No stars to guide me.
The tree lay opposite the hills I now stood on—silent, distant, unmoving. Even from here, it looked enormous. A monument older than language, older than the world around it. Between me and it stretched everything the old man warned me of.
Across the dead plains, where grass once lived and now only wind remains.
Over the shallow gullies carved by time and strange rain.
Through patches of broken woodland, where roots tangle in silence and nothing grows straight.
Divided by the rivers—the three of them, each a border in its own right:
Aedros, black and slow, dragging shadows along its surface.
Vaelor, cruel and wide, whose crossing means gambling with more than just the current.
And Abeth, the quiet one, where memory fades with every step toward the shore.
Getting there wouldn't be possible in a day. That was one of the reasons I had started early. I didn't carry much—just a single sack slung across my back. There was no illusion of comfort in it, no thoughts of warmth or rest. I brought only what I needed. Some dried roots and enough water to make it to the first night. A few cloth wraps for bandages, bottles of ground medicine, and poultices for cuts or worse. Small strips of cloth in case the air thickened. A handful of Katros flowers, tied together with twine—more for memory than use. And a pouch of mixed powders: nothing deadly, but enough to craft what might keep something else from becoming so.
Everything I brought, I brought because the old man had taught me what to pack.
He'd taught me which insects meant nearby rot and which ones marked clean water.
How to follow a trail made not by feet, but by dragging limbs.
How to test a plant's bitterness with the back of a knife.
How to tell when something in the air isn't fog, but death disguised.
He even showed me how to trap smoke inside a jar, and which moss to burn to keep voices—real or otherwise—at bay.
He'd taught me too much, honestly.
And still, not enough.
It's true that he had only ever shown me a narrow band of land—the safe parts, the neutral ones, the pieces that hadn't yet decided whether they wanted us gone. Maybe he thought it was enough. Maybe he was trying to protect what little I had left of whatever I was. I used to think he was hiding things out of spite or stubbornness, but now I understand. He didn't want to give me reasons to walk further than I could return from.
I thought of him then. Of the way he leaned when he walked, slightly to the left. Of how he rubbed the same knuckle with his thumb whenever he was thinking. I thought of his tired eyes—how they didn't avoid yours, but passed through, like he was watching some version of you that didn't exist yet.
A month. That's all it had been. One month.
And yet I knew—he had lived many more than that. Years.
Alone.
Eating little.
Speaking less.
I could only imagine what it meant for someone like him to share a space again. To wake up and hear footsteps that weren't his. To boil water for two, and not just one. To speak thoughts out loud instead of leaving them to rot somewhere in the rafters. And now, to part ways again, just as suddenly as it began… I could understand that kind of loss. I don't know if I'll ever be able to name it properly, but I understand it.
But sharing a life with him in that house—surrounded by old books and older silence, with too little food and too many memories—wasn't the life I came here to live. That wasn't my dream to chase.
I didn't fall into this world to grow old beside someone else's regrets.
I didn't crawl out from under that tree to sit still.
And even if I didn't come here with a purpose…
I have one now.
That tree may have judged me once and dropped me like I wasn't worth blooming, but I'm not the same. Not anymore.
The path ahead may not forgive me. The rivers may not let me pass. The tree may not take me back.
But I'm going anyway.
And if nothing else…
I'll know I walked toward something I chose.
We had never exchanged names.
What use do names serve when there are only two of you?
Maybe he thought there was no need. Or maybe… he'd simply forgotten his a long time ago.
It wouldn't surprise me. In that house, among the silence and the dust, time seemed to dissolve things like that. Slowly, gently, but completely.
I thought about it while stepping over a patch of torn earth, where the ground had split and never quite healed. Sharp stones jutted from the dirt like broken teeth. I walked carefully between them, hopping across scraps of metal and old debris—discarded tools, cloth eaten through by worms clinging to what was left of the grass. The rot was deep here. I couldn't tell if the land had died before or after the buildings fell.
My pack tugged at my shoulder with each movement, and still my mind wandered.
When I had first tried remembering my old life—my other life—it wasn't so hard. My name came quickly enough. A few seconds of focus, that's all it took. I didn't think much of it. There were gaps, sure, but it didn't feel like loss.
But then it took longer. Seconds became minutes. And the strange thing was… trying to remember one thing always seemed to replace another. Like I was trading memories in order to keep any at all.
I remembered the name of my university once. The next day, I couldn't recall a single face from my class.
