The wind had changed.
Where there was once silence between the trees, now there was breath — Lethe's breath, slow and deep, as if the city was relearning how to be alive. Birds Kaelen didn't recognize sang from branches that had only existed moments ago. The forest still bore traces of its vanished past, but now it shimmered with a tentative memory of itself.
Kaelen walked slower than usual. Not from fatigue, but reverence.
Lethe had changed her.
She could feel it in the heaviness of her steps. In the ache behind her eyes. In the pulse of her sigil, which no longer glowed faintly, but burned softly with every beat of her heart. She had not simply remembered a city — the city had remembered her back.
And with that came a cost.
---
That night, Kaelen sat beside a fire carved into the earth with the old spiral glyph. Tareth had used chalk from a broken temple stone to draw it, muttering in Athrénn under his breath. He'd been quiet since Lethe — more than usual.
She stirred the flames with a stick, watching the embers catch and curl into smoke.
"Something's wrong," she said.
Tareth didn't look at her. "You anchored Lethe. That isn't supposed to happen."
Kaelen blinked. "What do you mean?"
"I thought you'd pull a name. A person, maybe a relic. But you didn't anchor a memory." He looked at her then — really looked. "You anchored a city. You shouldn't have been able to do that."
She frowned. "Why not?"
Tareth stood slowly, shadows clinging to his coat. "Because no one has in over a hundred years. And the last one who did…" He trailed off.
Kaelen waited. "What happened to them?"
He stared into the darkness beyond the firelight. "They became part of what they remembered. And they were never seen again."
---
Kaelen rubbed her forearm. The spiral had changed. What had once been a closed circle now had a fracture running through it — a thin crack filled with light, like memory forcing its way through stone.
She rolled down her sleeve. "So what does this mean? I'm... unraveling?"
Tareth didn't answer. Instead, he reached into his pack and pulled out a battered piece of parchment. Unfolding it revealed a hand-drawn map — not of geography, but of sigils. Each one linked to an emotion, a memory, a name.
The one in the center was circled three times.
Anchor glyph. Athrénn root word: 'Relkheth'.
She Who Roots Names in Stone.
Kaelen traced it with her eyes. It matched hers exactly.
"You've seen this before," she said.
"I have." His voice was heavy. "It belonged to my commander. The last one who anchored a city. She carried that mark into the Hollow and never came back."
Kaelen swallowed. "So I'm her?"
"No." He met her eyes. "You're worse."
---
By morning, the world had changed again. Lethe, once hidden, now showed faint outlines on old maps that previously bore only blankness. Cartographers would call it a glitch. A trick. A lie.
But the Remembered would know.
Tareth marked a new heading — north, toward the Vale of Threads, where the second vanished city once stood. Its name was still lost, but its absence weighed heavy on the land.
"There are stories," he said as they packed, "that each city fell for a reason. Not from war or ruin, but from sacrifice. Someone gave something up — their name, their blood, their love — to preserve something else."
Kaelen tightened her cloak.
"Then we'll find what they saved. And give it a name again."
---
That night, Kaelen heard something in her dreams.
Not a voice.
A chorus.
It spoke in a language older than sound. The words coiled in her chest and burned against her sigil.
She awoke breathless, and found a single word carved into the stone beside her bedroll — not by her hand.
"Valenstrad."
She whispered it aloud.
And far, far away — in a void between forgotten memories — a shattered city opened one eye.