Ashen had learned to listen to the quiet—really listen. Not the kind that hung limp in empty corridors, but the kind that trembled with unspoken words. The kind that settled just before something shattered. It was the edge of silence that betrayed the world's intent.
Now, he crouched on the blackened ledge of a ravine split deep into the earth, eyes fixed on the temple carved into the rock face below. The Trial Island was never supposed to have this place. He knew that much.
The first time through, this ravine had been just another death trap—a collapsed fault line riddled with lesser wraiths. But in this life, it pulsed with something else. Something new. Something not meant to be seen yet.
Something that had noticed him.
Riven's voice hummed beside him, low and cautious. "This temple wasn't in the maps, was it?"
"No," Ashen answered without looking away. "Because it didn't exist."
She gave a bitter chuckle. "You say that like it explains anything."
He didn't answer. Not immediately. The way she looked at the world—raw, open, skeptical—reminded him too much of himself before the weight of memory dragged him down. She hadn't asked about the brand seared into the back of his hand, or why monsters avoided him in a perfect radius. She hadn't even blinked when he redirected a spell using broken logic.
But now, she was asking. Not with words—with presence.
And that meant something.
"The Trial Island is adapting," Ashen murmured. "Trying to correct for me."
"That's... comforting." Riven narrowed her eyes at the stone guardians flanking the temple's entrance. "So what's inside?"
Ashen pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. "Either a trap meant to erase me. Or a fragment of the system I'm not supposed to touch yet."
She rolled her staff between her fingers. "And we're going in?"
Ashen stood slowly, eyes never leaving the mouth of the temple. "We're going in."
The interior of the temple wasn't warm or inviting—it was carved in solemn, precise angles, lined with bones and muted echoes. The air buzzed with residual mana, like a machine stuck between powering down and waking up.
Ashen pressed his palm to one of the carved reliefs. It didn't respond. No glow, no surge of holy light, no divine recognition.
Perfect.
The deeper they went, the more the silence began to press. Not just quiet—absence. There were no insects, no dripping water, no system notifications, not even ambient system HUD. Riven kept glancing around like she expected something to jump out of the walls.
And then something did.
Not from the walls, but from Ashen himself.
He staggered. Clutched his ribs.
A voice bloomed inside his head, not through his ears. A whisper that sounded like static overlaid with his own voice.
"Do you understand yet, Ashen Verrick? The system does not forget. It evolves."
Riven dropped into a defensive stance. "What's wrong?"
Ashen's mouth opened—but another voice spilled out.
"You shouldn't be here. Your existence is already straining the equilibrium."
He clenched his fists until they bled, and with effort, forced the presence back down. The weight lifted just enough for him to breathe. "It's the system. A proto-fragment. Embedded here like a virus scan."
Riven stared at him. "You're saying... this place knows you're not supposed to be alive."
"No. It knows I'm not supposed to be remembered."
They entered the central chamber.
A stone dais stood beneath a cracked sunroof, pouring eerie blue light onto a circular terminal. Floating just above it was an artifact—half sphere, half lens, pulsing faintly.
Ashen approached slowly. Each step took a decade from his knees.
He recognized it.
The Lens of Recall.
In his original timeline, this artifact was deployed in the War of Dimming Suns—used to recover the last thoughts of dying heroes. It recorded truth, bypassing the System's filters.
This wasn't supposed to appear for another seven years.
"I need time," he said.
Riven nodded and turned her back to him, guarding the door with a silent readiness that made his chest ache. She had no reason to trust him.
He approached the lens and pressed his hand to it.
"Anathema Signature Detected." "Initializing Memory Anchor Protocol."
A pulse of light, and suddenly Ashen stood in a battlefield.
Not a battlefield. The battlefield.
The moment before the end.
He saw himself—older, wearier, bleeding from the ribs—surrounded by craters and shattered divine corpses. Behind him, Kaleid knelt in mock despair as the Church's broadcasting runes picked up his "heroic" monologue.
But the Ashen from the memory wasn't focused on Kaleid.
He was dragging himself toward the body of a girl with silver hair.
Riven.
Ashen's heart clenched.
She had died protecting his blind side. Because he had refused to let her sacrifice herself in a suicidal spell.
Because he still believed some lives could be spared.
The memory flickered. Time distorted. And now he was staring at another version of himself—taller, crueler, wrapped in black tendrils of broken mana.
This was the corrupted Ashen. From the Dungeon of Dead Futures.
A whisper crawled into his mind.
"It's always you who remembers. That's the curse. Everyone else gets peace. You get clarity."
Ashen stumbled backward. He tried to leave the vision—but the Lens was anchoring him.
He saw flashes—Eira impaled by a divine spear, Riven devoured by mana feedback, his own hands dripping with blood as he activated the Final Seal.
He screamed.
The vision collapsed.
Ashen woke to Riven shaking him.
"You were gone for fifteen minutes. You stopped breathing."
He coughed. Wiped blood from his nose.
"It was the memory of the last battle," he rasped.
She hesitated. "Did I... die?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
"You saved me."
She didn't speak. Just turned away, cheeks tight with emotion.
The Lens now hovered dormant.
But it had already done its job.
Ashen reached inside his cloak and withdrew a black shard. One of the Divine Overseers had given it to Kaleid in his first life. Now, it would be used to forge something else.
Riven saw it and narrowed her eyes. "That's divine crystal."
He nodded. "We're making a statement."
"What kind?"
He stood, taller now. Not in body, but in presence.
"The kind they can't rewrite."
That night, in the forest edge near the temple, Ashen carved something into the trunk of a sacred tree. A spell that couldn't be erased by system updates.
A single line:
Ashen Verrick was here. And he remembers.