"Some memories come like fire. Others arrive like a knife to the throat."
The sea didn't move.
Kaien stood at the cliff's edge, watching the dead ocean breathe like someone asleep beneath glass. Behind him, the wind murmured over jagged rocks, repeating the only word that mattered now.
Vael.
He didn't know how to carry it yet. Not like a name. Not like anything earned. It felt more like a cut — something inflicted, not inherited.
Eira sat a few paces back, knees drawn to her chest, gaze fixated on the relic-blade Kaien had driven into the soil beside them. Mourncaller hadn't spoken since the ruins. That worried her more than when it occurred.
"I've been thinking," Kaien remarked quietly.
Eira didn't answer.
"If I remember something—anything real—what do I become?"
"Depends what you remember," she responded.
Kaien turned. "And if it's something I shouldn't?"
Eira looked up, face pallid in the starlight.
"Then the world will try to forget you again."
They left the cliffs before morning, travelling through a forest of blackwood trees that moaned with the voices of drowned things. Every footfall shook dead leaves that muttered half-spoken names.
By lunchtime, the trees stopped in a clearing defined by old stone monoliths. Twelve of them—cracked, burned, and half-swallowed by the dirt. They formed a circle, the center of which was charred black.
Kaien felt it before they even went inside.
Memory.
Old. Violent. Unyielding.
Eira froze.
"This is a Covenant Grove," she remarked. "Sovereigns used to make memory pacts here. Blood to blood. Memory to memory."
Kaien touched one of the stones. It was warm. Almost pulsating.
"Did your House ever use this place?"
Eira's voice sank. "No House did. Not willingly."
Kaien turned. "Then who did?"
Eira didn't answer.
Because she didn't have to.
The air began to burn.
A guy stepped from behind one of the monoliths. Cloaked. Masked. Pale garments embroidered with glyphs that shimmered as if written in bone marrow.
A Citadel Inquisitor.
Eira grabbed for her blade, but Kaien raised a hand.
The Inquisitor talked without shifting its mask.
"Vael."
The word struck Kaien in the chest like a blow.
"You were supposed to be ash."
Kaien stood tall. "I don't remember you."
"Good. That suggests the fire worked."
Eira murmured, "He's not here to kill you. He's come to test if what's in your blood is real."
The Inquisitor lifted a hand. A strand of silk unspooled from his sleeve—memory-thread. Weaponized thought.
"If your name still burns… then burn."
Kaien moved before he thought.
Mourncaller screamed to life, the sword forgetting a hundred fights in a single heartbeat as it deflected the first thread of thought aiming for his chest. The force behind the blow split one of the monoliths in half.
Eira circled wide, hoping to flank—but the Inquisitor wasn't truly there. His body flickered, becoming half-echo, half-wound in space.
"You carry a House that defied oblivion."
"We buried your fire once. Let us do so again."
Kaien cut. The blade met nothing.
But his palm—still imprinted with the word SOVEREIGN—glowed. The minute he bled onto the ground, the monoliths roared.
Eira yelled, "Kaien, you're waking the Grove!"
Too late.
The Covenant Grove remembered.
The earth split.
From the burnt center, a flame rose—not fire, but memory-made-form. A vision from a thousand years ago, seared so deep into the Grove it had become fossil.
A man in black stood there. Cloaked like Kaien, clutching a blade that flowed smoke and language.
"I, Kaien Vael, make covenant with the House of Ash."
Kaien blinked.
"That's—"
The vision gazed up at him. Same eyes. Same burn on his palm.
"To forget is to burn. To burn is to become."
The flame touched Kaien's hand.
Pain. Not physical—ancestral.
Every word ever said by his bloodline, every pledge, every treachery, surged into him at once like boiling tar.
He yelled.
The Inquisitor lurched back, suddenly less assured.
Eira reached for him—but the flames coiled around her too, savouring her memory.
Only Mourncaller remained still.
When Kaien slumped, the fire dissipated.
And the image was gone.
He woke hours later. It was night again.
The Inquisitor was dead.
