Ashrift wasn't a place. It was a wound.
The moment Izen stepped beyond the cracked boundary stone—a jagged, rusted monolith etched with faded glyphs—he felt the shift. The light behind him dimmed unnaturally. No sun. No artificial flame. Only the grey luminescence of shadowlight, bleeding like mildew from the walls and broken pillars of what had once been the noble tier of Luminos Prime. Now, it lay buried beneath centuries of grief and echo-mist.
Fog clung to the ground in thin tendrils, whispering as it moved. At first, Izen thought it was wind. But as he walked deeper, he realized the fog was speaking.
Not in words.
In names.
Not spoken aloud, but inside his mind—each one coiling around the memory-thread on his left arm, tugging at his soul like invisible hands.
"Do not respond," Grinless murmured, its shape flowing silently beside him. "If you answer, they will follow."
"They already are."
The shadows beneath Izen's feet no longer obeyed the angle of his body. They leaned ahead of him, reaching toward the alleys, toward the windows of crumbling manors. Several broke from him entirely, flickering like snakes across broken tiles, then vanishing through the ruins.
Ashrift was feeding.
The Binding Thread pulsed once, twice. Then steadied.
The name he carried—Callow—resonated faintly. Not a memory. A tether. Something here was bound to it, and it was alive.
They passed through the remains of what might've once been a bridge, though now it simply hovered—a fragmented pathway suspended by nothing but tension and old glyphs. Shadow-lanterns, long dead, hung from twisted chains. A low moan passed through the air. It wasn't wind. It was grief.
"This place is wrong," Izen said.
"All memory is wrong if left unkept," Grinless replied. "Ashrift is memory unbound."
Ahead, a tower stood tilted like a snapped neck. Its top spire lay collapsed beside it, covered in old Archive banners—shredded parchment marked with the sigil of the Scribe's Guild, now blackened and illegible. On the wall near the base of the tower, something had been scrawled in dried ink:
WE REMEMBER. WE REGRET. WE REVEAL.
The echo tugged sharply at Izen's thread.
He approached.
The tower's entrance was cracked, half-sealed by debris. Old bones rested beneath the arch—some human, some not. Shadows coiled around them like pets awaiting their masters' return.
He ducked inside.
The air was thicker here, almost gelatinous. Like walking through half-dreams. He blinked, and the interior changed. Once a stairwell. Then a library. Then a nursery. Each flicker came with a fresh name whispered at the edge of consciousness.
Grinless hissed.
"Echo-pressure building. Something strong is forming."
Izen stepped forward. The journal in his satchel began to shake. He pulled it free, and a single page fluttered loose, unmarked except for a fresh glyph burned into the parchment.
A name was appearing.
Not written by his hand.
Not written by any hand.
Lyrell Callow.
The journal snapped shut, nearly biting his fingers.
A low groan echoed through the tower.
And then—
A figure appeared in the corridor ahead.
Not walking.
Gliding.
She wore robes of translucent ink-thread, her face pale and perfect and utterly still. Her eyes were black voids, swirling with memory. Her feet didn't touch the ground, but her shadow trailed behind her like a wedding veil made of weeping ash.
Grinless recoiled.
"That's not a memory echo," it growled. "That's a bound revenant."
Izen stepped back, one hand raised instinctively to the binding thread at his arm. It pulsed sharply, as though screaming.
The woman's mouth opened—but no words came. Just ink poured from her lips, hitting the ground with wet slaps, and forming symbols in a circle beneath her.
"She's trying to unbind," Grinless hissed. "You need to speak her Name. Now."
"I don't know her—"
"You do! It's the one you just received!"
Izen's voice cracked. "Lyrell Callow."
The ink froze.
So did the revenant.
She turned her head, slowly, toward him. The veil of ash behind her twisted violently. Her eyes changed—from void to something else. Pale blue. Human.
She whispered. This time, the voice came through.
"…Izen…?"
He staggered. "You know me?"
"I…remember…"
Her form flickered—shadows tearing at her limbs.
"…but they…unmade me…"
"Who?"
She screamed—not at him, but at the sky. The tower shook.
Then from the ink-circle beneath her, something else emerged.
A second figure—faceless, cloaked, larger. Its shadow branched into wings and claws. It did not speak. It howled—a deep, metallic screech like rust being peeled from bone.
"Move!" Grinless shouted.
Izen dodged just as the figure lunged. It didn't walk. It collapsed space—one moment distant, the next inside his ribs. A claw of raw ink raked across his side, drawing no blood, but searing into his thoughts.
He fell.
The world blurred.
Pain. Weight.
Grinless leapt over him, striking the creature with a flare of mirrorlight. It shrieked, reeled back.
The revenant—Lyrell—collapsed.
Her ash-shadow broke apart.
"Izen," she whispered again, weaker now. "You must finish the…binding…"
"I don't know how!"
"You carry her thread," Grinless snarled. "Use it! Anchor her!"
Izen gritted his teeth. He raised his arm. The binding thread burned.
He reached out, ignoring the pain, and grabbed hold of the revenant's arm.
She screamed again.
So did he.
Their shadows collided.
And merged.
The scream became a wind.
Then silence.
The tower stilled.
Izen collapsed.
Grinless crouched beside him, breathing hard though it did not breathe.
The binding thread was no longer black.
It was silver.
Faint.
Alive.
The revenant was gone.
