The storm had gone quiet after the valley. Not gone, just waiting. Its silence pressed around me like a held breath, the kind that makes you wonder if the air itself is watching. I had slept, or something close to it, but my dreams were not mine. Flames. A temple burning in golden light. A name that was not Kael but still felt like it belonged under my skin, Thalen.
When I opened my eyes, the world was pale and frozen. Snow drifted through cracks in the roof above, settling on Aurelius's maps and relics. He sat across from me, eyes half closed, surrounded by fragments that glowed faintly blue. They pulsed whenever I shifted, like hearts that beat to my breath.
"You kept them," I said.
He did not look up. "They kept us," he replied. His fingers traced the edge of a metal shard, and light flickered inside it like lightning behind a curtain. "They respond to you. The storm bends their pattern. Each pulse points north."
"North to what?"
Aurelius turned the shard in his hand, watching the reflection of the dying fire. "To him. Varok is not chasing anymore. He is pulling."
That was enough to make the storm twitch again inside me, restless, like it understood something I did not.
Lyren stood near the doorway, arms crossed, gaze fixed on the horizon beyond the falling snow. She had been quiet since the valley, quiet in a way that was louder than words. When I caught her eye, she looked away first.
We left by dawn. The sky was an endless grey lid, pressing down on the world. The road north cut through forests of glass and bone, where old battles had burned too hot for the earth to forget. Sometimes the wind carried faint metallic echoes, clashing steel, the ghost of a scream.
The storm inside me stirred with every step. It did not hum or rage; it mourned. I could feel it grieving for things long dead, cities that no longer existed, names lost to wind.
Lyren finally broke the silence. "The storm remembers," she said, her voice barely louder than the snow crunching beneath our boots.
I nodded. "It remembers everything."
Her eyes flicked to mine. "Including what you were before?"
I had no answer for that.
By nightfall, the mountains had grown sharp against the sky, black teeth biting at clouds. Nestled in their side was the ruin Aurelius had been tracking, the monastery of Forgotten Hands. Its towers leaned like tired sentinels, their stones carved with lines of ancient prayer. Each mark was filled with frost, glowing faintly from the stormlight that leaked off me.
Inside, the air was still, heavy with the scent of ash and something older, memory, maybe.
Aurelius walked ahead, scanning the carved floor. "This was once part of the Seals' lattice," he said. "The gods' power was not spread randomly. It was threaded through the world in lines. This place sits at one of the intersections."
Lyren's hand rested on her blade. "So the lattice is real."
"Yes. And like any web, it remembers what it once caught."
I moved deeper into the hall. The storm pulled me toward a circular chamber where light pooled faintly in the cracks of the floor. Mirrors lined the walls, tall and narrow, built from stone polished so smooth that it reflected even shadows.
The moment I stepped closer, every mirror flickered. Faces rippled across them, mine, but not mine. Men with eyes like storms. Women holding blades made of lightning. A child standing under black rain, smiling. And then him, Thalen. The name struck like thunder.
He looked like me, but older, heavier with centuries of regret. His hand reached toward me from the glass.
When my fingers touched the surface, the world dropped away.
I was standing in another sky, one painted with fire and stormlight. Cities burned below, oceans boiled, gods screamed in voices that cracked mountains. Around me, hundreds of figures stood with the same mark glowing on their skin, the mark of the storm.
Thalen was among them. His voice came like a blade drawn from stone. "Do you know what you did, Kael?"
I tried to answer, but the wind swallowed my words.
"You sealed them," he said. "Not to save mankind. To spare them from what they had become. You turned their divinity into memory, so they could never rise again. But every wound remembers its blade. The Seals bleed time, and you, " He stepped closer, eyes glowing white. ", you are the one who cut deepest."
The sky cracked. Storms collided above, lightning striking like claws. I felt myself pulled backward, falling through centuries.
"Kael!"
Lyren's voice dragged me out. I gasped as air returned, as if I had been holding my breath for a lifetime. The mirrors shattered outward, raining shards across the floor. The chamber groaned, stones splitting under the strain of the storm that now filled the space.
Aurelius caught my arm, his grip iron. "What did you see?"
"Not a lock," I said, voice raw. "A wound. Every Seal is a scar on the world. Varok is not trying to break them. He is trying to heal them, by reopening everything that was sealed."
Lyren looked between us. "You mean, bring back the gods?"
I nodded slowly. "And if he succeeds, everything that came after, the cities, the people, the world itself, will be erased."
The storm around us dimmed. For a moment, I could almost feel it thinking. Then the monastery trembled again. From the depths below came a sound, metal grinding, gears waking after an age of silence.
Aurelius froze. "He has found one of the Engines."
Through a gap in the wall, a faint red glow spread across the northern sky. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
Lyren stepped to the window. "Then the Iron Prince has begun to move."
I walked to the edge of the terrace. Snow whirled in the wind, falling into the endless dark valley below. Lightning flickered far away, unnatural, too deliberate to be weather.
The storm whispered behind my thoughts, its voice layered, ancient. You remember enough to fear the truth.
I closed my eyes. I could still see Thalen's face in the mirrors, still hear the gods screaming behind his words.
"I am done running," I said. "If the storm wants answers, it can find them in me."
The wind rose around us, carrying the echo of distant thunder. Snow swirled into spirals, glowing faintly from the stormlight beneath my skin.
Aurelius stood behind me, expression unreadable. "You know what this means, Kael."
"I do," I said. "He will not stop. And now he knows I will not either."
Lyren drew her hood up, her eyes on the crimson horizon. "Then we go north."
We left the monastery before dawn. The path was steep, carved through ice and silence. Behind us, the ruin collapsed inward, burying its mirrors, its secrets, its dreams of ash.
As we climbed, I looked once more at the storm flickering across the sky. It was not just light anymore. It was a signal. A challenge.
The storm did not wait for gods or men. It moved with or without us.
I breathed the frozen air and felt it spark in my lungs. "Let the truth come," I said quietly. "I am ready to meet it."
The storm stirred in answer, not in rage but in recognition. Somewhere beyond the mountains, the Iron Prince moved his armies, and the world began to remember what it had once been.
Snow fell, soft and endless, as the last light of the monastery faded behind us. The silence that followed was not peace. It was the pause before thunder.
And in that stillness, the storm inside me began to dream.