The night didn't sleep.
Even when Loor gone with the fog, Kaien sat wide awake, staring at the shard.
It pulsed softly, like a heartbeat imprisoned in crystal. Not a relic. Not exactly.
A memory sealed in glass. One the blade had forgotten.
And Kaien? He wasn't sure he wanted to remember it.
Eira shifted nearby, her back to the wall, one arm across her chest, the other grasping her rusted knife. Not asleep. Just silent.
"You trust him?" she asked into the silence.
"No," Kaien said. "But I believed him."
"Same thing?"
"Not anymore."
They went at dawn.
The world had changed again—ashen plains replaced by a wide basin of iron buildings, some fallen, others leaning like drunk giants. Each one had engravings in a tongue that pained Kaien's eyes to read.
Not ancient.
Erased.
"They were watchtowers," Eira replied, brushing a palm over one collapsed pillar. "Before the rain."
"For what?"
"Each other."
Her voice seemed empty, faraway. She didn't elaborate. And Kaien didn't press.
Instead, they walked on.
The air here was heavy. Not from smoke or decay—but something deeper. Like the ground recalled shouts too loud to echo.
Then they heard the tune.
At first, simply a hum.
Barely a sound. More a rhythm in the bones than the air.
Kaien stopped walking.
So did Eira.
Because that wasn't just any tune.
It was the same melody from Mourncaller's memories.
The train. The captives.
That tune with no language.
Kaien turned slowly.
A woman stood behind them.
Pale skin. No eyes. Just flesh stretched tight over where her face should be. Her clothes were made from old banners — each one sporting a shattered symbol, a name crossed out in ash-ink.
But her lips moved.
And the song came from them.
"Sovereign?" she asked.
"Or just the one who remembers?"
Neither Kaien nor Eira spoke.
Not until the woman stepped forward, displaying her hands — mirror-glass palms that shimmered with faces not her own.
Kaien's sword hissed. Mourncaller trembled with a memory it couldn't grasp.
"You were there," he said. "In the train."
The woman tilted her head.
"I was the train."
Her name was Calla of the Forgotten Rails.
A relic-walker. A soul who had let herself be buried alive inside the memories of a transport engine – so long she became it.
"Every time I sang," she claimed, "they forgot their chains. For one stop. That was all I could give."
She possessed no weapon.
But the hush folded around her.
Kaien stepped closer.
"Why now?"
"Because something stirs in the Iron Sky," she murmured, lifting a hand toward the fractured clouds. "And when it falls… only the sovereignless will survive it."
They followed her through the maze of skyscrapers.
At the center stood a spire still standing—barely. Its apex reached towards the sky like a broken spear.
Calla led them inside, past rows of hung armor, each set humming faintly.
"Enforcer suits," Eira replied. "Old ones. Pre-rain."
"Memories," Calla corrected. "They only attack those who remember their former wearers."
Kaien paused by one – a crimson-plated relic marked with the seal of Citadel Luma. His fingers brushed it—
And the world tilted.
Flames.
A cathedral falling.
A voice - his own — shouting orders to people whose faces he couldn't see.
A solitary word on the altar: VAEL.
He stumbled back, breathing hard.
The armor didn't move.
But now it knew him.
"I fought here," Kaien muttered.
Calla nodded. "All of us did. In different shapes. Different names."
"And now?"
She turned to him.
"Now you return. To gather what you left behind."
At the top of the spire was a pool.
Still, black, and cold.
"Not water," Calla said. "Distilled regret."
Eira looked unwell. "Why would anyone keep that?"
"Because some memories aren't taken. They're bled."
Kaien stepped to the edge.
The pool didn't reflect him.
Only a child.
Burned. Barefoot. Holding a crown of thorns.
"Do you remember me?" the child said.
Kaien didn't answer.
He stepped into the pool.
Pain.
Not tangible.
Worse.
He remembers the day his name was seared into his skin.
The voice that did it belonged to someone he trusted.
