The silence in Kireth Hollow didn't last long.
After the soul-heart cracked, villagers began returning, blinking like sleepers waking from a long dream. Some remembered fragments — others, nothing at all. But they all felt the same strange sense of absence, as if something had been living among them… wearing their faces.
Elira sat with the village elder — an old woman named Lhorin — who hadn't spoken in nearly a year. But now, her eyes were clear. Her voice, steady.
"It came from the stars," she whispered. "The thing that whispered. It didn't want to destroy us. It wanted to be us."
Elira frowned. "You mean Nyareth?"
The name made Lhorin stiffen. "That is a name you should not speak. Names carry weight. That one… it does not belong to this world."
Meanwhile, Aran stood alone beneath the withered boughs of a twisted oak, where he had seen the soul-heart's final vision. Nyareth — a presence of vast intellect and patient malice — had not simply bound pain. It had gathered it, cultivated it, like a gardener harvesting emotion.
He was not a god. Not a demon. But something far older. Something that saw emotion not as weakness… but as fuel.
And Aran had burned too brightly to go unnoticed.
"He felt me," Aran muttered. "When I destroyed the heart, he looked back."
Elira joined him.
"Then we need to find out where he came from," she said. "And if he's alone."
Aran looked toward the stars.
And for the first time in years… he felt cold.