A canyon cut through the realm. Wind howled in the voices of the forgotten.
One glyph blinked on the cliff face.
Cree leaned too close.
A glyph pulsed on the cliff face—veined with light, trembling like it remembered being carved by a scream. The symbols rearranged when watched, fractal lines bleeding down the stone like ink trying to recall a name.
Cree leaned closer. The air around the glyph tasted like copper and ozone. A thin filament of light extended toward their brow—
"Don't—" Daviyi started.
Too late.
The light touched Cree's forehead. Their spine arched sharply—too fast—like a marionette yanked upward. A searing line traced from brow to navel, as if memory had decided to dissect them. The skin on their arms crackled faintly—veins rearranging into glyphs before fading.
Their voice, when it came, wasn't their own. Just a pitch too high. As if the sentence was spoken through a borrowed throat.
Cree's knees buckled. Not from pain—from subtraction.
Something was gone.
It had teeth.
Niraí stepped forward, eyes sharp but voice soft. "That name is still somewhere. Memory doesn't forget—it just misfiles what hurts too much."
Daviyi nodded grimly. "This realm doesn't erase. It catalogs. It waits for you to ask the wrong question—and gives you the answer that ruins you."
Hydeius stood further back, shadows curling around his boots. "It didn't take your brother's name, Cree. It took your right to say it. There's a difference. A cruel one."
Cree blinked.
"What... was my brother's name?"
A shape lingered where the name should be. A laugh. A scar. Fingers brushing ash from a child's brow. But not the name. It wasn't absence—it was theft. Like being robbed of a scar and left wondering why your skin felt whole.
Cree touched their temple. Not in pain. In mourning for something they still loved.
Could no longer claim.
A laugh hovered in the hollow behind their teeth—too familiar to be theirs, too distant to name.
Cree didn't cry. But they did forget to breathe.
Cree's throat worked—once, twice.
"I can still feel him. His hand. His voice. But his name's gone. Like I traded it for a memory that only pretends to comfort."
They looked at their flame. It pulsed faintly—like a heart trying to remember a beat.
"Did I give it away? Or did he take it when I wasn't watching?"
Just for a moment.
It felt like betrayal. Not of him—of themselves.
A smell flickered—wet leather and cloves. Someone humming off-key near a furnace. But the name... gone.
Ecayrous watched like a surgeon watches a wound decide whether to bleed.
Before he smiled, running a finger along the flickering glyphs. They recoiled from his touch.
"Names are such brittle things. Especially when they forget who they belong to."
Their voice carried no panic—only absence. Like someone speaking from behind glass.
The glyph on the wall pulsed again. The lines rewrote themselves—and for a moment, so did Cree's veins. Thin glowing threads lit up beneath their skin, as if their body was trying to remember a version it hadn't been born as.
The silence was instant. Sharpened.
Something in Cree's flame guttered low—not out of fear. Out of absence.
"Don't," Daviyi warned. "It'll rewrite you."
Too late. Cree stumbled back, blinking.
No one answered.
A cathedral of black bone rose from the ash—ribs arched into spires, vertebrae stacked into towers.
Every pillar was a femur—marrow scooped, sigils etched where growth once lived. Some were still warm.
The ceiling quivered—stretched vocal cords stitched between spires, vibrating with screams too old for memory. Beneath their feet, the floor pulsed—a lattice of crushed ribcages, some still twitching, reacting to breath and heartbeat like an echo too loyal to die.
One snapped. Not with a crack—but a wet snap, like a throat clearing itself of history.
The scream followed.
It wasn't human.
It was the building.
Inside, screams twisted into a choir—not sung, but exhaled by lungs preserved in crystal.
The air clung to skin like mucus remembering warmth. Qaritas recoiled slightly—not from heat, but from the feeling of something too intimate sliding across his shoulders.
The air trembled with harmonic despair.
Victims floated midair—suspended by cords of nerve-thread. Their mouths hung open in silent horror, tongues etched with glyphs of repentance. Eyes blinked, but saw nothing. One began to drool—blood, not spit—black as apology.
He brushed bone dust from a rib-pillar and whispered like sharing a secret with the building itself.
"Every scream you hear? It's still working."
The scent of scorched marrow hung in the air—sweet, rotten, and almost maternal. It clung to the back of their tongues, thick enough to taste, tender enough to confuse.
The cathedral moaned. A low, wet sound—like breath escaping a wound too old to heal.
One scream ended mid-note. The cathedral swallowed the silence like a lover keeping a secret.
Ayla's voice was flat, but her hand trembled once. "You carved my lullabies into this ceiling."
Ecayrous chuckled low, almost fond. "And yet they echo sweeter than your screams. Isn't that love, Ayla? Breaking something just enough so it sings only for you?"
He leaned closer, not touching her—just letting the air remember. "I never took your voice. I tuned it. You're welcome."
Then when he says:
"And look how beautiful you've become."
Her soul-light flickered. Not dimming—shaking. Like it remembered a version of her that had once screamed and wasn't allowed to stop.
Qaritas took a step forward. His vision edged with heat—not from fire, but from blood trying to boil backward through his veins. Divine wrath coiled inside him like a blade waiting to unmake.
His curse pulsed—light bled from beneath his skin in jagged bursts, curling into symbols that didn't belong to him.
His bones ached—not with rage, but with invitation.
His jaw clenched. Not from restraint—from pressure. The curse coiled up his spine like molten chain, branding names onto his ribs. Some weren't his. Some were versions of himself he hadn't lived yet.