I tried to picture my neighborhood, but the streets turned vague, faceless. The people who visited us—family friends, guests I'd known for years—their names fell away first, and then their voices.
It got worse.
One morning, I realized I couldn't remember my father's name. Not his voice. Not his face. Not the stories he told, or the way he walked, or how he laughed. All I had left were the fragments my mother used to mention—things she had told me about him. But even those began to dim.
Then… it started happening with her too.
Her name took longer to vanish. Her face still lingers in my memory, clear and sharp, like it was carved into me. But I know that won't last. Memory is soft here. It sinks into the ground like water into ash.
Even my own name... I have to reach for it now. Pull it out like it's buried under rubble. There are mornings when it comes quick, and others where I don't even try. Because I'm afraid it won't come at all.
I paused beside an old signpost—nothing written on it anymore. The wood was flaked with mold, half eaten. I placed my hand on it, just to feel something solid. The bark crumbled beneath my palm.
If this place is capable of removing everything, even who you were, what does that leave behind?
A shell?
A blank page?
Or something new?
It won't be long now—before I forget them both. My father and my mother. Their voices. Their hands. Their names.
I don't know whether that makes me someone else entirely, or just a thinner version of who I was.
But either way, I can feel it happening.
I carry my memories like glass now—thin, brittle, and fewer each day.
And at some point, maybe the weight of them won't matter anymore.
Maybe names don't mean much when you're alone.
But I still hope I can choose one—before even that becomes something I forget.
It had been hours since I started.
My legs ached, and the hills I'd left behind were long swallowed by the dark.
I had traveled a fair distance—passed brittle ridges and flatlands where the wind smelled faintly of rust and roots. I came across a few wanderers along the way. None of them had anything useful. Some offered stares. One mumbled a prayer under his breath. Another just walked right into the trees and didn't come out.
I thought about checking the nearby settlements.
They wouldn't like that. Not very much.
I remembered the first time I came across them—figures hunched by firelight, watching me with faces painted in ash and bark. I had assumed they rejected me because of where I came from—because I came from his hill. From the house with smoke that curled from the chimney like a signal. I thought it was guilt by association. That the man above the hill had earned their scorn, and I was just a shadow of him.
But that wasn't it. Not entirely.
It's a long story.
Like most things here, it doesn't start where you expect it to.
I looked up at the sky. It was dark—always was.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, a few stars flicker through the haze—distant, half-alive. The people here believe they're celestial beings. Guardians, watchers, ancestors glowing through the void.
I scoffed at that.
You could be the smartest person in your old world—philosopher, engineer, doctor, it doesn't matter. Once you arrive here, the rot of this place eats through what you knew. Slowly at first. Then all at once.
Your memories, your titles, your truths… they don't follow you for long.
Eventually, everyone goes back to the roots.
And the roots don't care who you were.
I reached the edge of the river and stopped. The bank dipped unevenly—soft mud meeting jagged stones. Across the dark water, shadows moved. Some drifted aimlessly. Others stepped into the river and were gone in seconds, swept away like leaves in floodwater.
Aedros.
The queen of shadows.
The watcher of the dead.
The river with no sleep.
People call it many names. I've never heard the same one twice.
I found a soft patch beneath a half-dead tree—its trunk cracked, limbs brittle but still holding shape. I slid down beside it, my back pressed to the bark. The sack rustled beside me as I opened it and pulled a few dried roots to chew. The taste was bitter, but it filled the silence.
I left the water untouched.
You don't drink from the rivers—not Aedros, not Vaelor, not Abeth.
Rain is the only source now. And even that's become rare. When it comes, it tastes faintly of stone.
I leaned my head back and let the quiet settle.
My thoughts drifted back to the man above the hills—to the house where the wood creaked like it was remembering something. To the look in his eyes when I told him I was leaving. And to the story he never told me.
The reason people hate him—
It's an old story.
The kind you only hear when you've stayed long enough to stop believing in fairy tales.
There was a time—long before my arrival, long before the old man had set foot in this place—when the sky was still whole and the stars hung undisturbed above the world. A time when even silence had a rhythm, and the tree, the Aurean Spire, stood not as a mystery, but as a beacon.
And then came the night it burned brighter than it ever had. A golden blaze that swallowed the sky whole, devouring the stars one by one until nothing remained but its own terrible light. The people, scattered and uncertain, gathered beneath it. Drawn like moths to the flame. All of them. Old and young. Farmers, warriors, monks. They came not in worship, but in awe.
