Only shadows moved — slowly — like drowned things beneath the skin of reality.
Orrny stood still. The silence screamed louder than any death he remembered.
The air stank of ashes and forgotten names.
He took a step. His foot crushed something soft — not stone. Not earth.
Flesh.
Then came the whisper:
“You survived... but did you remain?”
His vision trembled. The walls twisted into ribs. The sky cried in reverse.
He saw Lyssara’s smile — a flicker — her laugh echoing through time.
And then her body, lifeless. Yet untouched.
As if death had apologized.
The boy screamed without sound.
His knees gave out, but the earth did not receive him.
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Something held him.
Bones. Roots. Veins of memory growing from the ground like hands.
“They did this to you.”
He turned.
The trail began — bodies half-buried in soot. Claw marks on stone.
Mouths frozen in apology.
His hands shook. His chest burned where the cursed mark still pulsed —
Throbbing like a second heart.
And deeper inside him...
A mouthless voice.
A breath with no lungs.
Something that slept in the cracks of the soul.
“You are what remains of us.”
He collapsed. Not from weakness — but from remembering.
The fragments returned:
— Lyssara drawing stars in the dirt while the elders screamed in the distance.
— The two of them hidden in the ruins of the temple, eating stolen bread, dreaming of wings.
— A moment when she kissed his mark and said:
“Even if they hate you… I won’t.”
He cried. Not as a boy. Not as a man.
But as a wound that understood it would never close.
Then the wind brought something — something ancient.
A tower of bone and smoke, rising ahead, glowing a faint red.
The Clan’s Urn.
Their sacred pyre.
Where ancestors were offered.
Where the failed were burned.
He knew he had to go there.
But something watched him.
A formless shadow. A gaze made of silence.
Orrny stepped toward the Urn.
The ground shook.
And the whispers smiled.