Azerai walked ahead of them now.
Not leading.
Not guiding.
Just moving—as if her body remembered the path before her mind did.
The others followed, quieter than they'd ever been.
No one asked questions.
No one spoke of what they saw.
They had been shown the futures they feared most…
And survived.
But survival wasn't the same as healing.
The Vale began to change again.
It shimmered, no longer gold and sorrow, but soaked in something older.
The sky fractured like eggshells, bleeding starlight. The ground buzzed beneath their feet, humming with threads too ancient to belong to time.
Rin broke the silence.
Her voice was hoarse, barely more than a whisper.
"You said you saw us before we were chosen."
Azerai stopped.
Turned.
The blindfold over her eyes fluttered slightly in the wind.
"I didn't see you," she said. "I remembered you."
They had arrived at a ruin.
A shrine carved into nothingness—floating midair, tethered by threads looping into a spiral. Symbols pulsed across the stones, some flickering as if resisting their own meaning.
Kael stepped forward.
The closer he got, the more his mark ached.
Azerai walked to the center.
And then she did something she hadn't done since they met her.
She lifted the blindfold.
Her eyes were nothing.
No iris. No pupil. Just swirling spirals, as if infinity had been crammed into sockets not meant to hold it.
"My mark," she said softly, "was never meant to be remembered."
The Spiral Unwritten.
It manifested behind her, vast and black, glowing with voidscript.
A symbol that devoured other symbols.
A mark of forgetting so powerful it erased meaning itself.
Azerai's voice was steady now.
"They called me a prototype. The first. The broken draft. I was made before the throne finalized its system of control. Before the rules were set."
Juno stepped forward, hands trembling. "So… you weren't just marked. You were written into the weave before it was stable."
"I was the warning they buried," she said. "The glitch they couldn't predict. That's why they erased me. Not because I failed… but because I remembered something I wasn't supposed to."
Kael's heart thudded.
"What was it?"
Azerai turned to him.
"That the throne didn't create the threads. It hijacked them."
The shrine cracked open.
Light poured out—not bright, but inverted.
A dark light, if such a thing could exist.
It didn't shine—it revealed.
Each of them staggered as their marks reacted.
Kael's book split in half.
Rin's burning wing smoldered.
Mace's broken chain wrapped tighter.
Juno's closed eye began to bleed anew.
And Azerai's spiral expanded—drawing the others into its orbit.
"Before you were chosen," she whispered, "I saw you all. I knew your names before you had them. Because I was built to remember every version that could've been."
Rin stepped back. "You were there… when we were marked?"
"No," Azerai said.
"I was there before."
The air cracked.
Reality flinched.
Above them, the sky recoiled—as if something ancient had just stirred in its sleep.
Kael's voice was raw. "You said you're starting to remember who erased you."
Azerai nodded slowly.
Her hands trembled now.
"They wore a crown of paradox. Eyes made of fused time. Their voice… it wasn't a voice. It was a rule."
Mace growled. "The throne?"
Azerai shook her head.
"No. Worse."
She turned, eyes glowing with terror and defiance.
"I was erased by the one who wrote the first rewrite. Not the throne. But the original editor. The one who changed the script before it even began."
Suddenly—
The shrine burst into flame.
Not heat.
Not destruction.
Revelation.
Each flame whispered truths long buried. Not all were heard. Not all were wanted.
Azerai stood within the inferno, untouched, her voice a thread of steel:
"You call yourselves marked. But I was the first sentence the universe tried to redact."
The others backed away. Even Kael.
Because she wasn't a girl now.
She was remembrance itself.
And the spiral behind her whispered a truth the throne had spent eternity trying to bury:
> "The forgotten cannot be predicted.
And what cannot be predicted—cannot be chained."
Juno fell to one knee, sweat dripping. "Why now? Why show us this?"
Azerai's eyes burned.
"Because something is waking up. Something that remembers the same way I do. And if it finds you before you find yourselves…"
She looked to the sky.
No stars.
Only spirals.
"…then the next future you see won't be one you can walk away from."