The world above the clouds was deathly still. Yet, in that silence, something ancient stirred.
Cael and Elen stood on a narrow spine of crystallized wind, suspended between peaks that no map dared to name. The bridge wasn't made by hands—no, it had grown, over ages, like frost threading a mirror. Each step echoed not against rock, but memory.
Elen reached out, brushing the air. A fine shimmer clung to her fingers. "We're past the bounds of the waking world," she whispered. "This is the edge of where stories end... or begin again."
Cael's eyes were distant. His feet moved, but not with certainty. The wind here didn't blow—it whispered. Names. Dates. Places neither of them had ever known, yet felt deep in their bones.
"Do you hear them?" he asked.
She nodded, brow furrowed. "The Forgotten."
Between them and the sky, hundreds of thin golden threads stretched like the strings of some divine harp. They moved gently, not from any wind, but as if plucked by invisible hands. Each thread pulsed with faint images—faces laughing, cities burning, children crying for gods who never answered.
Elen stepped closer to one, hypnotized. A thread flicked against her arm.
Her knees buckled.
She collapsed, eyes wide in horror, trapped in a torrent of memories not her own—yet somehow familiar. Her breath hitched.
"Velmira... The sacrifice wasn't war... it was a ward... for me..."
Cael caught her before she fell entirely. But his arms trembled—not from effort, but from a sudden wrongness within him. His pulse had vanished. He placed his hand over his heart and felt nothing.
"I'm fading," he whispered.
"No," Elen gasped, clawing her way up. "Not now. You're not done."
But the threads disagreed. Around them, they began to twist. Not in aggression—but invitation. As if acknowledging that Cael no longer belonged to any thread of fate. That he had become... an anomaly.
One thread slithered toward his ankle like a serpent. It touched his skin—and in an instant, Cael saw himself.
As a child. As an old man. As a blade of grass. As a forgotten star.
Every version, possible and impossible. All of them led back to one place.
The Dreamtomb.
The cradle of the First Dreamer.
"Do you know what it means?" Cael asked, voice distant.
Elen nodded slowly. "If you go any farther... you might not come back."
"I'm not sure I was ever really here."
He turned. And for a moment, she saw the truth in his eyes.
Cael was not a traveler.
He was a thread cut loose—searching for a loom that could still remember him.
Suddenly, the sky above cracked with thunder.
A figure appeared in the distance, standing on the mirrored path ahead—cloaked in red fire, face hidden behind a porcelain mask marked with seven burning eyes.
Lemarion, Archflare of the Kindled Faith.
"You should have stayed forgotten," his voice boomed, even from miles away.
Cael stood, slowly. "I tried," he said.