Then lightning fell.
Without warning, without wind, the sky split open and bolts came crashing down—blinding, blistering, absolute. The first to die were incinerated where they stood. Their screams came only after, delayed by the roar of the storm that followed. Panic took the rest. The people turned on each other, confused and afraid, begging the tree for mercy, believing it had cursed them. But it wasn't the tree.
It was the man who emerged from it.
No gate opened. No flare of divine magic. He simply stepped forward from the roots, as though he had always been there, hidden between dimensions, waiting.
He was not human. Not entirely.
Taller than any man. His body impossibly dense with strength. Muscles drawn tight across his frame like tempered steel, veins faintly glowing beneath darkened skin. There were marks carved into his flesh—runes, like the ones I had seen in old ruins and worn stone—but these weren't worn. They pulsed. Lived. Symbols of lightning and war etched not just on his skin but inside him.
And at the center of his chest, suspended on a thread of shimmering spider-silk, hung a stone.
Rough, jagged, shaped like a bolt of lightning. A rune.
The paintings I later found in a shattered structure—etched with the trembling hands of survivors—didn't focus on his cruelty or his violence. Not the way you'd expect. They didn't center the charred corpses or the cracked soil. The heart of each image was always the same: the rune. That stone. The first of many.
They called him Raga.
Not god. Not savior. A being of higher dimensionality, they said. A refugee from a world above this one. A world with rules so different that when its people descend, even by mistake, they rip the laws of this one apart.
Raga brought power with him. Terrible, beautiful power. He didn't hoard it. No. He gave it away.
He broke the rune into pieces and shared them among the desperate humans, binding fragments to their blood and bone. And in doing so, he lit the fire that would never go out. With those stones—runes of fire, water, wind, decay—humans turned into more than themselves. They began to burn brighter. Fight harder. Kill faster.
Civilizations collapsed overnight.
Men slaughtered their own kin for stronger runes. Entire factions rose and fell beneath the tree's shadow. The world rotted under the weight of ambition. And above it all, sitting like a dark god beneath the golden canopy, was Raga.
Not intervening.
Just watching.
And building.
He was forming an army—not to rule this world, but to flee from the one above. From something stronger. A threat never named in the scriptures. Only implied. Something that hunted him across realms.
The ones who survived, the few who could still speak, began to pray—not to Raga, not to the runes—but to the tree itself. Not in faith, but in desperation. To burn the tyrant. To curse the betrayer. And the tree listened.
One night, without wind or warning, it shone again.
But this time the light did not blind. It opened. And from that light came another being.
This one smaller, cloaked in a quiet brilliance that made no sound and cast no shadow. In his chest, not hung but etched, glowed a circular rune. A pattern of concentric rings, speckled with shifting points of light—like the orbits of distant moons.
He did not speak.
He didn't need to.
Raga knew who he was. And he knew what time it was.
He rallied his army, the rune-bearers he had forged in blood and fire. Promised them refuge in a better world. A reward for loyalty. Then he struck.
The sky shook.
What followed was not a war, but a reckoning.
The new being—whatever he was—unleashed a force not rooted in one element or another, but in something far older. Light not just as brightness, but as judgment. Memory. Order.
One by one, the soldiers fell.
Runes shattered. Flesh turned to ash.
And at the center of the storm, Raga was broken.
He wasn't spared. He wasn't imprisoned. He was slain—his body buried beneath the tree that once gave him passage. Some say the tree fed on him, took his essence in as offering. Others believe it was justice. Balance restored.
The paintings end there. The records, too.
Only one name is given for the other man, the one who brought the war to an end. A name scratched at the bottom of the final mural. Faint. Almost forgotten.
Seluin.
The angel of light.
And maybe... the first to truly understand what the tree was.
After the tyrant was buried beneath the roots, the man of light did not leave.
He turned back.
Behind him stood the remnants of a broken world: scorched fields, hollowed settlements, families torn apart by power they were never meant to hold. And yet, as he looked, they knelt. Not in fear—but in reverence. Their heads bowed. Their hands trembling. They whispered his name like prayer.
Seluin.
In that moment, something in him shifted. Perhaps he had come only to destroy, to restore balance and return. But when he saw what remained, he understood: a world left behind needed more than a sword—it needed a guardian. A guide. A reason to hope.
