The sky did not exist. Or rather: it existed only as absence, a lintel without color that could not contain the world beneath it. There, suspended between two identical voids, a hall opened like an amphitheater chiseled from black stone. The tiers were not made for sitting: they rose and fell like frozen waves, peaks of basalt and smoothed furrows, reflecting a light that came from nowhere. At the center, a perfect circle, bounded by ancient runes, breathed with a slow and austere rhythm — every symbol was a heartbeat, every heartbeat an oath as old as falsehood.
There was no wind. There was no smell. And yet the air vibrated. There, as if the universe had set its loom again, threads had been knotted anew. Something, or someone, had pulled the strand of a story that no longer wished to remain broken.
Nephis appeared first. Or perhaps she was simply the first to recognize herself in the silence. The gleam in her eyes was subdued, disciplined, like a torch pressed against her chest. She carried the sword in her right hand, and in her left the more insidious weight: memory. It was not the weapon that made her hand tremble: it was what she did not want to recall. The place spoke to her of the Dream Realm and at the same time denied it; it seemed a fragment torn from a nightmare and dried in the light, a fossil carved by the terror of a god.
On the tiers, like shadows discovering the shape of their own bodies, other faces began to manifest. Effie, tall and fearsome, hair bound like ropes, arms bare and skin marked by scars that could tell stories better than a poet. Kai, with a smile that was as much a shield as a blade, fingers already testing the air for invisible balances, as if there were a plan even in stillness. Cassie, steps both gentle and uneasy, head slightly tilted forward — a habit that would never fade, even if her blindness reversed in the dream; she seemed to listen to the hall, not look at it. Jet, who wore darkness around her like a scarf and knew how to use it to her advantage: discreet presence, cutting gaze. Rain, young and impatient, eyes wide like small mirrors, searching for someone to call by name and afraid to find him. Mordret, already ready to laugh, to undo meanings with a touch, as if reality were only a board game suited to him by a sick destiny. And then others: Darion, immobile like the stone that evoked him, lips pressed; Anake, with the delicacy of a riddle recited in a low voice; disappeared figures, interrupted, and yet brought here in their last congruence.
No one spoke at first. No one said "where are we?" or "why?". The question was present like a ribbon around every wrist. But the hall did not offer answers: it offered a sound. A sound that climbed the tiers like an invisible current. It was not thunder. It was not a chant. It was a voice.
"The Forgotten God awakens."
It was not said. It was written in the air, and the air read it. Nephis raised her head. It was not a premonition. It was a fact. One could not refute the reality of a sentence when it inhabited breath.
"The world is a vessel full of shadows. Many were born from man, others devoured him. Some have been forgotten. One of these is here."
It was not a voice that belonged to a body. It was the direction of motion itself. The sound did not come from above, nor below, nor from the hall: it came from the calling, as if someone had breathed on a name and forced it to sit.
Cassie took a step. "Who… who brought us here?"
A glow ignited at the center of the rune circle. It was not a flame. It was a color that lacked the courage to be defined, a gray warmth that spread its intention on the eye. The light coagulated, coiled like muscle around the void, and became… a book. No. A tome. No. Something that knew how to imitate the idea of a book: the Chronicle. The Chronicle of Shadows.
Jet tilted her head, almost smiling. "A theater. And we're the captive audience."
Kai cleared his throat. "Whoever the director is, they have a sense of drama."
Effie slapped Kai's shoulder with the force of a bison and the grace of a comrade-in-arms. "Shut up and listen. I want to see if this thing knows how to tell stories properly."
Anake moved half a step closer. Her presence was no step: it was a glide. "It does not tell for pleasure. It tells by law. This is a testament."
"A testament to whom?" Rain asked, unable to hide the tremor.
"The story of the one who is missing," said the voice, writing once again into breath. "The one who was subtracted. The one you have called by many names but who never took yours."
Cassie tensed. Self-awareness ran over her skin like cold water. "Sunless."
