There Are Places in the World Where Time Never Died, It Just Got Mean
The Cathedral was still standing.
That was the first bad sign.
It should've been dust, salt, ash. It should've collapsed during the Siege of Hollow Saints, or when the Embercloaks razed the Eastern Spires. It should not be here.
But it was. Whole. Waiting.
Ashkore saw it before the others.
He stepped through a break in the veilbrush and stopped, one boot still in the roots. For a long moment, he didn't breathe.
Grim came up behind him, then muttered, "Ah. Shit."
Pippa let out a low whistle. "Well. That's... intact. Horribly intact."
The Cradle of Flame and Salt was its old name. Carved from soulglass and mirrored obsidian. Spires like teeth. Windows like eyes. Even now, you could feel the heat radiating from the walls, not warmth, but memory. Fire that had burned so hot, its roar still clung to stone.
Lyara walked up last. She froze when she saw it. Her fingers tensed on her sword hilt, not like she wanted to fight, but like she wanted to disappear into the earth.
"I died here," she said, too quietly.
Ashkore didn't turn.
"I remember," he answered.
The ground near the cathedral was slick with salt and fractured stone. Not natural. Nothing about this place had ever been natural.
Ashkore knelt, touching the cracked floor near the outer wall. "The fractures are opening again," he murmured. "See that shimmer? Time's thin here."
Pippa crouched beside him. "Not just time. Thought. Look."
She pointed to the edge of her shadow. It had started twitching. Not swaying. Twitching.
Grim lit a protection ward. "The Veil's bleeding. We need to get in and get out. Quiet, fast, no spells unless absolutely necessary."
"Why are we here again?" Pippa asked, already loading a bolt into her wrist-harpoon.
Ashkore's jaw tightened. "The Silver Dawn is here. Setting up resonance spikes. Tuning the fractures. Trying to use this place as a stabilizer."
"For what?" Lyara whispered.
"For something worse."
The inside of the cathedral felt like walking into a lung.
The walls pulsed. The air was heavy, humid, like the breath of something old and forgotten had been trapped here for centuries. Even the light came in wrong, too red, too slow.
Luna whimpered in Ashkore's arms.
"She feels it," Grim said. "The old scream."
Pippa scouted ahead, silent on boots that shouldn't have been that quiet. "Stairwell on the right's still intact. Leads up to the bell altar. If they planted the beacon, it'll be there."
Ashkore nodded. "Lyara. Stay with Luna. If anything shifts, take her and run."
Lyara didn't argue. She just knelt beside Luna and muttered something old and sharp in Rootspeech, a half-prayer, half-threat to anything listening.
Then they split.
Ashkore reached the bell altar alone.
The stairwell had collapsed halfway up, forcing him to climb hand over hand through splintered beams and bits of bone that still sang when disturbed.
The altar was worse than he remembered. It hadn't been a holy place in years, but now it was wounded. The soulglass bell was cracked and weeping, a dark ichor that pooled beneath it, reflecting faces that weren't there.
And next to it: the resonance spike.
Thin. Silver. Embedded into the marrow of the cathedral like a thorn in a corpse. Buzzing, faintly. Channeling something skyward.
Ashkore reached for it.
And then the cathedral remembered him.
He was seven again.
Screaming.
Not with fear but, with rage.
The flames were eating the walls. His mother's voice was a chant, rising above the roar, calling on something that did not have a name. She bled from the mouth, the eyes, the hands. Her shadow had already fled. But her voice,
"Do not fear fire, my son. Fear the silence it leaves behind."
And then she turned toward him.
Not her.
The shadow-of-her.
Face melting like wax, voice still his mother's, but layered with something deep and wrong.
"You carried her, Ashkore. You carry all of them."
He staggered back.
The bell let out a low chime. And in that single tone, he heard every scream he'd never let out.
Below, Luna stood on her own.
No one had taught her how.
She wobbled forward, eyes fixed on the cathedral ceiling. One hand reached toward the air like she was tracing something only she could see.
Lyara called her name.
Luna didn't stop.
Instead, she whispered again.
This time, louder.
A word none of them recognized, but every part of them felt.
The air buckled. The stone cried.
Lyara lunged to grab her, and the floor exploded.
Ashkore came to with blood in his mouth and fire in his eyes.
The resonance spike was gone.
The cathedral was screaming.
Not metaphor.
Literal screaming. Every wall, every stone, howling in fractured tongues as the fractures destabilized.
Through the noise, he heard one word.
"Break."
Luna's voice, carried through the collapse.
And then,
Silence.
Real silence.
Not peace. Not calm.
The kind of silence that precedes something.
Ashkore found Luna half-buried under a piece of altar stone. She wasn't hurt. She was humming.
Lyara crouched beside her, one arm broken, eyes wide with something like faith, or terror.
Pippa limped over with a bleeding shoulder. "She... stopped it."
"No," Grim said, appearing from the dust. "She changed it."
When the dust cleared, the cathedral was still there.
But different.
The walls no longer bled.
The shadows no longer twitched.
The cracks had fused into something like veins, alive, but dormant.
Luna sat in the center of the wreckage, watching the ceiling like it had answered a question.
Ashkore knelt beside her.
"You burned a place that already burned," he said softly. "You broke something that was already shattered."
Luna looked up at him.
Smiled again.
"Fix," she whispered.