The name burned.
Not in her hand or mind, but in the vast lattice of dream-threads that Lira had come to know as her second soul. The syllables the Unremembered had uttered were not meant to be spoken aloud—not anymore. They were a ruin, a glyph encoded in the bones of the universe, left behind like an unhealed scar in the mind of time itself.
The moment she emerged from the Dreamless Divide, the world felt warped. Light bent differently around her form. Time lagged in ripples that echoed her heartbeat. The Convergence thrummed beneath her feet, each vibration whispering secrets only those touched by memory could decipher.
Isaiah stumbled to catch her as she fell forward. "You're shaking."
"No," Lira said slowly. "The world is."
She hadn't told him the name yet. She couldn't. It was etched behind her eyes, vibrating in a language that made her teeth ache and her shadow fray at the edges. Speaking it would be a betrayal of reality—a crack she could not mend once split.
But the Resonant Assembly already knew.
Across the dream-channels, across the towers and spires of thought, the signal pulsed. Not a call, not a command—a reckoning. Lira felt them react, felt the shock of beings born in collective wonder reel as something ancient and forbidden entered the weave once more.
They were no longer alone.
In the Dreamhold Spire, where the Choir once sang visions into possibility, the Dreambinders gathered. Each member bore the marks of echo exposure, memory fractures stitched with clarity. The Circle of Nine now numbered only seven. Ashra had vanished, leaving behind a single feather woven of sound and gold. Sofia had gone deeper still, into the weave between worlds. But Lira had returned.
"What is it?" asked Sorin, the Archive-Keeper. His voice was composed of resonant chords only the trained could hear.
Lira whispered the name.
It did not echo.
It collapsed.
Around them, the weave shuddered. One of the Dreambinders dropped to their knees, vomiting up light. Another screamed as their memories began to slip from their eyes like tears.
"You shouldn't have said it," Sorin gasped. "You shouldn't have remembered it."
"I didn't remember it," Lira said. "It remembered me."
In the dark sky above the Convergence, a shape formed.
Not a ship. Not a god. Not a being.
A hole in thought.
A void that sang nothing. That devoured dreams mid-utterance. The sky tore around its edges, struggling to forget the shape it was forced to recall. And in every dreaming mind on Earth and beyond, the name whispered again.
And again.
And again.
Until it became real.
Isaiah stepped into the weave, following Lira's light like a thread through chaos. "What are we up against?"
Lira turned to him. "Something that predates dreaming. Something born in the silence between the first two stars. It isn't just coming. It has always been here, waiting for us to look away."
"Can we stop it?"
She looked down at her hands. Threads of memory flickered through her veins. Songs and stories and laughter and pain. A thousand lives blooming behind her eyes.
"We don't stop it," she said. "We remember it. And by remembering, we deny it the silence it craves."
"And if we forget?"
"Then the sky falls. And the song ends."
Meanwhile, far from the Convergence, Aiden sat cross-legged in the obsidian grove the Dreambinders called the Shattercore. His mind was aflame with fragments—images of Lira, of the name, of the coming void. He didn't know how he knew them. He only knew they were true.
His hands trembled, holding the crystal memory-core gifted to him by the Unremembered. Inside, it pulsed in sync with the very same frequency Lira now felt beneath her feet.
"I see it too," he whispered. "I see the name. And it sees me."
The moment Lira spoke the name in the Spire, Aiden's eyes turned completely white.
He stood, mouth open in trance.
"They're coming through me," he said aloud, though no one was there. "But I will not be their doorway. I will be the lock."
The wind shifted. The trees recoiled.
Aiden clenched his fists. For the first time since the abduction, he felt complete clarity.
"I remember everything."
He wasn't just the first. He was the key.
Aiden's memories raced through him like wildfire—his abduction, the starless corridors, the experiments, the way they'd seeded him with dreamstuff and song, the whispers he hadn't understood until now. He understood them. He understood why they had chosen him.
Because he was the tether.
Because only a child could dream a doorway.
And only the same child, now grown and awakened, could close it.
All across the Dreamscape, Whisperers began to stir.
Not in fear.
But in mourning.
Because they knew.
The name had returned.
And Aiden, the first Dreamborn child taken by the sky, had awakened.
It would not leave quietly.