One pulse of light seared behind his sternum—an unfamiliar sigil burning through his shirt. He doubled over briefly, knees catching the floor. The smell of sulfur and scorched time filled his throat.
"If I let it speak, it won't be me speaking anymore."
"If I scream... it'll sound too much like a yes."
"I wasn't built for this," Qaritas thought, teeth gritted. "I wasn't supposed to… want it."
But the light inside him curled like a promise spoken in fire. It wanted him whole. It wanted him ruined. And it wanted him willing.
"I'm not a god," he told himself. "I'm not his echo."
The curse didn't answer. It pulsed, slow and soft, like it disagreed.
He could feel it shaping words inside him—words not born from mouth or mind, but marrow. Old names. Old claims. Not yet spoken aloud. But waiting.
The curse wanted to speak. Jagged and wrong, like his bones remembered a war his mind hadn't survived yet.
The light withdrew—hissing, resentful.
His chest still glowed faintly beneath the skin—an echo of the godform he nearly became.
Every breath tasted like regret and copper.
And the curse whispered again, more insistent now.
"Let me finish the prayer. Just this once."
As if it had nearly remembered the shape of godhood.
The light inside him pulsed again—not jagged this time, but seductive. Like a breath whispering: "Let me finish you."
He tried to focus on Ayla's voice in the bond. But his skin burned with symbols not spoken
"I'm not ready. I'm not worthy. I'm not him."
But what if I'm not him either?
The curse whispered back, soft as embers:
"You weren't made for godhood. You were carved to remember it."
His grip on control thinned like stretched parchment. He didn't know if his next breath would be his—or the curse's.
Ayla's hand snapped out. Not gentle. Commanding.
Their bond flared—not just memory, but shared ache. Her presence surged into his spine like a name whispered through iron.
"Not yet," she thought into the link. "Not here."
"Don't let him break you now."
The road to Hellbound. Screaming faces pressed into obsidian glass.
Every step brought muffled shrieks.
Komus stared downward. "I know this one."
He said no more.
Hidden behind Demalik Castle, the entrance was not a door—but a hunger. A split in the wall of the ribcage palace, pulsing like a wound that wanted to be entered.
Ayla stopped walking.
"No," she whispered. Too soft.
But the others were already turning.
The corridor opened into a chamber of flesh—alive and still breathing. The walls pulsed. The floor twitched. Faces rose from the stone—sobbing, laughing, sleeping.
The air was perfumed.
Sweet.
Rotten.
Like childhood and blood and sex and lies.
"This is where you broke, Ayla," Ecayrous said lightly. "But gods, how you sang before you did."
Ayla stood just behind Qaritas, her steps slower now—deliberate. Niraí kept close to her side, one hand twitching toward a blade. Daviyi lingered near the entrance, glancing back.
Ecayrous walked ahead unchallenged, the cathedral parting around him like a loyal wound remembering its master.
Ecayrous didn't walk into the chamber. He returned.
The walls pulsed in recognition. The harem figures lifted their heads—some without eyes, some without hope.
"This place was holy," he said, stepping over a sobbing girl with stitched lips. "Not because I broke them. But because they sang after they broke."
He gestured toward the ceiling, where blood had dried in the shape of Ayla's first name. "She sang lullabies until her voice frayed. Until it wanted to stay here."
He leaned closer to Ayla, voice dust-soft, "They remember. Even if you've spent lifetimes trying to forget."
From the gloom, figures emerged.
Harem members—dozens of them. Draped in torn silks stitched into their skin. Eyes hollow. Mouths slack or sewn shut. Some crawled. Some stood. Some danced slowly to music that no longer played.
They did not look at Ayla.
They didn't scream or speak or flee. They merely reacted—like shadows obeying heat.
When Ecayrous stepped into the chamber, the entire harem shifted.
Bodies fell to their knees in perfect, painful synchronization. Arms lifted like puppets. Spines arched as if their bones remembered obedience better than breath. Some wept. Not from sorrow—from worship.
One spoke through mangled lips, barely intelligible:
"Father of fire. Mouth of stars. Please... choose me again."
Another, skin so thin it was translucent, reached toward him with a trembling hand. "I'm still clean. I haven't forgotten your name."
Ecayrous smiled as if he were walking through a garden "Still blooming, I see," he murmured. "Rot makes excellent fertilizer."
Her body didn't shake. That would've been mercy. Instead, it remembered—quietly, cruelly.
And the silence inside her wasn't empty. It watched. It waited. It remembered every lullaby she'd been forced to whisper into blood.
The silence she'd once mastered now rose like a noose in her throat.
One look no older than 19 years—sat curled in the corner. A thread of saliva hanging from her sewn lips. She rocked slowly, repeating one word through bleeding stitches:
Ayla didn't cry. That had been taken long ago.Her hand twitched.Her stomach hollowed.That word knew her name.
"Obey. Obey. Obey."
And still, none looked at Ayla.
But she saw them—just for a breath—how they once were.
Niraí slipping sweets into her palm before lessons. The youngest humming lullabies off-key, two notes behind. One girl—eyes full of questions—had braided her hair with crushed flower stems.
Ayla didn't remember their names.
But she remembered how it felt to be loved by them.
That was worse.
Ecayrous didn't stop walking.
But as he passed her, he whispered—soft and triumphant:
"See what I've made in your absence? They don't even remember your name."
He hadn't taken her name. He'd stolen the scar it left behind—and made them worship the wound.
Torches burned without flame. Instead, they bled memories—visions flickering in the fireless light.
One showed a young woman, mouth sewn shut, learning to dance before a god.
Qaritas stared. "Is that—?"
"My old room," Ayla said. Her voice was dust.