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Chapter 10 - Fragments of the Forgotten I

The dark did not return with silence.It returned with a sound soft, rhythmic, wet.

Drip.Drip.Drip.

Kaelen opened his eyes.

He wasn't on the platform anymore.

He lay on his back, on cold stone slick with something thicker than water. The air smelled like rot and ink. The ceiling above him was alive, moving a great dome of reflective black glass pulsing like the inside of a lung.

He sat up. His ribs howled. His side bled again, the Wyrdmark pulsing faintly to seal it.

The wound from the Wyrdbeast still hadn't closed.

The platform was gone.

The Rift had changed again.

This wasn't memory.

This was… something else.

A whisper crawled up the wall beside him. Not from lips. From carvings. The stone itself whispered.

He is awake.The myth breathes again.What has he brought us this time?

Kaelen stood. Slowly. Blade in hand. Eyes wide.

The space was… wrong. No doors. No walls. Just endless obsidian mirrors some cracked, some whole arranged in a spiraling pattern. Each one reflected not his body, but fragments.

A version of him burned alive.A version in Sanctum robes.A version kneeling over Auren's corpse, laughing.A version in chains, eyes hollow.

He turned away.

"Stop this," he said, to no one. "I'm done with riddles."

A voice answered.

But it wasn't the one he expected.

"You're done with everything. That's your problem."

Kaelen turned.

The Master stood behind him if it was him. Taller, somehow. Hood lower. His robe wasn't stitched, but woven from language. Not symbols. Words. Thousands, stitched into shadow, shifting as he moved.

His face… was still veiled.

"You bleed a myth," the Master said, voice like a bell beneath the sea. "And the Rift records. It shapes. It starves. And it feeds."

Kaelen raised his blade. "Where the hell am I?"

"Where myths remember what the world forgot. The Hollow Archive."

The walls pulsed. Each mirror whispered names, places, memories.

The Master walked past Kaelen, his feet not touching the ground.

"Every Wyrdbinder is eventually brought here after failure, or victory, or death. This is where the Wyrd stores the pieces of what might have been."

Kaelen followed slowly, limping. "You brought me here?"

The Master tilted his head. "No. You did. When the beast touched your soul, your truth bled too deep. And the Rift turned its eye."

He stopped before a mirror that showed Kaelen… not as he was. But as a child, standing in the ruins of a burning monastery, clutching his brother's hand.

Kaelen stared.

"I don't remember this," he said.

"You do," the Master said. "But not with your mind. You remember it with your myth."

They moved deeper into the spiraling Archive. The Master raised a hand and a glowing glyph appeared in the air, etched in gold fire.

"You've been told power is something to cast. Something to draw from ley-lines. That's what the Sanctum believes. What the old Orders used."

"But that's a lie."

Another glyph appeared. Then another. Then hundreds. A wheel of script rotating around them, singing in a language Kaelen didn't know but felt.

"Power is record," the Master said. "The Wyrd is not a source. It is a memory. A soul-recording engine. It stores emotion, action, belief and from that, it builds mythic resonance."

Kaelen narrowed his eyes.

"So what? It rewards you for being dramatic?"

"No. It rewards you for being true. The deeper your belief, the purer your regret, the sharper your guilt… the more real you become."

Kaelen felt cold all over.

"There are no spells," the Master said. "Only glyphs carved truths. Sigils bound regrets. And Names which are the shape of the self, burned so deeply that the Wyrd cannot ignore them."

The Master turned to a blank wall. Raised his hand.

"Watch closely."

He uttered a single word not in any tongue Kaelen knew.

It wasn't sound. It was shape. A fracture in the air. A vibration that rewrote light.

The wall exploded into motion became a battlefield.

Kaelen saw soldiers screaming. A river of flame. A god's corpse. An army of blind monks walking into a sunless city.

"That was not a spell," the Master said. "It was a recording. A memory. Spoken so clearly that the Wyrd accepted it as truth."

Kaelen staggered.

"Then what are you?" he whispered.

The Master didn't answer.

Kaelen stepped closer. "Who are you?"

Silence.

Then:

"I do not know," the Master said. "I have had many Names. All of them burned. All of them buried."

He turned. And for a moment, Kaelen saw behind the veil.

Not a face. A brand.

An ever-changing sigil burned into where a heart should be.

Kaelen asked: "Why teach me this?"

The Master stepped closer.

"Because you carved something the Wyrd had not seen in a long time."

He held up Kaelen's cracked myth-slab. A single line burned on it still:

I am what's left.

"Do you know what that is?" the Master whispered. "It's a lie. And a truth. And a weapon."

He raised his hand and carved it into the air. The words became light.

Suddenly, Kaelen was surrounded by screaming echoes versions of himself dying, surviving, killing, begging, burning.

"You are the only one who can carry your brother's myth. And if he still lives… then his is already being rewritten."

Kaelen collapsed to one knee.

The weight of it all the horror, the scale, the sheer wrongness of knowing the world might forget what Auren was if he didn't fight tore into him.

"Then teach me," he said. "Damn it all, just teach me."

The Master stepped forward.

"Then choose. What will you carry into the Wyrd?"

Kaelen thought. Not of revenge. Not of glory.

But of Auren's voice. His laugh.

His promise.

"I won't let it all die."

The Master carved a burning glyph into Kaelen's chest.

A soul-mark. A living brand.

[Sigil of the Memory-Bound Flame]

And the Rift… shifted.

A door appeared tall, skeletal, veined with veins of ash and bone.

The Master turned to it, slowly.

"Beyond this is your first true lesson. But know this every step you take from here… will cost you something real."

Kaelen stepped forward, heart hammering.

The Master whispered:

"The Wyrd listens. Speak wisely."

And the door opened into dark.

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