Ilia
She floated.
Or rather, she existed in something that resembled memory but bled like dream. There was no ground. No up. No breath. Only drifting pieces of a place she had never been but somehow knew:
— A citadel made of bone and light, suspended over a sea of ink.— Pages fluttering through the air, covered in symbols that rearranged when she blinked.— A girl, her age, her face, her eyes — smiling, and then burning.
Ilia reached for the image, but it dissolved into light.
"Where is this?" she whispered. "Who are you?"
"You are," the voice replied. It came from everywhere — soft as mourning, sharp as thunder. "You are what's left."
A figure formed ahead — cloaked, featureless. It stepped forward and offered her an open hand.
"The seal did not erase you. It divided you. Fractured you. You are both key and consequence."
"I didn't choose this."
"You did. Just not in this skin."
She stepped forward, uncertain — but the moment she touched the figure's hand, visions cracked through her like ice:
— Her fingers drawing glyphs across someone's chest.— The first time she called Sevran brother.— A war that began not with a weapon, but a question: What happens when memory lives too long?
And below it all, the same phrase, over and over, in Myel's voice:
"Not again. Never again."
Vex
He hit the stone hard, rolled to his feet, and fired a burst of light toward the two remaining traitors. Rien ducked beside him, bleeding from a cut across his brow.
"She just—fell?" Rien shouted.
"No," Vex said, chest heaving. "She was taken."
They were down to two enemies — but both well-trained. Lysa, though unconscious, had scratched something into the runes before she fell. It pulsed with an oily blackness, trying to crawl along the cracks of the floor.
"Help me seal it," Vex ordered.
"With what? Chewing gum and optimism?"
Vex drew a blade carved with mirrored steel. "This will do."
Together, they scrawled counter-glyphs, slowing the spread — but the floor kept breathing, like it wanted to inhale something from below.
Rien gritted his teeth. "If we don't pull her out soon, we lose her."
Vex didn't respond. He just looked down into the fissure — and saw light, coiling and expanding like a storm inside a cathedral.
"I don't think she's lost," he said. "I think she's remembering."
Ilia
The visions ended.
She stood on a pale, endless surface now. At the far edge: a door carved into nothing. A symbol above it — the same one Sevran had worn at his throat. The remnant mark.
The voice returned.
"You sealed me once. Do you know why?"
Ilia raised her eyes. "Because you asked me to."
A silence. Then: "Good. You remember."
She stepped toward the door. Her hand hovered above the handle.
From beyond it, she heard Sevran's voice:
"I didn't want to be saved."
And her own, from another life:
"You weren't."
She turned the handle.