The morning came slow, grey light slipping through the broken beams of the ruined outpost. Mist clung to the underbrush like breath that refused to fade.
Evelyn knelt before the wardstone, fingertips brushing its moss-covered face. Where others saw cracks and erosion, she saw lines hidden beneath the lines—secondary sigils laid by a practiced hand, buried beneath age and ash.
Torren watched from a distance, eyes scanning the treeline. "You're certain this is safe?"
"No," Evelyn murmured. "But I'm not sure safety matters anymore."
Her hand pulsed with residual warmth from the encounter the night before. Something in her core—some fractured echo of the shard she consumed—resonated with the glyphs.
These weren't just wards. They were memories.
She pressed her palm fully to the stone.
A rush of scent: blood and pine sap. A Warden's breath, ragged and short.
A name: Seren Volte.
A desperate act: drawing the second circle—an advanced technique forbidden to low-tier Wardens—using his own lifeblood as ink.
"Let the Hollow pass," he'd whispered.
A final glyph. Not of warding.
Of remembrance.
Evelyn fell back, gasping.
Torren was there, steadying her. "What happened?"
"I saw him," she said. "The Warden who died here. He made a second pattern. Not for protection—" she looked back at the stone—"but to remember. This place is a grave and a story both."
Torren frowned. "A story for who?"
"For whoever came next," Evelyn said. "For me."
They moved through the ruins more deliberately after that.
Beneath shattered crates and collapsed rafters, Evelyn found more evidence—fragments of wardsteel etched with overlapping sigils, none of which appeared in her mother's old scrolls.
She copied them into her journal, the one her mother had forbidden her to open but which now felt more like a key than a lock.
Among the papers, she found a folded piece of canvas—oil-painted, cracked with age.
It depicted a burning city. In the background, a silhouette stood in the flame: silver-eyed, marked with the same sigil Evelyn now bore on her back.
Torren saw it too.
"You've seen her in your dreams, haven't you?"
Evelyn nodded.
"I don't think she's just in your head," he said. "I think she's real."
Evelyn whispered, "Or I'm remembering something that hasn't happened yet."
That night, Evelyn tried recreating one of the second-circle glyphs in the dirt.
She traced the outer ring carefully, then added the counterstroke—opposite of a standard ward, meant to draw in rather than repel.
The moment she completed the glyph, the air around them dropped ten degrees.
Mist curled in from the trees.
And the glyph glowed faintly blue.
Torren unsheathed his blade. "That's not a protection ward."
"No," Evelyn said. "It's a listening one."
From the shadows, a whisper came—not words, but tone. A melody. A pattern.
The same melody Evelyn's mother used to hum when reading the old scrolls late into the night.
It had no words, and yet Evelyn understood it.
Something ancient remembered her.