The name Velessan tasted like metal and rain when Kaelen spoke it aloud again.
The wind changed instantly.
Not the way it had with Lethe or Uvenhal — no warmth, no sigh of recognition. This was sharper. Hungrier. As if something had been asleep beneath the Vale, and the name had cut it awake.
Tareth cursed under his breath and drew his blade.
"Say it again," he ordered.
Kaelen hesitated.
"Say it."
"Velessan."
The air collapsed.
---
A spiral of roots twisted open beneath Kaelen's feet — not natural, not carved. It was like a scar on the earth. A spiral exactly matching her sigil, cut deep into the stone.
And at the center: a gate.
No wood. No handle. Just solid darkness stitched between broken marble arches.
Etched above it:
"City of Echoes. Lightless, but not forgotten."
Kaelen stepped toward it, and her sigil responded instantly — not with pain, but weight. It pulled against her wrist like an invisible tether.
"I think it wants me to go alone," she whispered.
Tareth grabbed her arm. "That's how Uvenhal nearly devoured you."
"That was memory. This is... emptiness."
Tareth looked into the spiral.
"It's not just a gate. It's a hole in the pattern. Whatever's beyond that... hasn't been touched by thought in a very long time."
Kaelen met his eyes.
"Then I need to be the first one who remembers it."
---
The passage wasn't stairs. It wasn't even space. It was like falling through the idea of falling — a corridor made of thoughts that hadn't finished forming. She landed with no sound, no feeling.
Velessan was not a city. It was a void that had forgotten it was once a city.
Walls existed only when she looked at them. Her footsteps didn't echo. There was no wind, no gravity. Just stillness.
And then she heard it.
Not a whisper. Not a call.
A mirror of her own thoughts, repeating with a half-beat delay.
"I don't belong here."
"I don't belong here."
---
Kaelen reached a plaza — or something like one. A blank, circular space where outlines of buildings flickered in and out. At its center stood a pedestal holding a perfect black mirror. Around its base: names, written in languages she couldn't read.
She looked in the mirror.
She saw herself. But not as she was.
In the mirror, her sigil was whole. The Spiral was complete. Her eyes were filled with starlight. Her skin glowed with the shimmer of every city brought back.
She looked powerful.
She looked wrong.
Then the reflection spoke:
"This is what you become if you remember everything."
Kaelen reached out. "Is that... a warning?"
The mirror pulsed.
"No. A temptation."
---
The mirror cracked.
And from its center stepped a figure.
Not Hollowborn — not twisted or shattered like the ones in Lethe. This one was beautiful. A young woman, dressed in memory-silk, eyes like broken moons.
Kaelen knew her instantly.
"Mother?"
But the woman didn't smile.
"I am the memory she gave away," the figure said. "The part of her that chose to forget you to keep you safe."
Kaelen backed away. "You're not real."
The figure stepped closer. "Neither are you — not fully. Not yet."
She reached toward Kaelen's sigil.
"Let me take the burden. Let me remember. You don't need to suffer."
Kaelen's hand shook.
But then she clenched it.
"If you were part of her... then you were born of sacrifice. You don't get to take mine away."
The sigil burned — bright, blinding, alive.
The reflection screamed.
The plaza shattered.
And Velessan spoke.
Not in words. In recognition.
---
When Kaelen surfaced from the gate, the wound in the world sealed behind her.
She collapsed on the grass, gasping.
Tareth pulled her upright, holding her by the shoulders. "What happened? What did you see?"
Kaelen held out her arm.
The spiral had evolved again. It now pulsed with three cores — Lethe, Uvenhal, and now a third: a dark thread, woven into the pattern like obsidian silk.
But most importantly — around the edges of the spiral, for the first time, were names.
Not her name.
Not cities.
But fragments of others: Evron. Nema. A glyph she didn't yet know how to pronounce.
Tareth's breath caught.
"It's starting to map itself."
Kaelen looked out at the sky.
"I think I saw the future. A version of me with the whole spiral. A version that doesn't need help anymore."
"And?"
"I hated her."
---
Later that night, alone by the fire, Kaelen traced the dark thread of Velessan now woven into her skin.
And it whispered to her, as sleep took her:
"Seven cities remain."
"One lies beneath your blood."
---