The tome — the Chronicle — opened without hands. The pages did not exist as sheets: every face saw something different, and yet all recognized the same scene. Words appeared in characters that changed with each glance, adapting to who was watching. They were written in shadow and then in light, as if neither element could claim exclusivity.
"Read. Remember. And decide."
Nephis took a step toward the circle's edge. "What decision?"
"To save the world from the forgotten shadow," the voice said, "or return it to it."
Mordret chuckled softly. "A simple choice. I've always loved dilemmas with two mouthfuls."
Jet did not grant him attention. Her gaze was fixed on the Chronicle, but not curious: vigilant. As if the page could strike. As if reading were a duel.
Darion descended one step, his armor — or his flesh — producing no sound. "If the Forgotten God feeds on the forgotten, then it demands we remember to deny its meal."
Anake met his gaze without moving. "Or it demands we remember to feed it better substance."
"Splendid," said Kai, spreading his hands. "So whatever we do, someone feasts. It would be nice to know who."
"Read," said the voice. "Sunless is not here. But his path is. The Chronicle will lead you. And in the end, it will ask you for a price."
Nephis did not ask which. No promise is worth a nail of the future unless one is willing to lose the nail. She made a gesture, simple and firm. "Let's begin."
The Chronicle changed form. No longer a book. No longer an object. It became space. It became air. It became a veil that descended from the nonexistent sky and touched the circle at the center, filling it with an image as water fills a vessel. The eyes of all were forced to look — not by a force, but by the question — and for an instant, the stone steps were no longer steps. They were memories.
The first image was ordinary. Ordinary as only truths can be: a small, dirty room, with a window that does not open and a door that opens only onto a corridor dirtier than the room. A boy sleeping on a thin mattress. A boy who wakes. Gets up. Leaves.
"The Boy of Shadows," Cassie murmured, as if the words were the same breath of the place. And the Chronicle did not contradict.
Effie snorted. "A sad beginning for a sad story. Are you sure there wasn't something more… titanic?"
Kai glanced at her. "Legends that don't begin with misery begin with a lie."
Nephis did not speak. She watched the boy's hands. A boy called by a name no one spoke. Hands that counted the coins of a day and did the math with hunger. Hands that learned to take without being seen. Hands that discovered how easy it was to be invisible when no one wants to see you. And then — the hands stop. A shiver runs through the image, as if someone had tugged the thread inside the veil.
The window of the room that does not open, opens. Not physically: the glass melts, and behind it there is no air. There is another world leaning in to bite: the Dream Realm. Not as their eyes have known it, but as it is known to someone who never knew how to define it. The unknown bends and devours the boy. It is not a kidnapping — it is an invitation you cannot refuse. The Nightmare Spell chooses, and you decide only how to die.
The Chronicle was not cruel. It showed without indulgence. The image slid like a blade of care into the intestines of seeing: it did not want to punish; it wanted to heal with truth.
"The First Nightmare," Jet said. But the Chronicle chose another path. The veil did not enter the dream. It remained at the margin and drew a wider circle. It was not yet time for nightmares. It was time to tell the weave that would justify them.
Another place. A market that was not a market. A shop that was not a shop. The Brilliant Emporium. Geometric walls, measured lights like balance, people entering with hunger for power and leaving with hunger satisfied and security compromised. The Chronicle coiled around a figure. Not a boy. Not a god. A master. Not the master of the world, but the master of a gesture: that of giving the right things to those who do not know they cannot carry them.
"Master," said the voice. "Four years have passed."
Kai whistled softly. "Four years and already a Master. Who believes that?"
Effie raised an eyebrow. "I do. But only because I've seen worse."
Nephis clenched her jaw. Sunless's absence was a scratch inside her chest, and his presence in the Chronicle was salt on the scratch. To see him — without seeing him — was a torture she had chosen. Because the other was worse: not seeing and then losing.
The Chronicle showed a wall. On it, runes. Not those of a god. Those of a man who had stopped being a boy and had chosen to be something more ferocious: an animal that knows how to count. The runes gleamed like a catalog of intentions: seals, contracts, transcribed wounds. Every line was a pact. Every pact a scar.