A brother. Or maybe… something older than blood.
Kaien yelled.
And the pool answered with light.
It surged up, bathing him with memory-fire not burning, but branding. Not his skin.
His soul.
He slumped back gasping.
Eira captured him.
Calla said nothing. Only watched.
When he opened his eyes, Mourncaller shone softly.
But the other blade?
The one from the cave?
It was gone.
Replaced by a string of words branded into his left arm:
"When the Iron Sky sings, run toward the sound."
They left before nightfall.
Calla offered no farewell.
Just the song again.
Softer now. Sadder.
Kaien didn't hum along.
But somewhere deep down, his bones did.
The wind changed as they departed the tower.
Not in scent, but in sound.
Where once the air carried the hum of remembrance the leftover echo of forgotten prayers and names murmured into stone today it held nothing. No birdsong. No ashfall. No falsehoods.
It felt as if the world itself held its breath.
"We're near it," Eira remarked, slowing her pace. Her eyes swept the horizon, where the spires of the Iron Sky faded into jagged stone teeth—ruins of cities that had no names, only warnings.
Kaien felt the same pull in his chest that had guided him earlier. Like a thread tugged from inside his ribcage, dragging him toward something he couldn't see, but that recognized him.
A sign, half-buried in a ravine, slanted toward them. It bore no lettering. Only a symbol. A fractured crown.
He paused.
The emblem was seared into his palm.
The earth got glassy as they dropped into the basin. Shards of obsidian-like earth jutted out at unusual angles, reflecting twisted copies of themselves. Some mirrors whispered.
Kaien heard his own voice, twisted and distant:
"The world forgot us first. The rest was mercy."
Eira grasped her dagger tighter.
"Don't listen," she said. "They speak with stolen mouths."
He nodded, but his gaze stayed fixated on the largest shard—a slab towering as a house. Within it, he saw not his own reflection, but a war.
Armored figurines. Fire descending from a broken sky. A cathedral falling behind them.
And at the center—
Him.
Younger. Or older? It was hard to tell. Wearing silver-black armor carved with sovereign glyphs. Speaking to warriors who had no sight.
"When the world breaks, don't flinch. Name it. Bind it. Burn it."
The memory ended with fire. Always fire.
They reached the depression at dusk.
No structures. No smoke. Just a crater encircled by runes and relics impaled in the dirt like tombstones.
In the center stood a monolith.
On it were engraved every name Kaien had ever heard—crossed out, overlaid, overwritten. Some gleamed. Others bled.
He stepped closer.
A voice boomed not from the stone, but from within his skull.
"Who comes to die?"
His vision clouded. Pain lanced into his skull.
Mourncaller yelled in his head, resisting.
Then quiet.
He stood before the monolith. Alone.
Even Eira was gone.
This was no vision.
This was a location outside time.
A test.
He looked down and realised the word on his hand had altered.
No longer "SOVEREIGN."
Now it read: REMEMBER.
A person stepped from the monolith—his shape, his voice, his face.
But not his eyes.
They were hollow, white, and blazing.
"You gave me up," the doppelganger said. "To survive. But survival isn't purpose."
They circled one another.
Kaien sketched Mourncaller.
The pair drew nothing.
"You're a memory," Kaien remarked.
"I am the cost."
And they clashed.
The fight wasn't physical. Every strike Kaien struck evoked memories—the screaming of the cathedral, the infant with thorns, the voice of the Archivist murmuring, "They burned your name because it burned them."
He staggered. The double struck his chest with a word:
"FORGOTTEN."
Pain lit his body like lightning.
Kaien fell.
The monolith pulsed.
"Why did you come here?" the voice enquired again.
He rose.
"To remember," he answered, panting. "Even if it kills me."
His mark flashed.
The double smiled.
And gone.
Kaien woke in Eira's arms, still in the crater.
"You stopped breathing," she said.
He looked down.
The word on his palm was gone.
In its stead, a name had reformed:
VAEL.
Not a recollection.
A warning.