The winds carried no song anymore.
Lyra walked through the dying lands of the outer realm, where the sky was ash and the trees had long forgotten the color of their leaves. Her feet bled, the old boots worn thin from the miles she no longer counted. Somewhere behind her, in a realm now silent and still, Raven was buried beneath the roots of the sacred grove—where love had once promised them everything.
Now, it promised her only silence.
The witch had told her only the price—not the ritual. Lyra would become the seal. The cage. The key. Her very soul would be twisted into the eternal lock that held the Forgotten King away from the world.
But how?
That question haunted her even more than Raven's death. The witch, already fading from this world, had only whispered, "Find the Mirror of Descent. It remembers what we have forgotten."
So she walked. Past hollowed villages and crumbling towers. Through forests where the trees wept in foreign tongues. She chased myths carved into stones and hunted down magic that even the stars refused to touch.
At night, the dreams returned.
She stood once more on the battlefield, her hands dripping with blood that shimmered like wine under a cursed sun. Raven's eyes—soft, confused, still full of belief in her even in his final breath—burned into her skull.
"It wasn't you," he whispered in the dream.
"But it was my hands," she would always reply.
One night, as she crossed the ancient dunes of the Hallowed Waste, she came upon an altar buried in salt. The wind howled a name she didn't know—until it hissed one she did.
"Lyra."
She froze. It wasn't the Forgotten King's voice, not this time. It was softer, heavier.
Raven's.
She turned, and there he was—his back to her, standing tall against the rusted sky, the spear she had driven through him still lodged in his spine.
"Why are you following me?" she asked the illusion.
"Because you haven't let me go."
Her knees buckled. She fell at the altar, sobbing, the heat from the sand biting into her palms.
"I can't seal him if I carry you inside me," she whispered. "But I don't want to forget."
The illusion of Raven knelt beside her, placing a ghostly hand on her shoulder. "You were always meant to choose. Not between love and war. But between memory and peace."
She awoke with a scream and a truth she didn't want.
The sealing wouldn't just take her life. It would take everything. Her name. Her memories. Her love. The world would forget her, and she would forget the world. The Forgotten King would vanish—but so would every piece of Lyra that had ever mattered.
In a way, she would die twice.
And still… she walked.
A week later, she found the Mirror of Descent buried beneath the Temple of the Hollow Flame, guarded by a beast made of bone and regret. She defeated it not with spells or steel, but with her voice—singing the song Raven once taught her under the moonlit riverbank.
The mirror cracked open like an eye and showed her what no one else could: the ritual.
It was brutal.
She would have to anchor the King in a vessel of his choosing, lure him into a place of power, then bind her essence with his in a final act of surrender. The vessel would have to be carved with runes of surrender—spelled in her blood. And the spell? It required her final breath to be offered willingly.
There could be no fear.
No hesitation.
No love.
And so she began.
In the ruins of a forgotten sanctuary, she carved the circle. Drenched it in memory and blood. The wind grew sharp again, and the sky began to fracture. He was coming. The Forgotten King had felt her certainty—and he was hungry.
"You think sealing me will end the war?" his voice echoed from all around, from inside her own bones. "You think there won't be another like me? Another you?"
"Maybe," she said, standing in the circle. "But they won't carry our war. Not anymore."
And in the shadows, as the world watched through clouds of dying light, the girl who would become the seal raised her arms—and called the King to her.