Jet tilted her head. "He wrote on himself. And then wrote on his shadows."
Mordret yawned, but his yawn was a weapon. "How boring. Power as accounting. And yet… how many avatars are there?"
The Chronicle answered not with a number, but with an action. The veil opened onto a canyon of night. A creature slid among boulders like the idea of a storm. Too large to be called demon as one calls a serpent or a dog. Great Demon. The name was a title, a rank, a glorious dishonor. The beast shattered a pillar with a single paw. A shadow peeled from the rock and bent the paw with a cut that seemed insignificant until one saw the rot of darkness seeping beneath the bone.
Not one. Two. Three. Avatars like fragments of a word that cannot be spoken. The shadows moved with discipline. They were not ghosts. They were soldiers.
The creature roared — but did not roar: it lost a piece of itself. Every shadow played the same note, and the note became a chorus. The Great Demon fell as a mountain falls that no one wanted to topple because they adored its arrogance. The final blow was not spectacular. It was inevitable. The throat of darkness became the creature's throat. And the creature became silence.
Effie made a sound that was half laughter, half respect. "Did you see? No showboating. Clean. Like a butcher who knows his craft."
Nephis did not smile. But something in her face softened. "He learned not to love blood. To make it flow as needed."
Cassie drew a slow breath. The fear crossing her diaphragm was ancient. "He has become… harder to find."
"Form is missing," said Anake, looking not at the image but at the gap the image left. "It does not cut reality. It slips beside it. A hole in the shape of a man. A void where the world stumbles."
Rain took a step forward — not toward the Chronicle, toward Cassie. "Do you feel it?"
"Yes." Cassie's voice was almost a prayer. "There's a part of him that does not inhabit the world like others. It is an absence. Not invisibility. Lack. As if reality had forgotten to include him in the count."
Kai straightened. "So if you look for him, you find the contour. But not the center."
"Exactly," said Cassie. "A man-shaped hole in the world."
Mordret clicked his tongue, amused. "What sublime absurdity. The boy who detached himself from the list of objects. An inventory that no longer contains him. And yet there he is."
Jet frowned. "If a thing is not in the inventory, you cannot steal it."
"But you can lose it," Mordret replied, satisfied. "Forever. And if you lose it, it can eat you from behind."
The Chronicle moved. The Brilliant Emporium vanished and gave way to the spine of a land. Not a desert. Not a mountain. Both. The Hollow Mountains — as dreams once decided to call them — bent their profile against a sky that did not recognize them. Every crest was a scar. Every valley a broken bone. The whole world seemed a carcass and the wind — the wind that existed here — was the breath of a beast that neither dies nor lives.
Sunless — but not Sunless, only his step — advanced. One did not need to see him to understand where he went. There are places the body remembers with more precision than the mind. The Forgotten Shore was one of those. Not like a beach. Like a funeral.
Nephis felt her stomach twist. It was not nausea. It was memory. The Chronicle could not force her to remember, but it could suggest so strongly that the suggestion became impulse. She saw the shore as she had the first time: a margin between two states of despair. She saw the trees as she had the first time: as cultivated wounds. And she saw the sun, or its illusion, pour itself against a sea of darkness no longer aspiring to win.
"He returned," Effie said, quieter than usual. "To honor the fallen."
Kai grew serious. It was rare. "To carry names where they do not die."
Darion moved his head. "A soldier always returns to where he buried his promise."
Rain swallowed. "Do you think… he does it for us?"
Nephis answered slowly. "I think he does it for himself. And if he does it for himself, he does it for us."
The Chronicle shifted toward a laugh. It was not cruel. It was the irruption of comedy unafraid of tragedy. The veil showed a scene that should have been impossible: a title superimposed on a face. It did not write "Sunless." It wrote "Lord Mongrel."
Effie burst out laughing — this time truly. "Lord… Mongrel?"
Kai joined with a half smile. "Indeed, His Lordship had the most… heterogeneous court ever seen."
Nephis rolled her eyes toward the nonexistent sky. "Do not call him that."
