The world does not forget gently. It erodes memory like wind over stone—slowly, cruelly, until truth becomes myth and myth becomes ash.
—Final line scrawled in the margins of a ruined codex, Scholar's Archive, Year Unknown
In the half-light before the breaking of the sky, a lone figure sat hunched beneath the shattered ribs of an old cathedral. The stars above—mute and watching—cast their pale fire down upon pages too worn to speak, save for the soft rasp of ink drawn across parchment.
She was dying.
Not in the way bodies die—but in the way nations die, in the way names die, vanishing from tongues too afraid to remember.
Her hand trembled as she wrote.
"To those who find this, know that I have written what I could before the end takes even memory from me.
My name was Seravelle, First Scribe of the Western Concord, Keeper of Threads. But those titles mean little now."
Lightning forked across the sky beyond the cathedral's skeleton, not from stormclouds—but from the scar in the heavens: the Weave Tear, still pulsing faintly with the echoes of a scream the world could not unhear.
"We drew too deeply from the Weave. We took and took. And the Choir came to collect.
I watched the King of Glass bleed rivers. I saw the Echo Crown fall from his brow and vanish into the tides.
And now, it begins again."
She dipped her quill into black blood—the last thing in her vial. Somewhere beneath the cracked stone, something stirred. A Nameless one, perhaps. Or a whisper of it.
"You must understand the faultline we stood upon.
There are two ways one may call upon the world's breath: Lucent, born inward from the soul's marrow—and Aetherwork, shaped from the currents without.
The former tempers blade and bone. The latter calls lightning and light. We called them the Internalists and the Externalists. But names are thin fences against collapse."
She coughed. It sounded wet and small in the wide cathedral.
"Some were born with brilliance. Others, like him, with almost nothing.
And yet it is the empty vessel that sings loudest when filled."
Outside, in the direction of the drowned city, a child's voice echoed faintly—no more than memory tangled in the wind. The scribe looked up, eyes glassy with cold.
"There is one who walks the path between Lucent and Aether both. Not chosen, not blessed—just willing.
He does not shine. He does not burn. But he endures.
When all else breaks, he will remain."
She folded the parchment, sealed it with a crest now forgotten by the world, and tucked it beneath a shattered statue of a faceless angel. It was all she could do.
And as dawn broke—red and cruel across the ruin—Seravelle closed her eyes, and was gone.
Some say the manuscript was found centuries later, carried by a boy with no title, no gift, and no name worth remembering. Others say it was never written at all—only dreamed by those the Weave has yet to forget.
But the truth?
The truth waited beneath the ash, where the boundless sky once kissed the earth.