The wind howled through the rubble like it had forgotten how to whisper.
Kaien stood over the body of the Oathbinder, the scroll of ash still disintegrating in his hand. The glyph blazed softly on the back—no longer inert. It pulsed now. Not with heat, but pressure. Like breath stuck in a throat.
He said nothing.
Eira didn't ask.
They walked.
The gulley behind them narrowed into a flat plain pocked with mirror glass and half-drowned names scrawled in the mud. A sky of steel loomed above, thunderless and silent. Even the relics appeared hushed here, as if scared to speak first.
"Are you going to say it?" Eira asked eventually.
Kaien kept walking.
She kept pace.
"The second name," she added. "The glyph beneath VAEL. I saw it form."
Kaien flexed his palm once, then again. "It's not a name," he said.
Eira didn't stop. "That's what scares me."
They crossed a forest of decaying pylons — spires previously used to broadcast memory over the earth like light. Now they crackled only when he got close, releasing static pulses of someone else's regret.
At the edge of the plain, they found it: a vault. Cylindrical. Iron-ribbed. Built inside the base of a shattered dome. The stone around it had burnt but not melted. Ash clung to the walls like bruises.
A sign was engraved above the door: a broken tongue eating itself.
Kaien stopped.
"This is a Furnace," he said.
Eira glanced over. "For bodies?"
"No. For memory."
The door pushed open without resistance.
Inside: a room of treasures. Or what remains of them. Blades dulled into bone. Tomes reduced to dust. Crowns melted down into unmarked rings. Each thing carried the scar of erasure.
Kaien stepped inside. The air shivered about him.
He proceeded to the center—an altar, basic and cracked. A bowl rested in the middle, lined with mirror-glass.
He took off his glove.
Opened his palm.
The glyph beneath VAEL flared brightly.
"This is where they burned names out of people," he murmured. "Scraped legacies down to embers."
Eira didn't move. "Are you trying to get rid of it?"
Kaien didn't answer. He placed his hand in the dish.
Pain.
But not physical. Memory discomfort.
The bowl hissed when the symbol hit the glass. Mourncaller—still wrapped—shrieked once, high and sharp. Then quiet.
The glyph... didn't vanish.
It resisted.
Cracks divide the bowl.
Kaien yelled out, stumbling back, holding his palm. The glyph had become brighter, not dimmer. As if it had fed on the endeavour.
"You can't burn out a command," remarked a voice.
Kaien looked up. Eira was still behind him. The voice hadn't come from her.
The shadows of the room curled inward.
A figure stepped from the mirror walls.
He looked like Kaien.
Same face. Same scar along the brow. Same burn mark on the palm.
But older. Worn.
And the second name on his palm?
It was complete.
The man smiled.
"You left this part of yourself behind," he added. "I waited."
Kaien grasped for Mourncaller.
His doppelganger did not flinch.
"You want to forget it again?" the echo questioned. "Or are you finally ready to hear what you said?"
The room shattered.
Not physically—but culturally. Time unfolded like paper catching fire.
Kaien stood alone.
No Eira.
No bowl.
Just two copies of himself and a thousand mirrors whispering the same phrase:
"The sentence was not to destroy Thornwake."
"It was to prove it remembered."
"You made memory a weapon," the double remarked. "And then ran from it."
Kaien stepped forward. "And you stayed?"
"I became the sentence."
They clashed.
Not with swords.
But with recall.
Kaien yelled the name of the fallen city. His doppelganger reacted with the face of the girl in the shrine. The battleground was memory, and the cost of each strike was knowledge.
Every syllable spoken rewrote a bit of the room.
Every idea recalled distorted the reflections.
Finally—
The doppelganger touched Kaien's chest.
Spoke one word:
"Endure."
And gone.
Kaien sank on the floor, breath ragged. His chest burned—not from fire, but from memories driven back into his bones.
Eira was by his side when he came to.
She didn't ask.
Not this time.
He sat up slowly. Opened his palm.
The second name was still there.
Still glowing.
But one glyph was now missing.
Not erased. Not incomplete.
Withheld.
He gazed at her.
"It's not finished," he remarked. "I think… I didn't just demolish Thornwake."
Eira studied him intently.