"Devil of Antarctica," the Chronicle added, as if its irony needed completion. The title stuck above the glance of another scene: ice that would not yield, wind that would not relent, a shadow laughing without showing teeth.
Mordret applauded in silence, with a killer's rhythm. "Divine. The demon who becomes title. The title that becomes mockery."
Jet remained impassive. "Names are weapons. Even ridiculous ones. They laugh while they cut."
Cassie breathed in again, deeper. "Sometimes being called by a name that plays is the only way not to go mad. A joke as armor."
Nephis looked at the Chronicle. She did not want to laugh. She could not. But… she did. Only for a second. Only the idea that "Lord Mongrel" was a way to say "I chose to be the mixture you despise and the king you fear."
"Who called him that?" Rain asked, with naive curiosity.
"The world," Anake answered, as one answers a child. "The world always names its predators with words that are both fear and art."
The Chronicle went backward and forward at once, like a hand that flips without numbers. The veil dropped drops of life and the drops kneaded into a river called "before the First Nightmare" and "after the first nickname." The image focused on the boy. The boy of shadows. The dirty room. The window pretending to open. The corridor smelling of rust and men who forgot to breathe so as not to consume oxygen. The hands that take and then stop. The smile that never arrives when it should, and arrives when it is useless. The boy looking at himself in the mirror and finding no one to define.
"The Boy of Shadows," Cassie repeated, but this time it was not a name: it was an epithet. An ornament to pain.
The Chronicle laid a scene on the circle. Two boys — no, two characters who did not yet know they were — met without meeting. One looked with blindness, the other looked with light. It was not the first meeting, but the Chronicle knew that first meetings are often edited; what mattered was the beginning of the weaving of threads.
Nephis did not descend into intimacy. She kept pressing her hand against the hilt as if it were an altar. Cassie moved two steps closer, fingers protruding, lips a line. She felt the image. She did not look at it: she felt it like a sound, as if it were recited through her skin. The Boy of Shadows crossed her chest and left behind a full void. "He was not just… poor," she murmured. "He was a boundary."
"A boundary that walks," Jet said. "More dangerous than a sword."
The Chronicle did not want analysis. It wanted the wound. The veil tightened and burst — not into fragments, but into words. "First Nightmare."
The world overturned. The hall itself became a hallucination, watching a nightmare that would define it better than any architecture. The boy — Sunless but not yet — fell into a landscape bending like a dying animal. The forest of roots, the sea of salt, the colossi breathing for those who no longer want to. Everything is a wheel that turns and finds no purchase. Every step a sentence paid immediately to pay it again.
Kai grimaced. "I had forgotten how disgusting it was."
Effie gestured as if to say "you get through." And then, under her breath: "If you don't die."
Nephis watched the keenest scene. She had always looked at horrors with severity, never with morbidness. She saw the boy seek allies, choose defenses, invent. It was not strength that saved him. It was the mathematics of survival. The counting of opportunities. The reduction of impulses to discipline. The transformation of fear into chess.
Darion spoke, monotone and true. "This is the moment when a man decides whether to become weapon or shield. He chose weapon."
"And shield," Anake corrected, with a half smile. "It is the nature of the boundary. It protects while it cuts."
The Chronicle changed again. "Appraisal." A word like judgment. A page like a tribunal. Anyone who has ever hosted the Nightmare Spell knows that perfect room: the voice that tells you who you are, how much you are worth, how long you will last, with the coldness of an accountant and the pity of a mediator. The Chronicle showed the boy listening, not listening, understanding that the written truth is only part of the lived truth. "Flaw," the veil wrote, and it was not an insult: it was a seal. The weight of the word returned to the bones of the spectators.
"Clear Conscience," Jet whispered, as if pronouncing the Flaw were a rite within the rite. "No lying."
Effie widened her eyes, then burst into incredulous laughter. "And how did he do that? Live? I don't get it."
Kai raised his hands. "Sometimes the truth is the only lie that holds."
Mordret shook his head, satisfied. "Ah, my favorite. The man who does not lie and yet built a city of mirrors."
