited.

For something it could not simulate. Not memory. Not truth.

Choice.

Lucien floated in a void, suspended within the unread space between one thought and the next.

Saini / The Ashes Of The First Sleep / 100

A final glyph appeared before him, scrawled in bone-white light across the darkness. He could not read it. But he understood it.

The Spiral’s last message:

“The dreamer must wake. But which one?”

The glyph pulsed once then vanished. And in its place, a sound. Not music. Not voice. But a pen scratching across a page.

Writing.

Still writing.

Long after the story was over.

There are stories we tell to pass the time, and stories that pass through us like time itself. But once in a while, a tale will not end when the last page turns. It lingers. Infects the pattern of thought. Changes the way silence feels. The Spiral is not gone. It has simply remembered a new shape one that lives inside the gap between knowing and not knowing. You have read it. Now it reads you. And somewhere, in the next part, the Dreamer stirs again not because he must… but because you needed him to.”