The name on Kaien's palm wouldn't stop shining.
Not only VAEL now.
Something deeper surged beneath it—shapes that weren't letters, not yet, but markers straining to form meaning. Like a second name attempting to claw its way to the surface. Like memory trying to grow fangs.
Eira eyed him, wary but silent, as they went further from the ridge.
The wind still buzzed, low and odd. The world wasn't quiet anymore—it was listening.
"Do you feel that?" Eira asked.
Kaien didn't glance at her. "The wind?"
"No. The sky."
They dropped down into a deep plain where the ground dipped into folds of black glass and half-melted ruins. Relics were scattered like bones, half-buried, half-forgotten. A broken blade here. A cracked helm. A nameplate burned clean.
Kaien knelt by one relic that pulsed faintly—what might have been a mask, but now had no eyes.
He reached out.
And saw himself.
A battleground. A voice like fire. VAEL spoke not to warriors, but to Sovereigns.
"You think memory will save us," he continued. "I say it will consume us."
A woman stood opposite from him, wearing a shroud of flame. "You're burning names, Vael. Not saving them."
"Maybe they need to burn," he added. "So nothing grows from the ash."
Kaien jerked his hand back. He was sweating.
"What did you see?" Eira asked.
"Myself. Giving a speech I never heard."
She gave him a strange look. "You give a lot of speeches for someone who doesn't talk much."
They moved on.
The dirt began to move underfoot—memory crust building beneath the soil, shattering with every footfall. Lightning flickered across the distant clouds.
But not lightning. Not really.
Script.
Names. Flashes of language that had been burned out of the planet were now inscribed into the sky like prophesy.
One word repeated over and over:
Thornwake.
They reached a ruin shaped like a collapsed amphitheater.
In the center: a dais of stone, marred by old scorch lines.
Kaien recognised it before he walked onto it.
"This is where I did it," he continued.
"Did what?"
He looked up.
"Spoke it."
The name that unmade a city.
"Thornwake wasn't destroyed by fire," he remarked. "It was destroyed by memory catching up to truth."
Eira stepped beside him. Her face was pallid.
"You unmade a city with a word?"
He looked down at his palm.
"It wasn't a word. It was a name."
"And now the world is remembering it."
Kaien stared up at the clouds, where the name Thornwake continued to glimmer.
"No," he said.
"It's remembering me."
They made camp in the remnants of an old windhall. The bones of wind-instruments still hung from the ceiling, silent now.
But as darkness fell, they began to hum again.
The same music Calla once sang.
The song of the forgotten train.
Mourncaller, shrouded in fabric alongside Kaien, thrummed in response.
Eira awoke in her sleep, murmuring a name Kaien didn't remember.
He gazed at his hand.
The glyph beneath VAEL was now full.
A second name had formed.
He didn't speak it.
Not yet.
Because this time, he wanted to select whether the world remembered.
Or burnt.
The rain didn't fall.
But the air felt like it wanted to.
Kaien stood at the edge of the windhall ruin, watching the clouds swirl like lost ink. The melody had long stopped, but the silence it left behind was terrible. Not empty—expectant.
Beneath the name VAEL on his palm, the new glyph still pulsed.
He hadn't spoken it out.
Didn't dare.
Eira approached with stealthy steps. Her expression was unreadable. A fatigued kind of watchfulness. The way someone stares at a fuse they don't know is lighted.
"Last night," she added, "you whispered something."
Kaien didn't answer.
"You said a name."
He turned to her carefully. "Did I?"
She nodded. "Didn't sound like a name. Sounded like a place attempting to bleed."
Kaien swallowed.
Maybe it was both.
They left the windhall behind. The next section of land was known as Ashwalker's Spine - a range of broken hills where even the black rain refused to settle. No vegetation. No ruins. Just long stretches of fractured memory-rock where travelers sometimes went wild treading in their own footprints.
The Archivist had warned him about this area.
"You'll hear yourself here. But not as you are. As you could have been."
Mourncaller didn't hum.
It mourned.
Midway through the ridge, the voices started.
Kaien flinched as he heard his own.