Cassie folded into herself for an instant, as if someone touched a wound not in the body. "Truth breaks you. It broke him. But it also made him…"
"Impossible to bend," Nephis completed quietly. "When you cannot lie, every choice decides harder."
Rain looked at Cassie, asking with her eyes. Cassie answered with an invisible touch on her hand, and thus more real. "Sunless's choices had no escape routes. Either you pass between light and shadow like a blade, or you remain in the bowels of the world."
The Chronicle dropped another scene. "Forgotten Shore — First arrival." The sea without sea, the shore without boundary, fear without distance. The veil, here, grew denser, as if the place demanded a special thickness of narration. The circle widened. One could feel sand-that-was-not-sand crunch against the teeth of the mind.
Nephis trembled — and did not deny it. Effie struck her arm. It was not tenderness. It was alliance. "We are here," she said. "Even in the memory."
Kai planted a foot more firmly on the step, as if to feel its reality. "One does not escape the past. One decides whether to scratch it or let oneself be scratched."
Jet did not answer. She watched the margins. In her mind, every image was a plan.
Mordret sighed, bored. "How long will this performance last?"
"Until you know what you must know," said the voice with neither impatience nor rancor.
The veil focused on two figures not yet a group. Cassie and Nephis. And the boy — Sunless — moving among them like a habit. They met beneath a tree that no longer wanted to be a tree: the Soul Devouring Tree. The name was a destiny. The Chronicle had no need to exaggerate. It sufficed to show how they spoke.
Cassie spoke softly. "My sight is a weight. Your light is a cut. He is the shadow."
Nephis looked at the boy — but looked above all at the void forming around him. "And yet… he holds us together."
Effie, outside the image, raised an eyebrow. "You say shadows are glue?"
Kai smiled. "Shadows are what remains when light has already decided. In that remainder live the agreements we would not have made in clarity."
Jet inhaled. "And if they are glue, they stick to what we do not know. That's why they hold."
The Chronicle widened the journey. "Formation of the Cohort." Not a chapter. A story in itself. Five people — Sunny, Nephis, Cassie, Effie, Kai — recognizing and not recognizing each other, deciding and not deciding, saving and betraying and then saving again, while the world around becomes their favorite enemy. The veil shows them exchanging food, words, insults, promises. Shows them training to look at each other with eyes that do not lie and hands that know how to grasp without crushing. Shows them becoming family in the worst way, which is the truest: a family not chosen by desire but by necessity.
Rain brought a hand to her mouth. "They were…"
"They were," Nephis said, and it sufficed.
Mordret snorted. "What poetry. And then? The fun part?"
The Chronicle had pity — or cruelty. "True Name." The veil became rigid like a face bracing for a blow. Cassie turned instinctively — as if she could escape what flowed at her side. But there was no escape. The name was not an object. It was a poison to be drunk and then sucked out with teeth.
Nephis stiffened. She had chosen to bear her role as one bears a stone. She took one step closer to the circle's rim. "I will not allow this Chronicle to…"
"Show what is," the voice interrupted, but without anger. "It is the only way. It is the reason for the convocation."
The veil wrote as one writes a sentence. Cassie, in a moment that never ceased to be present, told Nephis what the universe does not tell anyone without asking a price: Sunless's true name. It was not a sound. It was an engraved concept. "Lost from Light."
The world caught its breath again. Effie lost hers. Kai fell silent for once. Jet counted the implications with the speed of an assassin who knows the value of mercy. Darion closed his eyes — not to deny, but to see better. Anake tilted her head. Rain burst into tears. Mordret chuckled like a toad under rain.
Nephis said nothing. But her silence was a scream. Her face did not move. But her heart made a noise that brushed the hall like a roar. Cassie reached a hand toward her. Not to ask forgiveness. To remove a thorn. She failed.
"This is the wound," said the voice, like a doctor marking the point to incise. "The wound that holds together and separates. The Forgotten God feeds on forgotten wounds. This was remembered and then buried. Now we exhume it."
Nephis found her word. "I will not betray him again."
Cassie closed her eyes. "I did not… want to. There was no choice. It was my sight…"
"Choices always exist," Jet said, without malice. "But sometimes they are all expensive."
