Location: Mt. Silver, Southeast Approach — Three Days Before Disappearance
The wind was different at this altitude.
It didn't howl. It listened.
Galen crouched beside a half-buried marker stone, brushing the frost from its face with gloved fingers. The symbol beneath was familiar now: the crescent eye, etched into slate by hands long forgotten. This one was cracked.
He pulled a recorder from his coat — the old kind, still partially working despite the cold. A red light flickered dimly at the top.
Recording…
He set it down on the snow-covered rock, cleared his throat.
"This is Field Log #17. Time unknown. Date… probably doesn't matter anymore."
He exhaled.
"I've come farther than I should have. I know that now. And I think… I think the mountain knows it too."
The recorder buzzed slightly. Static pulsed around the edges, faint but rising.
"The glyphs are more erratic now. Unown are vanishing before I even see them. The dreams are constant. I hear names I never learned. I see places I've never been. And yet I feel them. Like they were mine."
He looked up at the sky.
"But I'm not afraid anymore. Not of Amaranth. Not of what waits past Veilpoint."
"I'm afraid I'll forget why I started."
He stood and walked to the fire pit, the embers long dead. The egg sat in a reinforced incubator nearby, wrapped in soft cloth and layered against the cold.
It hadn't moved in days.
But it felt awake.
He knelt beside it.
"You still haven't hatched. I don't know what you're waiting for."
He smiled faintly.
"Or maybe you're just smarter than me."
A pause. Snow began to fall again, thin and soft.
"I wonder if you'll remember me. If you'll know the voice that spoke to you all these nights."
He placed one hand over the shell. It was still warm.
"You're something different. Not a weapon. Not a gift. Just… a story that refused to be forgotten. Maybe the only one worth passing on."
The recorder continued ticking quietly.
Galen turned back toward the southeast pass — a narrow trail that spiraled downward, vanishing into mist and frost.
No path markers.
No return route.
But he'd seen it in his dreams.
Veilpoint.
Where memory bleeds into possibility.
He reached into his bag and pulled out one final item — a sealed envelope, edges waxed, the name "Kael" written across the front in black ink.
He pressed it gently beneath a slab of stone at the edge of the fire ring, shielded from the wind. Not buried. Not hidden.
Just… waiting.
The snow thickened.
He looked down at the egg one last time.
"I hope he finds you."
He knelt, touching the shell with both hands.
"And I hope you help him remember everything I forgot."
He walked toward the mist without looking back.
No transmission.
No goodbyes.
Only the sound of his own boots in snow, and the gentle hum of something vast beginning to notice him.
Back at the fire pit, the recorder kept running.
The static grew louder.
Then softer.
Then still.
The egg pulsed faintly once.
And then the light inside curled inward — as if the dream was folding itself into silence, waiting to be named again.