Solin wandered for years after becoming the first bearer of a Darkshard, walking the blurred edges between memory and myth. In the eyes of the Lightbearers, he was a ghost—a legend twisted by fear. But to those who heard him speak, who listened beneath their grief and recognized the truth in his silence, he was something else.
He was a reckoning.
His journey eventually led him to the Vale of Thorns, a once-sacred grove now overrun with bramble and quiet. There, the second Darkshard waited—not buried in ruins or locked behind flame, but sealed inside a woman.
Her name was Vereya.
Once a singer in the Choir of Dawnbells, she had carried the third shard of light during the Age of Chorus. But when her lover was consumed by an ascension trial—burned not by shadow, but by the light he sought to master—she fled. For decades, she had hidden her shard deep within her chest, turning its voice into silence. She sang no more. Her melody had become a wound.
When Solin found her, she didn't ask who he was. She only said:
"If you've come to rekindle my purpose, you're too late."
Solin didn't argue. He simply sat with her, beside the vine-shrouded fountain where her voice had once rung for cities. And over days, he told her stories—not of victory, but of grief. Of a boy who once mapped the paths of those brighter than him. Of silence, not as absence, but invitation.
Then, on the seventh night, he reached into the fire and pulled forth a shard—not with hands, but with forgiveness.
And that's when she wept.
Vereya's shard, long buried beneath sorrow, emerged
not as flame but as shadowlight—a gentle, aching glow that pulsed like a lullaby remembered. It didn't burn. It soothed.
Together, they named it: The Shard of Letting Go.
And so the second Darkshard joined the quiet constellation Umbrael was forming—a pattern not seen in stars, but in hearts. The kind of power that does not demand… only endures.
Shall we keep weaving the next chapter? Perhaps follow Vereya's first encounter with a young Lightbearer who mistakes her for an enemy—or explore the moment Umbrael speaks aloud for the first time since the fracture. There's depth still waiting beneath the hush… 🖤✨