Chapter One: The Silver Flame Returns
Part Five: The Breath Beneath the Stone
Date: Junilis 3rd, Year 204 PCR (Late Night)
Location: Veilgrove Outskirts – Abandoned Root Hollow
The Lyceum slept beneath Doctrine silence.
Wards hummed faintly around its perimeter—threads of memory-stilled wind meant to alert the guards of any resonance breach. But Zephryn had studied them before, when he was younger, and those threads weren't alive. They pulsed like false nerves—too uniform, too afraid to adapt.
He waited until the others had returned to the dorms. Kaelen was the last to fall asleep, lying on his back whispering to the ceiling, "He's back, and he's different."
Zephryn didn't need a cloak. He walked like mist and bled no sound.
He slipped past the outer gates and followed a trail only one other in the Lyceum had ever known—the spiraled veinpath carved beneath the twin roots of the dead harmon tree. A crack in the ward perimeter, shielded by dust and shadow.
At its end was something the Doctrine would never approve of.
A drakelith.
Sleeping.
Breathing.
Dreaming with ancient bones wrapped in child's skin.
Bubbalor's lair was barely that. A cavern no bigger than a shed, hidden under root and moss, shaped with care over six years of absence. The walls were carved with markings—drawings Zephryn had made with singed sticks. Symbols he didn't even remember drawing.
A blue glyph here. A crown-shaped mark there. One resembled Solara's face.
But Bubbalor never asked about them.
He just waited.
Tonight, the drakelith stirred before Zephryn entered. The moment his foot touched the root-ledge, a low growl-croon echoed from inside.
Zephryn stepped into the lair and knelt.
Bubbalor yawned, two baby fangs blinking silver in the dark, and rubbed his massive head against Zephryn's chest like a creature far too ancient to be that soft.
"You felt it too," Zephryn whispered.
The glyph on his arm pulsed once in response, and Bubbalor leaned closer, tongue flicking the edge of it like he was… reading it.
Or remembering it.
Bubbalor was only five years old.
By human measure.
But Crestborn weren't meant to be measured in years.
They were remembered in harmonics—how long their essence had hummed inside the world before bonding.
When Zephryn had fallen into the Void that day, Bubbalor had found him not with eyes, but with pulse.
He had been singing to himself in a forgotten place when the silver flame broke through.
And something in that fire called him.
They had never spoken—not with words. But the bond was pure.
The bond was older than Doctrine.
Older than Veil.
Older than the Hollow Choir.
Zephryn sat with his back against Bubbalor's side. The drakelith had grown since he last saw him—scales like glass-petal slate, eyes almost too big for his head, tail twitching with dream-rhythm.
"I cast again," Zephryn murmured. "The Pulse Eye named it Silver Crest."
Bubbalor didn't move, but his scales lit faintly.
"I don't know what it means."
The glyph on Zephryn's arm pulsed.
A hum echoed back from Bubbalor's chest—not vocal. Deeper. As if the drakelith had stored that name somewhere inside himself long ago, and hearing it now reawakened the hum.
Zephryn tilted his head, thinking.
"Did Solara… put something in you?"
For a breath, nothing.
Then Bubbalor exhaled.
And the air around him shimmered.
Just for a heartbeat, his breath glowed gold.
A pulse signature.
Not his.
Not Zephryn's.
Solara's.
In a hidden hall beneath the Doctrine's lowest chamber, the Hollow Choir stirred.
A projection glyph hovered above a carved table of mirrored obsidian. The glyph replayed a flicker of the scene: a breath of gold in a drakelith's sleep.
A memory signature embedded into a living Crestborn.
One Choir member leaned forward, face hidden beneath linen and bone.
"The core is alive."
Another—a figure with dozens of stitched fingers—responded flatly.
"She hid it inside the beast."
The Smiling Cantor entered last.
"Solara," he said with something like admiration. "She burned the old paths clean. But even she could not erase resonance."
He tapped the mirrored glyph.
"And now it sings again."
Back in the hollow, Zephryn lay awake.
He hadn't asked the right question yet.
Not "What did she leave?" But…
"…Why me?"
He clenched his fist.
The glyph sparked.
Lightning flashed silently over his knuckles, and Bubbalor stirred again, this time placing one claw over Zephryn's chest.
It glowed.
Not lightning. Not flame.
But memory.
Zephryn closed his eyes.
And in the next moment…
He dreamed of Solara.
Holding the silver glyph in her hands.
And humming something too old to remember.