There were nights—though no such word fit here—when Thorne imagined what sleep used to feel like. Not rest. Not recovery. But the true kind. The kind you woke from lighter. He hadn’t tasted that in decades. Maybe longer.

  The twilight never changed in the Death Realm—it only deepened. Cold like forgotten sorrow, like an apology never spoken, it pressed into the bones with slow, intimate malice. Fires were down to embers. Mist clung low to the ground. The camp slept in uneasy half-silence.

  Thorne did not.

  Before the bells. Before the scream. He walked the line between tents.

  He moved with the quiet of a man long past exhaustion. Each step measured. Each glance sharp. The stars above—unnaturally still—burned white and watching, uncaring. The temple loomed in the distance, and the thing within hadn’t moved since breaching the gates.

  But that did not bring him peace.

  It reminded him of Calavareth—

  The capital, veiled in alabaster towers and fog-slicked streets. Jewel of the Death Realm. Where bloodline meant everything and silence often cost more than screams.

  He’d been the only child of a house too wealthy for its own good. Raised on duty, not affection. Swordmasters, magisters, oracles. Tutors who taught him how to carve his name into history and ensure no one ever dared erase it. Magic. Strategy. Control. They forged him like iron—shaped to endure.

  And for a time, he believed that was enough. It was not.

  He had loved only twice.

  The first had faded like soft song—mortal, kind. They had outgrown one another. A gentle ending.

  The second had not been gentle.

  She had been killed returning from a nearby village. An eldritch thing twisted by madness had torn her apart, piece by screaming piece. Thorne arrived just in time to hold what remained.

  That was a hundred and twenty six years ago.

  Since then, he wore the ring. And the necklace.

  He had not dared love again.

  His gaze passed over the tents, quiet but tense. Elena Doyle. Brilliant, sharp, too young for the weight she carried. If the world survived, she would become one of the Shahriyar

  He had became a Sepahsalar detonated. Where other children still traced circles in ash, begging the stars for a Mark, he had already torn rifts in the tapestry of the world, shaping reality with a thought, a breath, a whim. He rose like a storm through still waters—unbidden, unyielding, unstoppable.

  Only the royals surpassed him. Maerros and Varek, sons of the king. And Lysara—distant cousin, terrible prodigy—whose gifts was so vast, so monstrous, that she left the rest of them flickering like candles beside a pyre.

  Varek, he respected. Steady, solemn, unshaken by the weight of power. A warrior who carried strength not like a weapon, but like a vow. In another life, they might have been brothers.

  Lysara? She had earned his admiration with the ease of a blade parting silk. A mind like wildfire. A will like iron. Beautiful in her relentlessness.

  But Maerros…

  Maerros, he loathed. With every breath. With every heartbeat. Arrogant, small-souled, drunk on the sound of his own name. Power was his mirror, his altar, his hunger. Everything Thorne despised, stitched into flesh and crowned with gold.

  And then there was Akasha.

  Not kin. Not rival. Something older. Something vast. The first to become a Shahriyarsurvived.

  A touch from her could unravel thought. A whisper could call you back from death and bind you in it forever.

  No one crossed her.

  Elena reminded him of Lysara, once. She had the same kind of fire in her.

  That sharp brilliance. That defiant light. A star too bright for a sky like this.

  He paused, just for a breath, outside her tent. The mist curled low. No sound.

  Then—

  the scream.

  It cut through the twilight like a blade across flesh.

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  He moved before thought caught up. Reached her tent. Ripped the flap aside—

  She thrashed. Back arched. Mouth wide in a scream too large for air. Her fingers clawed the cot. Her brow—

  A mark.

  Old. Wrong. Familiar.

  A rune burned there. Not drawn in blood or ink. Drawn into reality. A glyph from the temple walls. The kind only seen in forgotten tomes and whispered texts.

  "Elena!" Thorne dropped to his knees. Gripped her shoulders. "Wake up. Elena. Gods damn you, wake up."

  No response.

  He turned to the tent’s mouth, voice sharper than steel.

  "AKASHA!"

  It was not a plea.

  It was a summoning.

  She arrived in seconds.

  No sound. No flinch. She stepped inside like a falling shadow. Wings curled close. Eyes unreadable.

  Without a word, she knelt beside Elena. Her fingers brushed the girl’s temple.

  Akasha’s eyes went white.

  Not black.

  White.

  But not light—never light. Just the absence of all else, stretched endless and close like a breath you can’t exhale.

  Akasha stood in it. Alone.

  No wind. No sky. No self. Only silence, vast and weightless, as if sound had never been invented.

  She did not speak. The realm would not permit it.

  And yet—she moved.

  Each step pressed shape into the void. Pale stone bloomed beneath her boots for a heartbeat before dissolving behind her like frost melting beneath a sunless sky. A path that refused to last. A world resisting presence.

  This wasn’t a dream.

  It was Elena.

  Or what remained of her.

  Akasha had walked many minds. Broken ones. Twisted ones. She had stepped into the psyches of dying kings, into the shattered temples of mad prophets. But this—this was different.

  The white was not purity. It was absence. A hollowing. The slow, patient collapse of something once full of love.

