The wind had ceased to blow.
A silence older than words descended upon the wrecked plain of Glaiveholme, where stones had formerly stood as tall sentinels of a lost people. Now, there lay only a broken field of monolithic pillars, each inscribed with sigils that weakly glowed with memorylight — a pale blue light that shone like dew upon metal. The sky above was washed to slate gray, the Void no longer raging but whispering. calling.
Aeren stood at the precipice of the chasm simply called the Scar of Eversoul. His cloak, ripped from battles long fought, billowed around his boots. In his palm, the Crownless Blade throbbed with heat — a beating pulse like the beat of a heart, resonating not his own but something ancient and far deeper.
This was the place.
The Gate of Remembrance.
The Void-Titans had spoken of it in enigmas. K'Tharion's last whisper, as he turned to star-stuff, had seared itself into Aeren's memory:
"Only in forgetting can truth be found. Seek the gate where all names sleep."
And now it stood before him.
Not a wood or stone gate, but a wall of remembrances made flesh. It covered the earth like a screen of braided glass — half-transparent, with waves of vision and sound. One minute he was a child, running through fields of Irelian poppies. The next, a soldier, bloodied, laughing with men long dead.
He drew a breath, stepped across, and the world creased.
A Step Into the Past
With his foot passed the curtain, gravity turned around.
Aeren did not fall — he drifted through streams of broken memory. Pieces of his life floated by like river leaves: his mother singing, his father teaching him to cut runes, the day the first monster from the Void destroyed their village. His heart ached at each face, each moment of passing joy. But he could not catch them. When he tried to reach out, the memories dissipated.
Why am I here?" he questioned the silence.
The response was not in words, but in feeling. A beat — slow and expansive — resonated beneath the memorystream. The Gate was more than a passage, a mirror. It gave back not who he was. but who he had forgotten to be.
"You are not whole," was the voice.
It wasn't his own. Nor was it that of K'Tharion or Velmoria. It was something below. Something. familiar.
Out of the creases of time, a figure appeared. Wearing lightless armor, face shrouded in living shadow, the figure seemed to emanate presence — like a god half-remembered, half-feared.
"You are the fracture," the figure told him, "but also the key."
"Who are you?" Aeren asked.
The figure moved forward.
"I am who you once were. I am what you forgot to remember."
Facedown with the Forgotten Self
Aeren clenched his teeth. "Another illusion? Another test?"
The figure drew no sword, made no gesture of threat. Instead, it lifted a hand — and the world broke open.
A battlefield stretched before them. Aeren knew it at once: the Battle of the Hollowed Sky. Where he had first released the Void. Corpses stretched in endless files. Fire cascaded from broken heavens. And at the heart of it — a younger Aeren, splattered with blood, eyes crazed, screaming out a forbidden spell.
"You buried this," the shadow-figure said, "so deep that the world forgot. But the Void did not."
The memory-Aeren raised his hand, and a black fire engulfed the enemy battalion. They did not scream. They just stopped.
Aeren turned his face away, heart writhing. "I did not know. I was desperate."
"You were strong," the shadow breathed. "You still are. But you fear it."
"Your purpose? To remind me of my sins?"
No," the figure replied. "To demonstrate to you that you are greater than your guilt. The Gate does not swing open for the pure. The Gate swings open for the honest."
The figure retreated back into the stream and vanished in light — but not before depositing a sigil in Aeren's palm.
A spiral — the same that was on the Crownless Blade.
The Key and the Keeper
The memorystream slowed. The glass veil parted like wind-blown curtains. Aeren stood again on solid earth — though this place was no Glaiveholme, no world he recalled.
He had entered the in-between.
Before him stood the Gate proper: an arch of obsidian and crystal, its surface etched with a thousand names — names that glowed, flashed, and then disappeared. Stepping closer, the name Aeren Solace flashed. then faded.
A new presence stepped out of shadows near the arch — a woman, shrouded in memorywoven silk, with eyes like blazing moons.
"I am Caelira," she declared. "The Keeper of the Forgotten."
"You guard the Gate?"
"I am the Gate. And now I must ask: what do you seek, Aeren Solace, Crownless of the Void?"
He did not hesitate.
"I seek what was stolen — the memory of the Crown, the truth of my birth, and the path to end the Void's hunger."
Caelira nodded. "Then you must surrender something in return."
Aeren tightened his grip on the blade. "What?"
"Your name," she told him. "In order to pass, you must forget yourself."
The Choice
The silence that ensued expanded like an abyss.
To forget his own name was to cut himself off from all — his past, his folk, even his love for Seraya, whose memory had sustained him on the blackest of nights.
But the journey ahead required sacrifice. It always did.
He gazed at Caelira. An if I share my name. what will be left?
"Only your purpose," she said. "And the power to achieve it."
Aeren took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and said:
"I yield my name. Let the world not remember it — and let me recall only the truth."
A purplish light engulfed him. Anesthesia of memory — even of this moment — crept over him.
Through the Gate
When he opened his eyes, he stood on a new path.
His hands were bare.
The blade, the cloak, even the scar across his chest — vanished.
He did not remember why he walked, only that he had to. His heart sang a song he could not name. His mind repeated a question he could no longer put into words.
Above him, the sky was not sky — but memory itself, in motion like flame. And in front, far away, a spire stood. Not of stone or steel, but of names — lost, whispered, concealed.
The journey was not nearly done.
But now he walked it not as Aeren Solace.
He walked it as the one who had no name.
And in its aftermath, the Gate of Remembrance creaked shut behind him with a sigh — not of endings, but of change.