The Ninth Tier was not supposed to exist anymore. That's what the Archive said. That's what the Council repeated. The maps had been rewritten, and the structure had been flagged as a collapse site.
But Velora stood on stone.
The alley was narrow. Cracked stone walls lined either side, painted with the kind of handprints only children or the grieving ever made. The sky above was dimmer here. Not from lack of light—but as if the world itself had dimmed this place on purpose.
She crouched near the edge of a broken archway and placed her palm against the floor.
It pulsed. Once.
A slow, warm throb under her skin, like something alive.
Alastor stepped beside her. "It shouldn't be here."
"It is," Velora said. "And we're not the ones remembering it."
Near her boot, scratched into the base of the stone, barely visible beneath the moss and ash:
He walked here last.
No name. No date. But she knew.
The lettering matched older messages—those etched on coins, on Archive fragments, on candle bases from the Rebirth.
Rael's markers.
Alastor didn't speak. He just stared at the stone.
"Get a memory tracer down here," she said. "And scan for residuals. Old ones."
"None of this will be logged."
"Good," Velora murmured. "That means it might still be true."
That night, her quarters were colder than usual.
The candle she kept beside the mirror wouldn't light.
Three times she tried. Each time, the wick smoked—but no flame caught.
She sighed, leaned back, and stared at her desk.
There, placed neatly in the center—was a folded piece of parchment.
She hadn't left it.
No one had clearance to enter without triggering alerts.
And yet, no alarms had sounded.
She approached slowly, fingers hovering just above the edge. The parchment was brittle. Old. Edges frayed.
In the lower right corner, someone had drawn a hand. Open. Palm-up.
Inside the hand: a coin.
And inside the coin: the Hollow Star.
Velora unfolded it.
The handwriting struck her before the words did.
You weren't wrong to fight me.
You were just wrong to forget why.
She sat down hard.
She had heard Rael speak a hundred times. In rallies. In arguments. In the final hours before the Rebirth burned itself into history.
But she had only ever seen him write once.
His handwriting curled like the end of a thought left unsaid. Elegant, but unfinished.
This was his.
She ran tests.
The paper was dated—nearly eight years ago.
The ink had faded naturally. No signs of glyph tampering.
The page had been hidden. Forgotten. Or never delivered.
Alastor stared at the scan results with wide eyes.
"This was written before he disappeared," he said.
"No," Velora replied, voice quiet. "This was written after."
He blinked. "That's not possible."
"Neither is a corridor reappearing in the Ninth Tier."
Alastor handed her another sheet. "The tracer you requested picked something up. You'll want to see it yourself."
Velora followed the path alone.
It wasn't the same street.
It was the memory of a street.
The buildings were wrong. Too narrow. Windows in places they shouldn't be. Doors half-built. Signs that listed names she recognized—but didn't remember meeting.
The path ended at a wall of mirror glass.
Not smooth. Cracked down the center. Webbed like frost.
But the reflection held still.
Velora raised a hand. Her mirror image followed.
But when she stepped closer—the reflection did not.
The woman in the mirror stood still, staring back.
Same face. Same coat. But her eyes were gold.
And her expression was not Velora's.
It was his.
She backed away.
The reflection vanished.
The mirror cracked again—this time from within.
And beneath her feet, the stone glowed faintly.
One word rising in thin, fire-brushed lines:
REMEMBER
The Council did not respond to her inquiries.
When she requested full clearance on Rael's body recovery file, the interface returned a single phrase:
No remains verified. Case closed by consensus.
Consensus meant lie.
Velora left the tower at dusk, descending past Archive sectors where no one walked without escort.
She moved until the walls turned from polished stone to dirt-worn ruin. The old Council vaults—the ones sealed after the Rebirth—stood in silence beneath hundreds of glyph-locked layers.
Except one.
It was open.
Inside, a chair sat facing a black screen.
On the table: a mirror shard. Clean. Centered. No dust.
She approached, heart silent, mind screaming.
When she touched it, the shard pulsed once—and played back his voice.
"If you're hearing this… then it means I lost."
"Or it means you're finally asking the right question."
His tone wasn't bitter.
It wasn't triumphant.
It was tired.
"You think I wanted the Rebirth. I didn't. I wanted freedom. But I built a prison."
"So did you."
He paused.
"I'm not dead.
I'm just on the other side of forgetting."
"And if I come back… it won't be as who I was.
It'll be as what the world remembers of me."
The shard dimmed.
Velora stood still.
Not breathing.
Because something had begun to break inside her.
Not a wall.
Not a memory.
But certainty.
She returned to her quarters and stared at her reflection again.
It matched her this time.
But the coin on the desk was spinning.
She hadn't touched it.
And in the glass behind her, the candle flickered—
then bent sideways.