It took Serelith five days to reach the edge of the Wyrmroot Expanse, where the forest thinned and the earth turned white with bone-dust. The Temple of Lost Echoes did not rise from the land — it sank, sunken deep into the crust like a wound, its towers inverted, buried upside-down in the black rock like stalactites grasping at the core of the world.
She stood on the precipice, heart pounding. The only sound was the hum of the Veil — stretched so thin here, it was like skin about to tear.
They're watching, she thought.
Not the Hollow Court. Not the gods.
Something older.
She descended the spiral path carved by hands long vanished. Symbols blinked along the walls as she passed, reacting to the blood in her veins. The First Tongue pulsed faintly in her chest, like a second heartbeat. The deeper she went, the harder it became to remember simple things: her mother's face, her favorite story as a child, even her own voice.
This place devours memory to protect itself.
At the base of the descent lay a door — not a gate, but a mirror of obsidian, fogged and rippling. Carved into its edges were the same words she had spoken in Vareth: the words that cracked time.
A whisper greeted her. Not aloud — inside her.
"Only the unmade may pass."
She hesitated.
Then she spoke her name in the First Tongue — not the one given to her at birth, but the name hidden in her marrow. The name even she didn't know until it unfurled from her tongue like smoke.
The mirror screamed — and opened.
Inside, the Temple bloomed like a reverse cathedral: gravity twisted, architecture knotted like roots, doors within doors, stairs that ended in sky. Light and shadow fought in constant flux, and in the center, resting on a pedestal of living bone, sat the Codex of the First Tongue.
It breathed.
Its cover shifted, the letters rearranging like ants made of ink. It was not a book. It was a mouth. A memory. A god that had been bound in language.
Serelith stepped closer.
The Codex turned to her, its voice neither male nor female, neither spoken nor thought.
"Daughter of ash. Heir of the wound. Do you seek to learn… or to undo?"
She faltered. Her hand trembled over the surface of the Codex.
"I want to survive," she whispered.
"Then you will not."
"But you may become."
The Codex opened.
And everything changed.
Visions pierced her: realms layered atop one another like skins on a snake, cities that sang their citizens to sleep, gods caged in crystal moons, a war not of armies but of memory itself. She saw herself in each — as a savior, a traitor, a vessel.
And she saw the Unmaker.
It wore no face. It wore hers.
Serelith screamed as the knowledge tore through her like wildfire. And when she awoke, the Codex was gone — but its script was burned into her flesh, curling up her arms in ink and fire.
Her eyes no longer saw only the world.
They saw the truth behind it.