"I think I tried to erase myself before the sentence could finish."
She looked away.
"Then why's it coming back now?"
Kaien looked to the sky.
Because something else recalled.
And far off, beneath the horizon, thunder rolled—not from the clouds, but from the sky itself.
A soundless hum.
A voice rising.
The Iron Sky… begins to sing. The clouds no longer looked like clouds.
They moved too precisely.
They bowed toward the earth like they were listening.
Kaien said nothing. His hand blazed with slow rhythm — the sentence beneath VAEL no longer merely burning, but vibrating. Like it was being read aloud by something not yet present.
Or anything above.
Eira strolled beside him in silence.
She kept a tighter grip on her blade now, not because of opponents, but because Kaien hadn't flinched in days. And that, she understood, meant he was close to becoming someone else.
Again.
They dropped into the fractured marrow of a canyon lined with cut mouths in the stone. Not statues. Not faces. Just open mouths, forever mute.
Kaien stared at one.
"They used to call this place the Whisper-Vault," he continued.
"How do you know that?" Eira asked.
"I didn't."
They approached the center a shattered listening spire half-sunken into the canyon bottom. It appeared like a spine turned inward, as though the ground had sought to forget what it previously heard.
Relic bits dotted the walls: – Copper leaves shaped like ears – Bone keys that hummed when Kaien passed – Runes engraved in mirror-script, visible only when his hand drew near
Eira hesitated beside a broken mask carved onto the wall.
"What is this place really?"
Kaien said slowly: "A place where names came to hide. And sometimes… to be heard again."
As they stepped into the tower, the air altered.
It didn't get cooler.
It got clearer – like sound itself had more freedom to breathe.
Footsteps reverberated too loudly. Heartbeats lasted a minute too long.
Kaien flinched.
So did Mourncaller.
A figure moved in the dark.
Not stepped — glided.
It wore no eyes. Only a hood embroidered with empty runes. Its hands were smeared with wax.
When it spoke, it didn't utilise a mouth.
The air fashioned the words for it.
"One who carries a sentence," it said.
"We heard your first word a hundred years ago. Thornwake wept beneath it."
Kaien didn't reach for his sword.
This creature — whatever it was — didn't feel like an enemy. It felt like… a priest. Or a witness.
Eira whispered: "Is it a Revenant?"
Kaien shook his head.
"No. It's something older."
The monster turned its faceless stare to Eira.
"You hold death. But you do not harbour guilt. You walk beside it, watching."
Then to Kaien.
"You burned your name to cage the command. But it's leaking. Every syllable the sky swallows gets it closer to song."
Kaien stepped forward.
"I don't want to speak it."
The figure moved nothing.
"You already have. Silence is still a language. The symbol hums not because you shout — but because the world remembers the echo."
Kaien felt it again the pressure inside his palm. Like ink imprisoned under skin. Like language struggling to become event.
He took a breath.
Let a portion of it go:
Just one syllable from the second name.
The canyon changed.
A tree close turned to static.
The lips cut into the wall yelled backward, in reverse.
Eira slumped, clutching her ears.
The cloaked figure vanished quickly – as though it had never existed.
Kaien sank to one knee.
The sky above… twisted.
Not broke.
Bent.
The clouds swirled around a center that didn't exist — not weather, but resonance. Like reality had flinched when it heard him.
Eira gasped alongside him.
"You said part of it…"
Kaien didn't reply.
She turned to him, eyes wild. "What did it do?"
He looked up.
"Unwrote something. I don't know what."
She glanced at the spot the tree had been.
Only dirt remained.
Not scorched.
Erased.
Later, around a calm fire beneath shattered sky, Eira finally spoke again.
"You said Thornwake was unmade by a name."
He nodded.
"And now this sentence — this unfinished word — it's strong enough to undo things that never even knew they were remembered."
Kaien peered into the flames.
"I think I was trying to seal it inside me. Not merely hide it but use myself as the lock."
"And now?" she questioned.
He held out his palm.
The glyph pulsed again.
One additional syllable had produced.
Still not complete.
Still hungry.
Mourncaller trembled.
For the first time in days.
And far above, the Iron Sky hummed again louder, clearer, closer.
This time, it wasn't waiting.
This time, it was repeating him.