Vaelen faced Commander Dresk.
Once, Dresk had been the embodiment of the Tribunal's honor, a warrior-scholar who trained Vaelen in the Way of Spiral Blade. But now…
He was hollow.
His silver armor shimmered with runes that had been reversed, corrupted, designed not to protect, but to erase loyalty. His lips were sewn with a filament of silence. His eyes… remembered nothing.
The Pale Censor's voice rose behind him.
"He was the first to accept the silence. The first to give up his name for obedience."
Dresk raised his weapon, a curved blade inscribed with null-script, capable of severing the tether between memory and soul.
Vaelen raised his halberd in reply.
"Then let me remind you who you were."
The clash was seismic.
Halberd met null-blade in arcs of white and void. Each impact fractured the space around them, twisting time for heartbeats at a time. Vaelen struck low, Dresk spun to parry high. Sparks of corrupted glyphs rained around them.
"You trained me," Vaelen growled. "You named me."
No reply.
Only silence.
Back in the sanctum's core, Zaiya's writing ignited the surface of the Rewrite Font.
Glyphs raced across the chamber walls. One phrase shimmered, copied from Lysian's secret journal, encoded into the structure:
"The Ledger was never meant to erase.It was built to filter."
She stared.
"Filter… what?"
From the light, a vision played across the glyph-pool.
Lysian in a tower, surrounded by Tribunal councilors. The first Writ prototype is glowing on the table.
"It doesn't destroy," he said."It chooses what version of truth survives."
A young Tribunal officer leaned forward.
"And if all versions disagree?"
Lysian paused.
"Then silence becomes truth."
Zaiya stumbled back.
"They didn't create the Ledger to kill memory.They made it to win arguments."
She turned to Elya, who was scanning the sanctum's outer walls as cracks widened.
"If they're filtering memory, then somewhere, all our pasts still exist."
"Then we can still take them back," Elya said.
A Nullborn missile struck the sanctum's outer shell, shattering part of the Rewrite Font's ceiling.
The chamber trembled.
"We're running out of time."
Outside, Vaelen drove the halberd through Dresk's chest.
The revenant paused.
Bloodless.
But something in his eyes flickered.
Just once.
Recognition.
"V…ael…en…"
Then the light inside him collapsed.
And his body disintegrated like a name unspoken for too long.
Vaelen stood over the dust, breathing hard.
"I remember enough for both of us."
Zaiya collapsed beside the pool, her hand trembling. Her skin glowed white-hot with glyphlight, she was overloading.
"I can't hold it… much longer."
The First Glyph had grown, become a constellation of rewriting spirals across her body. Her very name was radiating energy now, pulling the sanctum's power into her form.
Elya looked between Zaiya and the cracking font.
She clenched her fists.
"We save one."
"But which one?"
The sanctum screamed.
Not in sound, but in memory, every wall, every glyph, every encoded syllable strained under the pressure of the Pale Censor's invasion. The Rewrite Font at the center buckled, its mirrored starlight spilling into raw threads of glyphlight. Zaiya, glowing like a living cipher, was on her knees, barely conscious.
"Her mind is overloading," Vaelen said, kneeling beside her."Too many layers... too fast."
Zaiya's eyes flickered open for a breath.
"If I stop writing, the glyph dies."
The Censor's fleet moved into final position above the sanctum. A low thrum filled the air, null-energy gathering into a singularity at the center of her ship.
"They mean to collapse the sanctum," Elya said."Turn this place into a vacuum of silence."
She looked at Zaiya, then the Rewrite Font, which trembled on the brink of complete failure.
One choice.
One loss.
Elya acted.
She plunged her hand into the mirrored pool, binding her own memory to it. The glyphs seared her palm, marking her with the Font's seal. It flared, stabilized, but at a cost.
"What did you do?!" Vaelen shouted.
"It needed a conduit. So I became one.""Part of me will live in this place now. If it dies, so do I."
Zaiya looked up, wide-eyed.
"You didn't have to."
"Yes," Elya said. "I did."
The Rewrite Font glowed steadily.
The sanctum held.
Above them, the Pale Censor's ship unleashed a beam of null-force.
Vaelen reacted instantly, throwing a projection glyph behind them, activating a hidden escape spiral embedded in the floor. Lysian's journal had referenced it once:
"If the sanctum ever falls, flee through the Scribe's Maw."
The stone split, revealing a tunnel of cascading spirals. The energy of collapsed names surged along its walls, screaming in forgotten dialects.
Zaiya reached for Elya's hand.
"Can you make it through?"
Elya nodded, though her eyes bled light.
"As long as this place remembers me, I'll follow."
They jumped into the Scribe's Maw.
The sanctum erupted behind them, engulfed by the Censor's silence, but the Rewrite Font endured, buried deep beneath its ruins, now protected by Elya's living memory.
[Elsewhere]
The Pale Censor watched from her throne of anti-script as the sanctum imploded.
"Phase One complete," her attending Nullborn droned.
She turned, voice like rust tearing silk.
"Then let the Nameborn Collapse begin."
Behind her, thousands of memory-glyphs began to unwind.
Across the continent, names began to flicker.
Forgotten.