They reached the Breach at midnight.
No gate marked its location. No wall defined its edge.
The world stopped.
Where grass should've grown, there was only black sand. Where stars should've shone, there was a dull, pulsing void. And where the Writ's glyphs usually danced in the air, symbols of divine surveillance, there was nothing.
Not silence.
Not darkness.
But absence.
Liris knelt at the edge. "This is it."
Zaiya stood beside her, eyes narrow. She gestured a warding glyph and then quickly scratched it away, disturbed that it hadn't ignited.
Elya looked around uneasily. "It's like… the world forgot how to be itself."
Vaelen said nothing.
The Breach responded to him. He could feel it as a thread pulling at his chest. Not violently. Gently. Like a memory he hadn't recalled yet, inviting him to return.
They stepped across the threshold.
The air changed instantly.
Heavier. But not in pressure. In presence.
The trees beyond were fossilized grey, crystalline trunks that hummed softly, echoing thoughts not spoken aloud. Their leaves shimmered in slow motion, refracting light as though time flowed sideways.
Zaiya paused to press her fingers to one. Her breath caught.
She pointed at the tree's core, where veins of blue light pulsed faintly.
Liris translated: "It's alive. But dreaming."
"Everything here feels wrong," Elya said.
"Not wrong," Vaelen replied. "Unbound."
By dawn, they had reached a stone path. It wound between the dreaming trees, leading toward a hill crowned with a ruin shaped like a half-sunken coliseum. Pillars of black marble leaned inward, forming a ring.
In its center: a platform of metal and bone, still glowing faintly with aether.
Zaiya was the first to step inside.
The moment she did, the air sang.
Glyphs, unlike the Tribunal's, spun into view. Spiral-shaped, fluid, living. They weren't written.
They were felt.
Vaelen recognized them.
Not from this life.
From the one before.
He whispered the name aloud.
"Nytherion."
Liris's eyes widened. "The city lost beneath the Writ…"
"Not lost," Vaelen said. "Buried."
And then the platform awakened.
Its runes pulsed.
A voice echoed through the hollow arena, not in words, but in images:
A sky filled with black suns
A tower made of screaming names
A throne beneath the sea, weeping blood
A man… with Vaelen's face… sitting on it, smiling
The vision cut off.
The platform dimmed.
Everyone stood still.
Elya looked to Vaelen, jaw tight. "What the hell was that?"
Vaelen whispered: "A warning."
Far away, beyond the Breach, the Pale Censor reached the Ember Reaches.
She stood atop a ridge and raised her hand.
Below, an entire town of 8,000 people, resistance farmers and artisans, looked up.
And then they forgot who they were.
Their names. Their families. Their histories.
A glyph burned into the sky: a symbol of annulment.
The Pale Censor turned, sensing the Breach's pulse.
She began her march east.
They entered the ruins of Nytherion just after the second dawn.
A tunnel of hexagonal stone descended beneath the coliseum's platform, hidden until Zaiya traced a pressure glyph across the old podium's rim. She hadn't been taught it, it had simply come to her, like a memory half-buried beneath her skin.
The passage lit faintly as they descended, not with torches or aether-lamps, but with memorylight, which flickered impressions burned into the stone, echoing thoughts from people who once walked here.
Elya paused beside one wall and reached out.
A brief image flickered:
A child, no older than ten, staring at a floating map and whispering numbers that changed with every breath. Her mother, standing behind her, eyes glowing with knowledge, no fear, no Writ, no gods.
Then it was gone.
"What is this place?" Elya whispered.
Liris answered. "A civilization that lived with aether, not beneath it."
"And now?" asked Vaelen.
"Now they're ash."
At the tunnel's end, they found a chamber of concentric rings, each carved with symbols older than language. In its center floated a single, orb-like construct, its surface etched with spirals of living script, rotating slowly in the air.
It spoke.
But not aloud.
It entered them.
"YOU ARE UNAUTHORIZED."
"YOU ARE REMNANTS."
"YOU ARE UNWRITTEN."
Vaelen stepped forward. "I am Vaelen Sol Draeth. Herald once. Now Ashborn."
The sphere paused.
"WE KNOW YOU."
"YOU WERE PROMISED."
"YOU ARE… FRAGMENTED."
The chamber rumbled slightly. A pulse rippled through the floor.
Zaiya stepped forward beside him. The orb turned toward her.
Then shuddered.
Not mechanically. Emotionally.
"YOU..."
"YOU CARRY HER MARK."
Vaelen looked at Zaiya. "What mark?"
Zaiya, eyes wide, lifted her sleeve.
There, just above her wrist, faint but pulsing, was a birthmark shaped like a three-pronged spiral.
Liris inhaled sharply. "That's the sigil of Avel-Kai. One of the last Aetherborn Houses before the Tribunal collapsed them."
Zaiya looked shaken. She had always been silent, but now she was visibly afraid.
The orb lowered slightly.
"YOU ARE MEMORY-BOUND."
"IF SHE DIES WE DIE."
"IF YOU ERASE HER NYTHERION ENDS."
Suddenly, the aether around them shivered.
A cold, scalpel-sharp pressure pressed against their thoughts.
Liris turned pale. "Something's entered the Breach."
Vaelen gripped his halberd. "What?"
Before she could answer, the orb blinked out, and the far wall peeled open like paper.
A black figure stepped through.
Not walking.
Gliding.
It wore no face. No eyes. Nobody.
Just robes of drifting ink and a mask made of forgotten names, shifting like smoke across the porcelain.
The Erasure Wraith.
The Pale Censor's first envoy.
Zaiya dropped to a knee, eyes clenched. "It's… inside me," she signed with trembling hands.
The Wraith turned its head slowly toward her.
Then it spoke not in sound, but in deletion.
Words that didn't form. They unformed.
And Liris screamed.
Not in pain.
In fear.
"It's trying to erase our memory of Zaiya."
"It's rewriting her out of our minds!"
Vaelen moved.
He drove his halberd into the Wraith's core.
But it passed through.
The Wraith laughed or unlaughed and turned on Elya next.
They had seconds.
Vaelen made a choice.
He pulled a small vial from his belt, soulglass dust.
Crushed remnants of his original Tribunal crest.
He crushed it in his fist.
And whispered his name in the old tongue.
"Vaelen Sol Draeth. I reject the Writ."
The glyphs on his body erupted in white flame.
The Wraith staggered.
And Zaiya screamed.