The fire cracked low in the ruins of Uvenhal's hall, casting long, curling shadows across the woven stone. Kaelen sat with her knees pulled to her chest, staring into her palm.
Her sigil had changed again.
What was once a simple spiral had now split — first cracked by Lethe, now branched by Uvenhal's awakening. Threadlike lines extended from the center, weaving across her wrist like veins of light. At the edges, the spiral twitched, as though responding to something even Kaelen couldn't feel.
"It's growing," she whispered.
Tareth crouched beside her, his gaze steady but troubled. "Not growing. Rewriting. The sigil was never static — it evolves with what it remembers. With what you anchor."
Kaelen traced the new pattern. "Then what happens when the whole spiral breaks?"
Tareth was quiet for a long time.
Finally, he said, "Then it stops being a mark. And starts becoming a map."
---
Tareth unrolled a worn scroll between them — a page copied from one of the last surviving Chronicles of Athrénn. It was a page of sigils: spirals, shards, loops, glyphs that looked like constellations half-remembered.
He tapped one in particular. It matched Kaelen's new form almost exactly — save for one missing thread.
"Spiral of the Nine," he murmured. "A myth. A mnemonic. Said to be the memory-key to all that was lost in the First Erasure."
Kaelen's eyes narrowed. "You think that's what's inside me?"
"No. I think you're making it. One city at a time."
---
Tareth leaned in, his voice low.
"The Spiral isn't just a symbol of memory. It's a mirror of the Remnant Pattern — the sacred structure that held the names of all creation before the Hollow God began its feast."
He pointed to the outer rim of the spiral.
"There were once eighteen 'anchor-points' — cities, ideas, people — tied to the Spiral. When they were erased, the spiral cracked."
Kaelen's voice was distant. "And if we bring them back…"
Tareth nodded. "The Spiral reforms. And the world might remember itself."
---
But Kaelen wasn't thinking about the Spiral anymore.
She was thinking about the memory Lethe had gifted her — a memory too raw to speak aloud until now.
"She gave me away," Kaelen murmured.
Tareth looked up.
"My mother. I saw her again in the loom-thread. She was crying. She kissed my forehead. She placed something in my hands — a ring, I think — and whispered, 'Never speak your name. Not yet.'"
She touched her chest, as if the phantom weight still rested there.
"She was afraid. But not of losing me. Of me being found."
Tareth said nothing. Only listened.
"I don't know what that means," Kaelen whispered. "I don't know if she saved me or abandoned me."
"Maybe it was both," he said gently.
---
Before dawn, Kaelen wandered the edge of the Vale. Her steps were slow, uncertain. She needed space from the prophecy Tareth believed in — from the Spiral, the cities, the weight of being remembered by places she'd never known.
That's when she saw it.
A glint beneath the roots of a twisted willow.
She knelt and dug with her fingers until they bled.
And there — wrapped in silk and bound with silver thread — was a small obsidian shard, etched with a matching spiral. A fragment of the sigil.
But it wasn't hers.
She turned it over.
The back bore a name.
"Velessan."
The name struck her like thunder. It meant nothing — and yet it shattered something inside her.
Because when she whispered it…
Her sigil burned.
---
She ran back to the fire, heart pounding.
"Tareth."
He looked up.
"I think I just found the third city."