Effie regained her breath and used it for something useless and useful at once: a mineral laugh that made the hall vibrate as a donkey's head vibrates in the wind. "I'm setting aside the instinct to beat you, Cassie, only because I want to see how this ends."
Kai placed a hand behind his neck. "I'm setting aside the instinct to run."
Mordret tilted his head. "I set nothing aside. I have always loved watching others pay."
Anake looked at the circle, and looked at it as one looks at a mystery entering a house. "The Forgotten God… feeds on the 'forgotten'. Not on the 'forgiven'. Not on the 'resolved'. On the 'forgotten'. This wound, even remembered, contains a core of oblivion. Not yours. His. Sunless is 'lost from light'. His name is a forgetting of oneself in light."
Darion spoke with the solemnity of one who knows words are nails. "And light did not want him. Or he chose to lose it."
Nephis looked at Cassie. "This is not the time."
It was not a threat. It was protection. Cassie nodded, with a sobriety the years had taught her to wear as attire.
The Chronicle closed the circle of the chapter — if one could speak of chapters in a Chronicle that refuses grammar. The veil grew thinner. The hall reclaimed its shape. The tiers became tiers. The circle recovered its boundaries. The world returned to suspension. The voice spoke again.
"You have seen. You have felt. You have remembered."
Nephis took half a step, breath short. "It's not enough. If this is to prepare a battle… it's not enough."
"It was not a battle," said the voice. "It was an invitation. The invitation to enter the place where shadows are weighed and light is weighed. You must decide whether the weight of Sunless suffices to bear what rises."
Mordret yawned. "Philosophical. Might also be amusing."
Jet fixed the void. "The battle will come. Preparation is never glory. It's accounting. And he counted. We have counted."
Kai grimaced. "You talk like an accountant. You're infecting me."
Effie straightened. "And you like a charlatan. You're infecting me too."
Rain looked at the Chronicle with courage born from pain. "What must we do?"
"Read," said the voice. "Read and remember in order. The Chronicle does not show chaos. It shows the interweaving. First, the Master of the Brilliant Emporium. Then the man-shaped hole. Then the Hollow Mountains. Then the names that laughed. Then the boy. Then the first nightmare. Then the Appraisal and the unforgiving shore. Then the meeting, the Soul Devouring Tree, the cohort. Then the Name that was not a name but an exile. And then…"
"And then?" Nephis was almost brutal: "And then what?"
"And then you will decide," said the voice, as if it could not ignore the order imposed upon it. "Who has the right to be saved by light, and who by shadow. Who has the right to be lost."
Anake gave a tiny nod, almost amused. "The Forgotten God does not ask pity. It asks coherence. It is the god of a thing humans do without knowing they do it: forgetting. To feed on forgetting is like being a sea that drinks rain."
Darion looked at the hall as one looks at the field before battle. "Then it will not be a war of blades. It will be a war of memory."
Jet brushed the hilt of her weapon. "Wars of memory bleed more."
Mordret chuckled. "And they have a finer taste."
Effie rolled her shoulders. "Then let's remember. Let's remember until it hurts, so perhaps that God satiates and leaves us our bones."
Kai gave a half twist of his neck, as if to loosen fear. "Or it eats us anyway. But at least… we'll have understood the menu."
Nephis finally lowered the sword. Not as one lowers it to fight. As one raises it to promise. "Then we read. And at the end… we decide."
The Chronicle obeyed. Not like a servant. Like a rite that follows blood. The veil stretched, the hall bent, the breath settled. And the Emporium returned. The runes returned. The Great Demon returned. The laughter that was not laughter but science of the comic returned. The man-shaped hole returned. The mountains returned. The shore returned. The names returned. The boy returned. The nightmare returned. The tree returned. The group returned. The Name returned.
But this time, not as images. As words carved into bones. The summoned felt them spin around their vertebrae, touch their shoulders, trace with chalk of shadow the contours of their choices. The Chronicle was building a bridge. Not between them and the past. Between them and a decision that would split the air: save, wound, remember, forget, call, be silent.
