The stars returned that night—distant, hesitant, and unfamiliar.
Where once constellations stood proud across the heavens, now there were distortions, unnatural glows, unfamiliar alignments. It was as if the sky had rewritten itself, or as if something had climbed into it and rearranged the stars like ornaments to a different truth.
Varis knelt beside a whispering fire. The flames flickered without heat, unnatural in their glow. They hissed as if offended by their own existence. He stared into them, eyes hollow, hands still calloused from the climb up the jagged obsidian ridge. Each finger trembled—partly from exhaustion, partly from what now stirred inside him since crossing the breach.
Across from him, Ilyen sat crouched over a sheet of dried hide, replicating the glyphs they had seen inside the rift. The young scribe's ink glowed faintly with a silver hue. Every line he traced twisted unnaturally, fighting his command, as if it resisted being captured by mortal hands.
"Ilyen," Varis said, voice dry from the ash-thick air, "when you write them down… do you feel it? Like they're watching?"
Ilyen didn't answer at first. Then, slowly, he nodded. "It's like... they don't want to be remembered. As if the moment we name them, they grow teeth."
Varis sighed and looked up. The stars flickered again.
The breach hadn't merely opened a path into another plane—it had cracked the barrier between memory and possibility. Since returning, they no longer dreamed their own dreams. They saw cities that had never existed. Wars that hadn't happened—yet. In his sleep, Varis heard his mother scream—a mother who'd died before he learned her name.
He felt the burden of knowing things he should not. And he wasn't alone.
The wind moaned through the canyon walls. A sound too close to a cry. Too human.
"You still hear it?" Varis asked without looking at Ilyen.
"Yes," Ilyen whispered. "Every night. It whispers the name I haven't spoken since I was five... I never told anyone that name."
A shadow shifted across the firelight.
Before either of them could react, he was there—emerging from behind a fractured pillar of bone-white stone. Not a god, nor a ghost, but something in between. A man cloaked in fabric that shimmered like fractured obsidian. His steps made no sound. His eyes, golden and vast, seemed to hold storms older than the world.
"You've seen too much," the man said.
Varis stood swiftly, drawing his blade—but the metal cracked as it left the scabbard, shattering into three clean pieces that fell like dead leaves.
The stranger didn't flinch. "I am not here to harm you."
"Then speak your truth," Varis growled. "And speak it fast."
The man stepped forward, his voice like thunder behind closed doors. "You are infected by memory—memories that belong to things older than language, to gods that have burned themselves out of time."
He turned his gaze to Ilyen. "You've begun to write them down. That cannot be allowed."
"They're just symbols," Ilyen said, though his voice cracked.
The man looked at him with sorrow. "No. They're doors."
The fire flickered again, and suddenly the world shifted. The canyon trembled, reality thinned, and around them flickered a dozen overlapping versions of the same moment. Varis saw himself kneeling, standing, bleeding, smiling—different fates converging in a heartbeat.
Then it all snapped back.
"I offer you a choice," the man said finally. "Forget. Or become something no longer human."
Varis stared at the pieces of his broken sword, then looked at Ilyen. The boy's hands glowed with glyphs now—not ink, but fire.
There was no going back.