The sky was wrong.
As the portal behind them sealed, Zaiya, Vaelen, and Elya emerged into a realm that looked like dawn caught in a permanent loop of amber clouds swirling in reverse, constellations blinking in unfamiliar patterns, and islands of stone floating in defiance of gravity.
This was the Sky-Sanctum.
Not a city.
Not a ruin.
A liminal place, suspended between memory and matter.
Zaiya staggered slightly. The First Glyph still pulsed faintly across her skin, alive with meaning. Her thoughts came in fragments, layered with voices not her own.
Vaelen caught her.
"This place isn't just old," he muttered. "It's unfinished."
Elya scanned the sky, her hand hovering near her blade.
"Where's the sanctuary?"
The answer came not from a voice but from the air itself.
Script unfolded across the clouds.
"ONLY THE FORGOTTEN MAY PASS."
The trio walked cautiously across a levitating stone bridge etched with glyphs. Below, infinite sky.
Each step whispered memories.
Zaiya paused at one glyph. A child's laugh echoed from it.
"They're embedded memories," she said softly. "Stored here by the Last Scribe."
Elya frowned.
"Why store them here?"
"Because even death can't erase what was written in the sanctum's code."
Halfway across, a pulse rippled through the sky.
An armored figure stood ahead.
Its face was hidden beneath a glass mask filled with stardust. A spiral crown floated above its helm, orbiting like a halo.
Its voice came in layers:
"I am the Keeper of the Sky-Sanctum. Speak your purpose or be cast into the void."
Vaelen stepped forward.
"We seek the core. The place where the First Glyph can be rewritten."
The Keeper's crown stopped spinning.
"Only exiled names may enter."
Zaiya raised her hand.
"I carry the Origin Cut."
The Keeper turned to her.
"Then you must prove your unmaking."
Suddenly, the bridge beneath her feet cracked.
Zaiya fell, not downward, but inward.
She stood alone in a blank world. No sky. No ground. No light.
Just silence.
Then, a single spiral appeared before her. It flickered her name etched across it:
ZAIYA AVEL-KAI
Then… it broke.
And a new glyph began forming in its place.
Her breath caught.
Not a name. A new one.
But what would I become?
Back on the bridge, Vaelen grabbed Elya's arm.
"We have to trust her."
Elya didn't move.
"What if she can't come back?"
Vaelen's grip tightened.
"Then we carry her memory."
Zaiya floated in the void.
No senses. No form. Only the slow formation of a spiral glyph in front of her was an evolving symbol pulsing with ancient intention.
ZAIYA AVEL-KAI→?
A voice called out. Her voice. And not her voice.
"You've carried names not your own. Spoken words stolen by ancestors. What name do you claim now that all others have burned?"
She tried to answer.
But her voice failed.
Then, the spiral split.
On the left: her name, Zaiya Avel-Kai, wrapped in the glowing bonds of ancestral memory.
On the right: a blank space. Not empty, but… potential.
Words surfaced in her mind like boiling ink.
"A name is more than a label.""It's a binding. A wound. A key."Choose."
She reached toward her known name, then stopped.
If I were bound to what I was, I would remain a prisoner of what they expected me to be.
She turned to the unknown.
And whispered,
"I choose the name I write next."
The spiral pulsed white.
And vanished.
Back in the Sky-Sanctum, her body gasped.
She opened her eyes, exhaling light. The First Glyph burned cleanly on her collarbone now, simpler. Sharper. Hers.
The Keeper of the Sanctum stepped aside.
"You have passed."
Meanwhile, Vaelen and Elya stood before twin statues, guardians of the inner sanctum.
They rose as the pair approached massive, winged beings clad in celestial bronze and marked with glyphs of the Vowkeepers.
Their voices echoed in unison.
"Name your fallen. Speak the vow you broke."
Vaelen went still.
"Kairn," he said."My brother. I broke the vow to remember him as he truly was."
Elya stepped forward.
"My mother. I vowed never to forget her name. But I let them take it."
The statues bowed once.
And crumbled into dust.
Zaiya stepped beside them, renewed.
"The sanctum accepts us."
The air around them changed.
Glyphs across the clouds rearranged into coordinates, directing them to the heart of the sanctum: a floating temple obscured in pale light.
But before they could move, a dark spiral erupted from the horizon.
And a voice came, old as silence:
"Your rewrite ends here."
Across the sky rose a ship of null light, its hull covered in anti-script, a fortress of silence.
From its prow emerged the Pale Censor, no longer masked, her face a swirling void.
And behind her stood beings draped in blindfolds and ink-black robes.
"Nullborn," Vaelen growled."She's awakened them."
Zaiya braced herself.
"Then let them try to erase me again."
The sky split with silence.
The Nullborn fell like ink-streaks across the clouds, each one wielding anti-scripted weapons that hummed with paradox. Their faces were hidden behind wax masks, blank, eyeless, sealed by silence.
"Zaiya Avel-Kai," the Pale Censor's voice boomed across the sanctum."You wear a glyph that was meant to die. Give it up, and I will grant you stillness."
Zaiya stepped forward, wind tearing at her robes.
"I don't fear stillness. I define it."
She raised her hands.
The First Glyph pulsed once, then split into three sigils, orbiting her like moons.
The battle began.
Vaelen surged ahead, halberd blazing with rewritten memory. He met the first wave of Nullborn with devastating precision. Every strike dispersed them in flashes of inverted light, the moment of their erasure folded and repelled.
But they kept coming.
For every one that fell, two more emerged resurrected from names long forgotten. Unmarked. Untraceable.
"They're copies," Vaelen shouted. "Not born. Constructed."
Elya landed beside him, blade spinning through empty names.
"Then let's make them worthless."
Zaiya moved through the chaos toward the floating temple at the sanctum's heart. Each step activated a panel of glowing starlight, revealing layers of Lysian Avel-Syrin's writing encoded into the structure.
At the center stood a sealed gate, covered in shifting spirals.
A whisper rose from beneath it:
"Welcome, bearer of the unchosen name."
"Do you carry ink, memory, and blood?"
Zaiya nodded.
"Then the first Rewrite Font is yours."
The gate opened, revealing a shallow pool of mirrored starlight.
She knelt beside it.
Her reflection did not match her face.
It was older.
Worn.
But behind the eyes… clarity.
"What do I do?" she asked aloud.
"Write the truth they tried to erase," the pool replied.
She raised a trembling hand.
The First Glyph flowed from her fingertips like flame.
And she began to write:
"I am not the last.I am the beginning of memory returned."
The pool ignited.
Outside, the Nullborn faltered.
Their masks cracked.
Their forms blurred.
As if Zaiya's rewrite was unweaving their silence.
The Pale Censor screamed, her face erupting into a spiral of blackened noise.
"You dare rewrite what was erased?!"
She raised her arms, and beside her, a figure clad in Tribunal black, silver-plated, with hollow eyes and lips sewn shut, materialized.
Vaelen's steps slowed.
"Commander Dresk…"
It was his old mentor.
Dead for years.
Reprogrammed.
A Revenant of Silence.
Vaelen turned to Zaiya, who was still writing.
"Hold the sanctum," he said."I'll handle the past."
Then he charged forward toward the shadow of his greatest failure.