The Hollow Queen's vision haunted her.
Not just because it showed a version of herself crowned in ruin, but because something inside her recognized it. Like a memory that hadn't happened yet.
Serelith fled the Hollow Court with the Codex thrumming against her ribs. The forest beyond was no safer — branches bent toward her as if listening, and the wind carried whispers in languages no mortal throat should speak.
She found a ruined chapel carved into a cliffside, half-swallowed by vines and time. The sigil above its shattered door matched one of the thrones in the Court: the blank one. The Forgotten God. The god without a name.
Inside, the Codex stirred. Words unspooled across her vision.
> You once belonged to this place.
You were never meant to survive it.
Serelith lit a flame from her palm. It cast no shadow.
At the altar, she found a book bound in bone — The Remembrance Ledger. Not a record of the living. A record of those the world had tried to forget.
Her hands trembled as she opened it.
Page after page was written in a fractured version of the First Tongue. But one name — hers — appeared in a dozen variations:
> Serelith the Unmourned.
Serelith Wyrmblood.
Serelith, Daughter of the Veil.
Each name linked to a different time, a different choice. Different selves.
Some had died in infancy. Others had become warlords. One had turned the gods themselves to ash.
She fell to her knees. "What am I?"
The Codex answered, not in words, but a pulse of knowing:
> You are every choice that was never made.
You are the crack in the mirror.
You are the reason the gods built the Veil.
Tears blurred her vision. Not from sorrow — from rage.
"They tried to erase me."
> No.
They tried to erase what you could become.
She rose slowly. The altar behind her cracked open, revealing a staircase spiraling into the earth. A place forgotten even by the fae.
The Codex pulsed once more.
> Go.
Below, your first name waits.
The name you gave yourself before they took it.
Serelith stepped into the dark, no longer afraid of what she might find — only of what she might remember.
Because if the Hollow Queen's vision was true…
…then the only one who could stop the Unmaker was the one who could become it.