So he took the stone from his chest—the celestial rune that pulsed with the memory of stars—and cast it into the base of the Aurean Spire. The tree accepted it without resistance. Its roots coiled around the stone like fingers closing around a promise. Then came the light.
It blazed brighter than before, golden fire rippling through bark and branch. Some say it grew taller that day, reaching toward whatever sky remained. Others say the runes carved into its bark began to shift, as though rewriting themselves.
What came next was peace.
The rains returned with rhythm. Droughts lessened. Harvests swelled. For a time, the soil grew generous, and the rivers ran warmer. No wars were waged. No runes stolen. People told stories of Seluin walking among them, inspecting fields, restoring broken wells, touching the sick with hands that glowed faintly when they healed.
But he never lingered long.
Eventually, he crossed the lowlands and made the long ascent to the hills opposite the tree. There, on the quiet side of the mountains—where the branches of the Spire could still be seen, golden against the black sky—he built a home. Small. Unadorned. A cabin of wood and stone.
He didn't seek worship. He turned away most visitors, preferring solitude. But the people came anyway—offering gifts, asking for blessings, bringing their children to be named or touched. For a while, he allowed it.
And then, one day, that changed.
During one of his rare inspections of the tree's base, Seluin noticed something strange. A bud—small, misshapen—hanging lower than the others. It had not bloomed. It had not fallen. The roots had not claimed it. Inside was a boy.
At first glance, he assumed the child was already dead—another dreamless husk cast aside by the tree. But the boy was alive. Breathing. Barely.
Seluin carried him back to the cabin.
No one knew who the boy was, or how long he had been in the tree's grasp. He never spoke of it. He barely spoke at all. He flinched at loud noises. Ate little. Slept restlessly. So Seluin, in a rare act of firmness, asked the people of the lowlands to stop coming. To give the child space.
They did not take it well.
To them, Seluin had become more than a man—he was hope made flesh. Their bridge to something greater. To be denied access to him, even for a reason, felt like betrayal.
But he didn't explain.
He didn't need to.
The boy came first.
And in that quiet cabin, far from war, far from the roots of power, they lived together. A man who had once burned with light, and a boy trying to remember who he was.
They lived quietly for a long while.
Seluin, once radiant with power, no longer shone. The light he'd once carried with him—the one that split mountains and ended tyrants—dimmed by choice, not by force. He grew older, slower, quieter. But not weaker.
The boy grew too. With time, he learned to walk the terrain. He learned the smells in the wind, the signals in the earth. Seluin taught him the language of herbs and stars, how to carve meaning into stone, how to listen when the forest whispered warnings. And though he never said it aloud, the boy knew Seluin loved him like blood.
But the world beyond the hills did not forget.
They whispered first—suspicion blooming in the dark. Why won't he come down anymore? Who lives with him now? Why is the boy worth more than the rest of us?
Then came the anger. The offerings stopped. The prayers twisted.
And Seluin, in his solitude, made a decision that shattered everything.
He destroyed the runes.
One by one, he hunted them down. The artifacts from Raga's reign—those shards of celestial power once gifted to mankind—he gathered them and turned them to ash. Some he found buried in vaults. Others clutched in dying hands. He burned them all, leaving no trace.
No more lightning carved from stone. No more fire summoned by word. No more strength pulled from a thread around the neck. He said nothing of it to the boy. But the world felt it.
The rains stopped.
The fields dried.
The river Aedros grew colder, crueler. Its black waters swallowed entire paths once walked in safety. Earthquakes split the land near the Spire. Fires swept through towns that had never burned before. Livestock failed. Children starved.
And the people remembered Seluin.
Not as a savior—but as a curse.
They came for him.
Torches. Blades. Some with old runes still buried in bone, hidden and burning. They demanded the boy. They demanded the return of the blessings he had stripped from them. Some even begged—offering to rebuild the temples, restore his name.
But Seluin refused.
They did not take him. He walked out to meet them.
And as the boy watched from the high window, Seluin raised his arms to the wind, and spoke the last words the world would hear from him.
Then he vanished in light.
No body. No echo.
Just silence.
In time, the people twisted the story further. They blamed the boy—the child who had stolen Seluin from them, who had lived in the cabin while the world burned. They called him parasite, thief, son of the tyrant. They said he had poisoned Seluin's mind, or perhaps was Raga's reincarnation, returned to finish what the last war could not.
The boy left before the flames reached the walls.
And for a time, the world forgot both their names.
