The first step down was shallow, but the darkness swallowed us whole.
The stone beneath my feet was cold and smooth, worn from time or hands I could no longer imagine. Dust curled in the air like breath, and the deeper we went, the more it began to feel like we had stepped outside the world.
Elna held the lantern high. Its glow flickered against the stone walls, revealing carvings—symbols half-chiseled, half-faded. None of them matched the letters I'd memorized, but their shape felt… right. Like pieces of a language I hadn't yet learned how to dream in.
The stairs spiraled, bending downward with no railing. We moved slowly. I counted each breath.
Thirteen steps.
Twenty-six.
Thirty-one.
A hush fell over us, thicker than silence.
Elna whispered, "Do you hear that?"
I paused. My ears strained.
At first, I thought it was my own heartbeat. Then I realized—
It wasn't.
It was something pulsing in the walls.
Low. Rhythmic.
Alive.
We reached the bottom without meaning to. One moment we were descending. The next, the staircase simply ended.
We stepped into a chamber.
Small. Cramped. But not empty.
The walls curved inward like a dome, etched with symbols and soot-dark veins. At the center stood a pedestal, waist-high, carved from obsidian. Its surface shimmered like still water, though there was no liquid on it.
Elna moved to the edge of the room, her breath catching in her throat.
"Yul."
I turned.
She pointed to the wall.
There, scratched in with something sharp and desperate, were symbols we could both read.
Not the ancient script. Ours.
Crude, messy… but legible.
YUL.
Beneath it, a second word:
AWAKEN.
"I didn't write that," I said, voice small.
"I know."
Elna touched the name with trembling fingers.
"This place… it knew you."
I stepped toward the pedestal.
Something buzzed in my chest. The way a string hums after being plucked. I reached out, unsure what I expected to find.
The moment my fingers brushed the surface—
Light.
Not blinding, but full. Deep. Like the slow turning of stars in some far-off place.
Images flickered behind my eyes.
A city of glass towers, now fallen.
A people with silver eyes, speaking the tongue of wind and ash.
A child, not unlike me, standing before a great stone gate.
And then—blackness.
I staggered back.
Elna caught me.
"Yul—?"
"I saw…" My mouth was dry. "Something. Someone."
The pedestal pulsed once, then fell still.
Whatever memory it had shared… it was gone now.
But not empty.
Something new had been left behind.
A single word.
"Shahen."
It echoed in my head like a prayer.
Or a key.
We returned to the surface in silence.
The sun had not yet risen. Dustwall still slept beneath its thin blankets of fog and ash.
At the edge of the woods, I turned to look back.
The stone had slid closed behind us, the passage sealed once more.
But I knew it would open again.
It had opened for me.
At home, Mother fussed over our absence, and Father scolded us gently. But Elna lied smoothly—said we'd gone to the far grove for mushrooms and lost track of time. He believed her.
She always had a way with lies that sounded like truth.
Later, as we sat near the hearth, I asked her, "Do you think we'll be able to open it again?"
She didn't answer immediately.
Then: "I think it'll open when it's ready."
"And what if it never is?"
She looked at me, serious.
"Then you'll find another way in. You always do."
That night, the voice returned.
But it wasn't like before.
It came not as whisper, but as presence. A warmth curling around my spine. A hush that bent the air.
"You saw the first shape," it said. "The Veil has thinned."
I sat up in bed, breathing hard. Elna was asleep beside Fenn, curled like a cat. The house was quiet. But the voice continued, not in sound, but in sense.
"Three words remain. Find them. Speak them. The Path will unfold."
Then silence again.
But not absence.
The voice had left something behind.
Not a feeling.
A word.
A new one.
Soft. Fragile. Powerful.
"Othelen."
I didn't know what it meant.
But my bones remembered.
And I whispered it until sleep took me.
In the days that followed, the world felt different.
Not larger.
More awake.
Every face in Dustwall held questions I hadn't noticed before. Every wall seemed like it might be hiding something. Every breeze carried syllables I almost understood.
I began listening more.
Not to people.
But to space. To rhythm. To the shape of silence.
And when I listened deeply, I heard it.
A melody beneath the world.
Like a language waiting to be spoken.
Or remembered.
One evening, Elna brought me a scrap of parchment, torn from an old ledger.
"Found it in the trade bin," she said.
The script wasn't ours.
But I recognized parts of it.
Twisting lines. Familiar curves.
The same as those etched in the hidden chamber.
I studied it for hours. Matched symbols. Guessed phonetics.
One phrase shimmered clearer than the rest:
"The Eye sleeps beneath ash."
I didn't know what it meant.
But it felt like truth.
On the seventh night, I dreamed.
I stood in a city of pale stone. Empty. Vast. Covered in vines and ash.
At the center, a spire reached toward a broken moon.
And on its steps, a child sat alone.
Their face was blurred. But they looked up when I approached.
They opened their mouth.
And spoke three words:
"Yul. Ka'thera. Shahen."
Then everything shattered.
And I awoke with a single thought, clear as glass:
The world I was born into had already begun to end long before I arrived.
But maybe…
Maybe I had come here to remember why.