"You could have saved Thornwake."
A second voice—also his.
"You should have burned the Archivist when you had the chance."
A third.
"You are not the last Vael. Just the one who survived."
He pressed onwards.
Eira kept her knife drawn the entire time.
Not for the voices.
For him.
At the highest point of the ridge was a shrine — or what remained of one. Just a ring of stone, a pedestal, and a single kneeling statue. A woman. Head bent. No face. A relic buried in her chest, buzzing faintly.
Kaien stepped closer.
The statue muttered, "Ashwalker."
Not to him. Just… to the wind.
He groped for the artefact.
And the world divided.
A battleground. The sky screaming. Kaien—no, Vael—kneeling over a dying friend. A woman with a relic embedded in her chest. The same statue.
"You said we'd name it together," she whispered.
"I tried," he said. "But the others—"
"Burn them, then."
Her hand in his. Bloodless. Final.
The memory fragmented.
Kaien stumbled back.
The name beneath VAEL was burning hot now.
Eira caught his arm.
"You said her name," she muttered.
Kaien nodded.
"I think she was the one I named Thornwake with."
Eira stared at the statue again. Then at him.
"She's remembering too."
They didn't steal the relic.
Kaien couldn't.
Not yet.
They left the shrine behind, the phrase Ashwalker reverberating in the rocks.
And behind them, the statue raised its head.
Only slightly.
But enough.
The statue didn't speak again.
But Kaien could sense its memory observing him.
Even after they'd left Ashwalker's Spine, the vision of her kneeling in stone, the relic pulsing in her chest—haunted every stride. Not because she accused him. But somehow, somehow, she still trusted him.
And that terrified him more.
They descended into a shallow depression where the dirt crunched underfoot, brittle and pale like burned paper. Mourncaller stayed wrapped. Quiet. But its silence wasn't tranquilly.
It was reverence.
Or maybe grief.
Eira broke the stillness first.
"You knew her."
Kaien didn't answer.
"You didn't just name Thornwake with her. You adored her."
Still no reply.
"I don't know if I'm angry or afraid," Eira replied, gentler now. "That the Kaien I know could have once been that man."
Kaien stopped walking.
"I'm not sure I stopped being him," he remarked. "Or if I've just forgotten how to be."
They passed a shattered watchtower half-swallowed by the basin wall. Glyphs covered its stones, most too worn to read. But one stood out: a crown broken in two.
Eira ran her fingertips across it.
"I've seen this before," she mumbled.
Kaien nodded.
"It's not a symbol. It's a sentence."
"What does it say?"
He stared.
"'The Sovereign who breaks his crown must wear its shadow.'"
The basin narrowed into a twisting gulley. As they passed, treasures buried in the stone began to hum—not loudly, not clearly. But in harmony.
Kaien halted.
The hum developed a beat.
Four tones.
He knew it. The cadence of command. The sound used to signal Sovereign instructions in the field.
Each hum was a memory.
Each memory, a weight.
At the end of the gulley, they found a broad slab of stone carved into a platform. Upon it were twelve pillars. Eleven were broken. One remains undamaged.
At the base sat a guy in white robes.
Unmoving.
Unblinking.
The glyph on his brow matched the Citadel of Nourth a location said to have burned itself clean rather than fall to the second rain.
Eira stepped forward.
He did not move.
Kaien approached.
The man's eyes were open.
Dead.
A voice echoed, not from him, but from the stone:
"Here sits the last Oathbinder of Thornwake."
Kaien's stomach twisted.
"I remember him," he muttered. "He gave me the final word. The one I burned into the city."
A scroll lay alongside the body.
Kaien unrolled it.
Nothing but ash.
He turned it over and saw a single symbol drawn on the back.
The identical symbol that has began emerging under VAEL.
Kaien stood silently.
Mourncaller buzzed softly.
Eira came up behind him. "What now?"
Kaien didn't answer at first.
Then:
"I think I know what the name is."
"The second one?"
He nodded.
"And?"
"It's not a name," Kaien added.
He opened his palm. The symbol underneath VAEL illuminated.
"It's a sentence."