The vault had quieted.
Eloryn sat cross-legged beneath a memory lantern—one of the smaller ones, dim but warm. Around her, faint strands drifted like fireflies: soft laughter, old lullabies, the scent of bread baking.
She held a memory thread between her fingers, gently coaxing it into shape.
Fenn watched nearby, eyes narrowed in concentration. "Careful. You're weaving with nostalgia. That stuff's sticky. One wrong twist and you'll be daydreaming about your fifth birthday for six hours."
"I liked my fifth birthday," Eloryn murmured, her mind hazy. "There were seven cakes. One for each past life."
Fenn leaned over. "Eloryn. You're drifting."
Maren snorted from across the room, where he was half-heartedly trying to reassemble a sword-shaped memory into something less… sharp. "Fenn, you literally turned yourself into a squirrel yesterday with a mis-weave."
"It was temporary! And educational!"
Eloryn, still threading the past into shape, found herself slipping—not into memory, but into mood. The soft glow of childhood joy dulled the sharp edges in her mind. She felt weightless. Gentle. Detached.
A dangerous place to linger.
"Okay," Fenn said, standing up. "Time for something more grounding."
She tossed a new thread at Eloryn—brighter, heavier, humming with humiliation.
Eloryn gasped. "This is—!"
"You, age sixteen," Fenn said, grinning. "Tried to impress a Stormspeaker by summoning lightning from your teeth."
"It worked! Kind of!"
"You also shorted out your eyebrows for a week."
Maren gave her a sideways look. "That explains the portrait in the temple with the hat."
Eloryn groaned.
But the laughter came quickly, and something inside her loosened. The tension she hadn't even noticed she was carrying slowly unwound.
Fenn nudged her. "You're learning. Not just how to use the threads, but how to survive them. Most people drown in the heavy stuff. You… float."
Eloryn stared at the half-woven memory in her hands. It flickered—part joy, part embarrassment, part something deeper.
"I think I understand," she whispered. "It's not about mastering memory. It's about choosing which ones shape me."
Pennrick strolled in with a broom that was clearly sweeping itself. "And that, my dear, is how you become an Oracle worth remembering."
He paused.
"Also, someone left a jar of weeping spiders in the hall again. If that was anyone's idea of a prank, well done, but also—why?"
Fenn looked deeply offended. "They were emotional support spiders, actually."
****************