The old man never told me this story.
He never said the name Seluin. Never spoke of the boy who once lived in the cabin, or the people who came with blades. Not directly.
But I found traces.
Carvings on stones, half-lost beneath moss. Scraps of scripture embedded in melted wood, the ink warped from heat and age. In one of the cupboards: a toy soldier made of brittle clay, its chest marked with the lightning rune. In the attic: bundles of ash-soaked silk with small replicas of runes carved in bone. And in a compartment beneath the floor, I found old journals—water-damaged, barely legible. Most of the pages were torn or blackened, but enough remained.
Enough to piece it together.
Even the cabin itself whispered truths if you looked closely. The careful repairs in the roof—done by two hands, not one. The faded symbols etched in the beams, long overwritten by newer ones. The ashes in the fireplace that never quite turned cold.
He never confirmed it. Never denied it either.
But I know now what he did.
Who he was.
And I know who I am.
He found me under the tree.
Just as Seluin had once found him.
Limp. Barely breathing. Covered in silk.
And he pulled me free—not because he wanted to, maybe not even because he believed in saving anyone—but because someone once did the same for him.
And left him with the burden of surviving.
Things were clearer now—at least more so than they'd been a month ago.
Back then, I thought the old man had spoken of magic as nothing more than a drunk man's rambling. Something said to fill the silence. But I understand now. Magic, as he called it, was a word for the runes—the ancient fragments of power, not just symbols but remnants of something older, far above this world.
I searched for them.
Everywhere.
Inside the cabin, in the cracked floorboards and behind the brittle cupboards. In the stone house half-swallowed by moss. Beyond the hills, into what remained of temples long buried in ash. Even into the grieving forests, where branches dripped with mist and the air whispered warnings in no language I could name.
I bartered with those in the settlements too—traded herbs, medicines, even lies. But most gave me nothing but cold glances and narrow eyes. Some spat at me. One man threw a stone. None offered answers. To them, I was cursed. The shadow of some forgotten devil. Maybe they weren't wrong. Still, I didn't let it stop me.
But after a full month, I'd found nothing. Not a single working rune. Only relics. Carvings. Imitations.
If one of them had truly held power, this land wouldn't be in this state. The sky wouldn't hang so empty. The earth wouldn't rot under its own weight. So I came to a conclusion—one I'd been circling around for days:
If I wanted answers, I'd have to ask the tree.
There were carvings, scattered across ruins and etched into fragments of stone, that spoke of fruits—gifts that once hung from the lower branches of the tree. Depicted strangely, they seemed less like food and more like offerings. Symbols. Runes in the shape of divine fruit.
Gifts from something beyond.
I don't know what they are. I don't know if they still exist. But the tree is the only anchor that connects this world to the one above.
Because, make no mistake, my goal isn't to fix this place. It isn't revenge. It isn't survival.
It's escape.
I need to reach the overworld. The place above this place. And eventually, the White Hall.
I've seen it—again and again. Sometimes while unconscious in the middle of danger. Sometimes when I fall asleep without meaning to. And always, I wake in the same pale chamber: silent, infinite, lit by no source, but glowing all the same. The Hall.
Most of the time, it's empty. Endless corridors of white stretching out, cold and clean and vast. But not always. There were days I heard them—voices not shaped like ours, not quite… right. I couldn't make out their words. But I could feel the weight of their presence. They knew me.
And I knew them.
And that, more than anything, was reason enough to be afraid.
They haven't appeared in weeks. I don't know if that's a blessing or a warning.
All I know is that to reach them—to reach the world they inhabit—I'll need a rune. A real one. One not made of clay or copied from story. And if the tree still holds any, then the Aurean Spire is the path forward. The only one left.
I stood up from where I'd been resting under the hollowed tree, brushing dirt from my palms. My muscles ached. My eyes were raw from lack of sleep.
I reached into the sack and pulled out the old blade. It had once been a machete, rusted and worn, its handle cracked with age. I lashed it to a thick branch with torn cloth and rope to fashion something like an axe.
Before I cut, I placed my hand on the broken bark and muttered a wordless thanks—for the shelter, for the stillness.
Then I began to carve.
Slow, heavy swings. Splinters flying. I needed logs. Enough for a raft, or something like one. The river ahead—Aedros—wouldn't tolerate mistakes. Touching it with bare skin could mean sickness. Madness. Worse.
But I had no choice.
I would cross it.
Even if it killed me.