The Girl Who Watched the Flame Sleep
A Memory Shard from Before the Fracture
Date: Unknown – Estimated 199 PCR
Location: Cliffside, Outer Veilguard Field
Time: 02:12 Veil Standard
The stars didn't hum that night.
They watched.
Quietly.
Like a thousand eyes blinking above the cliff's edge, unsure whether to speak or stay silent. Wind moved softly across the grass—too soft to carry meaning, but not empty either. The kind of breeze that knows secrets.
Selka crouched low near the slope.
Not hiding.
Just staying small.
She didn't want to wake him.
—
Zephryn lay curled in a hollow of moss and stone, arms tucked beneath his head, legs drawn in like the world had pushed too hard for someone so small. His breath came in even rhythms.
But his chest…
Glowed.
—
A faint glyph, not cast.
Not fully formed.
Just a shape.
An ∞ traced in pale resonance like someone had tried to write the word remember in the language of light—and forgotten how to finish.
Selka stared at it.
She'd seen him flare it once before.
By accident.
He had passed out afterward and laughed when he woke like it was nothing.
But she knew it wasn't.
It was never nothing.
Not with him.
—
She sat down beside him.
Cross-legged.
Silent.
She didn't speak.
Didn't reach.
Just… watched.
Like a guard.
Like a girl who didn't know how to protect him yet, but would grow into the kind of person who could.
And in the hush of that moment, she whispered—not to him, not to the glyph, but to the Veil itself.
"Don't take him."
—
Far off, above the ridgeline, another figure stood.
Cloaked in outer-sky fabric. Hair lit like silver flame.
Solara.
Solera.
The mother who watched from the edge of a world she'd already betrayed once.
She didn't step forward.
Didn't call for them.
She just stood in the dark, hand over her heart, listening to her son remember something he had never lived.
Her own glyph glowed at her collarbone.
A pulse-shaped crescent.
Half-broken.
Half-bound.
She murmured to the wind—
"Even now, it sings in him."
—
Selka looked down again.
Zephryn shifted slightly.
Not awake.
Not dreaming.
Somewhere in between.
And he whispered.
Just one word.
Not meant for anyone to hear.
But she did.
"…Rael."
Selka blinked.
Her throat closed.
She didn't understand it.
Not then.
But she would.
—
So she sat closer.
And whispered to the night.
"If he forgets who he is…"
"I'll remember for him."
—
Solara stepped back.
Disappeared into the trees.
The glyph at her neck faded.
But the one in her son's chest kept glowing—
Slow.
Infinite.
And alive.
—
End of Echo