Not slain. Not cut.
Just forgotten.
His body lay hollow, face blank, clothes empty. Even the memory-thread was gone.
Eira sat next him, face pale.
"You made a pact."
Kaien nodded slowly.
"What did you give it?"
"My name."
Eira didn't speak for a time.
Then: "And what did it give back?"
Kaien looked down.
His palm no longer bore only SOVEREIGN.
Now there was another word engraved beneath it, fainter but older.
ASH.
They buried the remembrance where the Inquisitor had fallen.
Not his body—it was already dust.
But the idea of him.
A little mound of stones, each marked with a name neither of them pronounced aloud.
"Why do you think he came alone?" Kaien asked.
Eira cleaned her blade clean. "Because the Citadel wanted to see if you were real. Not alive—real."
"They sent him to test the bloodline."
"They'll send more now. If you survived the Covenant, they'll know it wasn't a fluke."
Kaien stared up at the sky.
There were no stars again.
Only silence.
And the remembrance of flame.
They camped farther up the ridge that night, past the boundaries of the Grove. Kaien sat by the fire, tracing the new word on his hand. Ash. Not a House. Not a title.
A warning.
Eira observed him.
"When the Covenant spoke, did you hear your House's name?"
Kaien shook his head.
"I heard a voice."
"Whose?"
"I don't know."
But he had a guess.
The girl from the dream. The lantern. The recollection that gazed back.
Before sleep claimed him, Kaien spoke to the blade beside him.
"Mourncaller. What do you remember?"
For once, the blade answered.
"Nothing worth surviving."
Kaien didn't sleep that night.
Not because of fear.
Because of remembering.
The Covenant Grove still blazed in his veins. Even as the fire at their tent faded to burning coals, something inside him refused to chill.
He'd seen a man with his face — older, clearer-eyed — make a contract in the midst of the Grove. Not just any deal. A blood oath so ancient the memory of it may still break stone.
But there was one thing that disturbed him most.
That man… had named himself Kaien Vael too.
"Was it me?" Kaien muttered into the darkness.
"No," answered Eira, gently. She hadn't moved for hours, eyes half-shut but always looking. "It was who you were before your memory was taken. A version. A ghost."
"But the Covenant said—"
"It didn't give you answers," she interrupted. "It gave you proof."
Kaien stared down at his hand.
ASH.
The word didn't sparkle like SOVEREIGN had. It didn't burn. But it felt heavier.
Like it meant something final.
He turned to Mourncaller, the relic-blade laying beside him, silent again.
"I asked it what it remembered," he murmured.
Eira raised a brow. "And?"
Kaien hesitated. "It said… 'Nothing worth surviving.'"
Eira frowned. "That's the closest thing to a confession I've ever heard from a relic."
"I think it's forgetting more every time I use it."
Eira stared at the weapon. "Then maybe it's trying to forget you."
Kaien didn't answer.
But he couldn't stop thinking about that prospect.
They moved at dawn.
Past the boundary of the Grove, the terrain went brittle and flat—scarred from some ancient siege when the rain hadn't just rained, but remained. Pools of dark water littered the land like open wounds. Every few feet, Kaien spotted glances in the puddles—faces. Maybe his. Maybe not.
Eira avoided them.
He didn't.
One pool, deeper than the others, drew his eye. He crouched near it. The reflection glanced back.
But it wasn't him.
It was the man from the Covenant. Older. Wounded.
Behind him, the reflection of the monoliths.
But something was awry.
In the sea, the monoliths were blazing.
Kaien leaned closer—and the mirror moved on its own.
The figure gazed directly at him through the surface and talked without sound.
"You're late."
Kaien fell back.
The puddle rippled. The vision gone.
Eira dragged him up. "Don't look too long."
"It was me," he said.
"No. It was what left of you."
She stared back to the black pools. "These are mirror graves. Places where memory got stuck under water. Some think they're harmless. Others claim they feed off people like us—Sovereignless."
Kaien stepped away, silent.
But inside, the reflection's words repeated.
You're late.