Beneath seven layers of obsidian bedrock, deeper than the reach of memory, lay the hollowed ruins of Kael Orun, once the City of Pinnacles. Before the Spiral's unbinding, it had been a sanctuary of ancient knowledge, home to the Order of Echoed Light keepers of the lost truths buried by gods and tyrants alike.
Now, it was a tomb.
Its towers were collapsed, its walls eaten by roots of time itself. No map recalled its paths, and no spell dared search its depth save for one chamber left untouched by decay, not by chance, but by will.
A will that had waited.
In this chamber, shaped like an egg cracked open by eternity, the flame of unborn creation danced above a cradle of starmetal. It hummed not with warmth, but with a strange rhythm, like the breath of something trying to remember how to live.
And within that cradle, she opened her eyes.
Her skin shimmered faintly, like dusk over still water. Her eyes were galaxies in miniature void black, speckled with stars. Her first breath pulled not air, but concepts: silence, memory, gravity, music. She blinked, and entire metaphors reshaped around her presence.
She was not a child in the usual sense.
She was the answer to a question Zeirion and Aralya had never asked aloud: What happens when the Spiral no longer binds?
A figure watched her from the shadows veiled in broken armor etched with runes that flickered between languages.
"You're awake," it said, kneeling.
The girl tilted her head. She had no name. Not yet. But she understood.
"I dreamed of him," she said. Her voice echoed strangely, like a lullaby whispered across galaxies.
"Who?"
"The one who chose creation over conquest. The one who let the Spiral go."
The armored figure nodded.
"That was your father."
The girl blinked slowly. "Then the world will come to end me."
"No," said the figure, rising. "The world will come to worship you… or to fear you. That choice is yours."
She looked upward. Stone and silence stretched far above.
Then, as if she'd always known how, she stepped from the cradle and walked barefoot across the ground leaving footprints that shimmered with language older than time.
"Find the Sovereign," said the voice behind her.
She didn't turn. "He'll find me. When it's time."
And then, she was gone rising toward the world that had forgotten how to hope.