The voice spoke one last time.
"Sunless is not here. His absence is gift and curse. If you remember him, you bring him back into the world. If you forget him, you deliver him to the god. You cannot do both. Every page you read gains a weight. In the end, the scales will close. The Forgotten God will rise. You will be the hands on the scales."
Nephis did not make a speech. She did not swear an oath. She made a choice: to remain. To remain in the memory that burns, in the scene that bites, in the words that demand and then free. Cassie remained at her side. Effie promised her strength with posture alone. Kai offered himself as smile and blade, as he has always known how to do. Jet wrapped herself in her darkness and used it as solution, not escape. Rain stiffened and then loosened the tremor, with a sister's courage. Mordret… remained to watch. Darion, to strike. Anake, to explain.
And the Chronicle, to ask.
The hall breathed. The nonexistent sky pretended to remember how to pretend to be blue. An invisible slit opened between one heartbeat and the next. The chapter was ending. Not the story. Not the calling. Not the price. Only the chapter. The first. The cruelest: the one that tells you nothing can be understood without passing through the door of pain.
Nephis closed her eyes and opened them again. "Show us everything," she said once more, but not with anger. With need. With hunger.
The Chronicle — satisfied, or simply logical — closed a little, as eyes close between two tears. It let hang in the air the sound of the Great Demon falling. It let the laughter over "Lord Mongrel" vibrate. It let sadness over "Boy of Shadows" spill. It let "First Nightmare" scratch the skin. It let "Forgotten Shore" lay down its salt. It let "Devil of Antarctica" insinuate its frost. It let "Soul Devouring Tree" grip. It let "Cohort" breathe a sigh. It left guilt on "True Name." And, finally, it left the question on "Why did we forget and why must we remember?"
Mordret stretched with jarring elegance. "I remembered all along," he lied. Or told the truth. It did not matter. "And yet… this theater amuses me. Perhaps it is the only thing to enjoy before the god rises."
Jet shot him a frosty glance. "It will rise anyway. The difference lies in knowing whether we can push it."
Kai, lightly, slipped his hands into the pockets of a cloak he did not have. "Does one push a god? With what?"
"With a name," said Anake. "With a memory. With a wound. With a price."
Effie shook her arms. "With hands. And with teeth."
Darion nodded. "With discipline."
Rain looked at the Chronicle. "With love."
Cassie looked at Nephis. "With truth."
Nephis looked at the void. "With everything we have."
The voice ceased writing into the air. Not because it had nothing more to say. Because now it was their turn. The hall trembled imperceptibly, as if rotating by a degree around an axis no one had ever seen. The circle of runes warmed. A distant sound, like the heartbeat of a giant, resounded beneath the steps. It was not a monster. It was not a motor. It was a god who, in a place that is not a place, was taking a breath.
Nephis lifted the sword. Not as one lifts it to fight. As one lifts it to promise. "Then we read. And at the end… we decide."
The Chronicle opened, obedient to the call it could not disobey. The chapter — the first — closed as lips close after the first sip of water in a desert. And the second prepared, invisible, to show the man the world no longer knows how to count.
The hall remained suspended. The light remained held back. The shadows remained sparse. The Forgotten God, beneath all this, made a small gesture: easy, inevitable, like the idea that a name — a single one — can change a god's hunger.
And thus, the chapter closed. Not with a period. With a slit. Where memory, once again, would have to slide fingers in and pry. Where decision, once again, would have to clench teeth and remain. Where the cohort, once again, would have to be a family — between light and shadow, between remembrance and oblivion, between war and silence.
Nephis inhaled, and with her the others. The air was not air. It was promise. It was debt. It was fate.
The Forgotten God listened. The Chronicle called.
And they, summoned, remained. They knew the next page would be sharper. They knew the wages of the past would be redeemed. They knew Sunless's absence was not a void: it was a magnet.
The magnet pulled. And they, between steps and runes, between wounds and laughter, leaned.
The choice had not yet been theirs. Soon it would be.
And then… they began to read again.