But the name Lyrell Callow was burned into the journal's next page, surrounded by a ring of silent glyphs.
"I didn't just bind her," Izen whispered. "She bound herself to me."
Grinless nodded slowly.
"And now they'll all come looking."
Izen didn't wake so much as surface.
The world returned in scattered fragments—stone beneath his back, the cold pressure of shadow residue clinging to his limbs, and the taste of metal in his mouth. Every part of him ached. Not from impact or blade, but from something deeper. A soul-deep fraying that left him feeling hollowed, as though part of him had been poured into someone else's vessel.
Grinless sat nearby, silent, its form partially fractured. Thin seams of flickering light cracked across its limbs like glass about to shatter. It wasn't healing.
"How long?" Izen's voice rasped, barely a whisper.
"Hours," Grinless murmured. "Maybe more. The Ashrift fog has no patience for time."
Izen pushed himself up slowly. The silver thread along his arm still glowed faintly, but its pattern had changed. More intricate now. Woven with new glyphs—curved, elegant, older than any he'd learned in the Archive.
"Lyrell," he said softly.
"She's inside you now. Fully bound. Not a fragment. Not a whisper. A legacy."
Izen turned his wrist slowly, watching the sigils pulse.
"What happens now?"
"You leave this place," Grinless said. "Before something worse smells the echo."
The walk out was slower than the descent. The Ashrift didn't resist them. It simply watched. Shadows no longer darted ahead, and no names whispered from the fog. Silence followed them like a mourning veil. The tower crumbled behind them as they passed the bridge, as if it had been waiting for the binding to complete before releasing its last breath.
By the time Izen stepped back across the boundary stone, the sun had returned—thin and pale above the city dome. The streets of Luminos Prime were alive again, but distant. Dimmed. He felt it all through a pane of glass.
Eryla Vance was waiting.
She stood at the edge of the entry platform, robes pristine, expression unreadable. When her eyes met his, she didn't speak. She simply turned and began walking. He followed.
They returned to the Shattered Hall in silence, through guarded corridors and glyph-locked doors, until at last they reached a room unlike any Izen had seen before—a circular chamber lit entirely by hovering sigil-orbs. Floating shadows moved in circles above them, each locked within its own containment arc.
"This is a Truth Vault," Eryla said at last. "Used by the Guardians' Guild for memory verifications and oath-sealing."
"And I'm here for what? Interrogation?"
She didn't answer. She pointed toward the center of the chamber, where a pedestal waited, its surface etched with hollow-threaded runes.
"Place your journal on the altar."
Izen hesitated.
"If I do… will I lose her?"
"No. But we'll see her. All of her."
He stepped forward slowly and placed the black journal on the pedestal. The moment it touched the surface, the glyphs lit up. A humming began—not mechanical, but alive, like a voice just below hearing. Then the air above the pedestal shimmered, and a figure appeared.
Not fully formed.
But real.
Lyrell Callow stood with her arms crossed, head bowed, and shadows gently swirling around her feet like fog learning to breathe.
Eryla stared for a long time.
"She remembers," Izen whispered. "More than I expected. Not just herself. But me. My name."
"She should," Eryla said. "You're her son."
The words landed like a dropped stone in still water.
Izen's thoughts froze.
"…What?"
Eryla turned her gaze toward him, her expression softening just enough to register something close to regret.
"Lyrell Callow wasn't just a name buried in the Archive. She was a former Reaver. One of the last independent Binders who refused to join the Lightbringer Compact after the Hollow Accord. She vanished in Ashrift eighteen years ago… the same year you were found, Lightless, at the Archive gates."
Izen staggered back a step. "That's not possible. I was told I had no parent trace. No bloodline records."
"You didn't. Because she erased them. She buried herself, so you could live."
He stared at the flickering form of Lyrell, her shadow trembling, her eyes faintly glowing.
"She gave up everything to keep you out of this."
"But I'm in it now," Izen whispered.
"Because you pulled her back," Eryla said. "And now? Now you carry a name the Guild considers extinct. A bloodline marked as politically volatile. Do you understand what that makes you?"
He swallowed. "A threat."
"No," she said coldly. "A symbol. And symbols are always used—or destroyed."
Izen turned his gaze back to the journal. The page where Lyrell's name had appeared now shimmered with additional script. Instructions. Warnings. A half-written ritual of preservation.
"She's not just memory," he said. "She's information. Protected. Structured. She designed herself as a living echo."
Eryla nodded slowly. "Your mother was the last person to attempt a perfect self-binding. She succeeded. Barely."
"And now she's part of me."
"Yes."
Izen looked down at his hands, still ink-stained. The thread around his arm had fused with his veins now, trailing silver like rivers of memory beneath the skin.
"What happens next?" he asked.
"That depends," Eryla said. "Do you want to run?"
"No."
"Do you want to serve?"
"I don't know."
"Then you have one option left."
She stepped closer and touched the journal lightly. Lyrell's image blinked out. The glyphs dimmed.
"You master it," Eryla said. "Whatever this binding is… whatever truth you carry now… you master it before it masters you. Or you will become like the others."
"What others?"
She didn't reply.
But the lights above them flickered.
And Izen, for just a second, saw dozens of figures hanging in stasis above the chamber—echoes of Reavers long gone, preserved in partial bindings. Failed legacies. Fractured truths.
He turned away.
He would not be one of them.