  The further she walked, the more she felt it—something watching, not from behind or above, but within. Not eyes. A pressure. A closeness. Familiar—but more intimate than it should be. As if the remnants of Elena’s soul were aware, trying to remember how to feel.

  Far ahead, something shimmered—barely visible, a hint of color against the endless white.

  She moved toward it.

  It took longer than it should have. Time folded oddly here.

  When she reached it, the shape resolved into a bench. Stone. Cracked.

  A family sat there.

  Jonas. Lily. Thomas. Elena.

  They did not move.

  Their faces were blurred. Their mouths open as if laughing, but no sound escaped. Lily's eyes looped in slow motion, stuck between expressions. Thomas flickered slightly—once present, then transparent.

  Jonas turned his head toward her, but where his eyes should’ve been, there was only paper. Flat and blank.

  She watched in silence. This memory was not anchored. It was bleeding.

  Then they faded.

  Akasha kept walking.

  Another flicker in the distance—a table, soft light.

  She approached.

  The kitchen.

  Elena served a tart. The plate disappeared. The tart hovered in the air, then burned to ash. Crayon drawings melted from the walls. A sun turned into a spiral. Jonas convulsed like a broken puppet.

  Gone.

  She moved quietly. Carefully.

  This place doesn’t want me here.

  Another fragment, further out—a hallway. A child reaching up.

  Arms that shouldn’t stretch that far.

  A smile torn into his cheek.

  Gone.

  They appeared like mirages in the desert. Unstable. Unwelcoming.

  She was not meant to see these things. And yet she did.

  A whisper reached her.

  Not sound.

  Remembrance.

  A looped fragment, Elena’s voice: “Wait—guys, wait up. Wait—guys, wait—” Over and over. Fainter each time.

  She turned.

  The bench had returned.

  Elena sat upon it.

  Rigid. Hands folded in her lap. Eyes wide, locked on nothing. Her lips moved, forming names without breath.

  Akasha approached, kneeling before her.

  “Elena.”

  No reply.

  She reached out.

  The air behind her tightened.

  The dream shifted.

  Bent.

  Something was arriving.

  Not from afar. Not from a place.

  From within.

  The void peeled back—not to let him enter, but to make room.

  He stepped through absence as if it had always belonged to him.

  Tall.

  Still.

  Hair of molten white.

  Eyes like dying suns—fathomless and heavy with something that was not memory but something older. Hungrier.

  He did not walk toward her.

  The space between simply folded.

  Akasha rose slowly.

  Even for her, it took effort to remain steady.

  The dream—the memory—the ruin of Elena—recoiled and quieted as he came near. Like a mind curling into itself. Like the last breath before surrender.

  Akasha studied him. She had a faint idea—rumors and forbidden echoes—but now she was certain. She had read of him in the deepest scripts, in the forbidden scriptures scrawled in dead languages held by the Keepers, those who traded in truths too ancient to name. The Realm of Knowledge did not part with its secrets easily. She had earned this knowledge by doing things best left to the dead.

  She had seen his shape ripple through the dreams of dying oracles.

  But this was no dream.

  "You do not belong here," she said.

  The Entity tilted his head—just slightly. That same soft, curious motion she'd seen echoed in the distorted memory of Jonas.

  "Nor dost thou."

  His voice was not spoken.

  It arrived.

  It resonated.

  As if the void itself had remembered how to form words.

  "You had no right to touch her," Akasha murmured.

  The Entity blinked once—slowly.

  "I do as I will. She ought be grateful I spared her, having dared raise hand 'gainst me."

  He looked past Akasha, toward the bench. Toward Elena.

  "Forgetfulness, truly, is a kindness."

  Akasha stepped between them.

  Not in defiance.

  In defiance of inevitability.

  "You are unmaking her."

  "Nay," the Entity said.

  He lifted one hand. The movement was too smooth. Too deliberate.

  "I do but correct her."

  Behind her, Elena’s breath caught—just once.

  A soundless sob escaped her lips.

  Her hands twitched in her lap.

  The Entity smiled.

  "She reached for that which had been taken. Memory is no right. It is a burden."

  Akasha's wings unfurled slightly. Not in threat. In tension. In poise.

  "She is not yours."

  "She shall be."

  And then the Entity reached forward—not toward Akasha, but past her.

  Toward the fragment that was Elena.

  Toward the last flickering echo of self.

  Akasha moved.

  Her hand met his.

  Not with force.

  With will.

  And the white screamed.

  Not sound.

  But structure.

  The void twisted. Cracked.

  Time curled in on itself like burning paper.

  They stood in the silence of gods.

  The Entity’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  "Tread with care. Thou knowest not what thou doest. Dost thou truly believe thou standest a chance, child? Thy mind is skilled—but mistake it not for might."

  Akasha’s eyes blazed white.

  "I'll do it anyway."

  A pause.

  A ripple.

  The Entity looked at her—not as one looks at an enemy, but as one looks at a puzzle they cannot solve.

  Then, contemplative, he spake again:

  "I would have taken her pain, made her forget. Yet mayhap thou speakest true. Mayhap she should remember."

  He grinned.

  "Let us then behold what cometh... shall we?"

  He reached out. Placed a hand on Akasha's shoulder.

  Her eyes widened.

  And they both vanished.

  The void shattered like glass.