There was no reason for his pulse to quicken.
No name to the ache in his chest.
No face in the flashes of dreams that clawed at the edge of his mind.
Yet when Raven touched the blade the Guardians had given him—the one said to be carved from the spine of a fallen realm—he hesitated.
The war council watched him from the shadows of the ancient ruin they now called a base. The Heartstone had pulsed violently just hours before, warning of another fracture in the veil. And Raven, the chosen weapon of the forgotten prophecy, was to lead the charge.
But something was wrong.
He looked up. The moonlight filtered through cracks in the ceiling, falling across the map etched in veins of glowing ash. His fingers hovered over the Wounded Marsh, where the rift's latest pulse had emerged. He should have felt nothing. Should have moved with the cold precision he was known for.
Instead, something in his ribs ached.
"I'm fine," he lied, noticing the General's eyes on him.
"Then prove it," the General said. "You lead the next breach."
Raven nodded.
---
Across the marshland, where the veil rippled like glass struggling not to shatter, Lyra crouched beneath twisted branches, her magic wrapped tight around her like a second skin. Every breath was a struggle. She was losing her strength faster now, ever since the veil had taken its price.
And Raven—her Raven—was on the other side of this rift, unaware.
She had seen him. Through the threads of broken memory, through fragments that flickered in the mirror pool she barely had magic left to conjure. His eyes had changed. Sharper. Colder. But there was still something there.
"I can't reach him like this," she whispered to herself, brushing ash from her trembling fingers.
The relic hidden beneath her cloak pulsed softly in response.
A gift from the Guardians who still believed in her.
A risk.
She clutched it tighter.
"I'm not trying to make him remember me," she lied to the wind. "I'm trying to save the realms."
But even the wind didn't believe her.
---
They met at the edge of the breach.
Raven arrived first, surrounded by soldiers dressed in shadows. Their auras crackled with magic meant to kill, not question. And behind them, the fracture hummed like a heartbeat echoing through bones.
Lyra waited in the dark, cloaked, hooded, nearly invisible.
And yet…
When he stepped close to the breach, he paused.
His fingers twitched. His chest grew tight. He didn't know why.
"Something's wrong with this tear," he muttered.
Lyra's lips parted. He felt it.
She reached forward—just a little, just a whisper through the veil—but the relic in her bag flared and burned her skin.
He blinked and turned sharply, staring into the rift as though he had caught something flickering.
For a second—just one—he almost remembered.
Then the spell sealed again, hard and cruel.
He looked away. Walked past.
The breach was claimed. The war moved forward.
And Lyra stood in the ruins of hope.
But the relic pulsed in her palm. Not with pain. With promise.
He had felt her.
The heart had remembered what the mind could not.
And she would keep fighting until he knew why.