The Holy Quarter of Arath Tal did not burn.
It faded.
Stone by stone, breath by breath, it forgot how to remember itself. The whitewashed towers of devotion once shimmered with sermons carved into their marble veins — now those verses peeled like skin, flakes of sacred law drifting into gutters that carried no more prayers.
Prexie Echo moved through it like a woman half-unwritten.
Her veil was torn. Her robes, once dipped in the ink of covenant oaths, had faded to the color of dusk-soaked parchment. No one stopped her. No one saw her. The guards at the reliquary gates looked through her as if she were memory instead of matter. And in a way, she was.
She had not eaten in days. But she had consumed whispers.
That was enough.
"They burned it not with fire," she thought, her sandals scraping along an alley of cracked stained glass, "but with silence."
Her mind wandered — not by will, but by reflex — to the fall of the Temple of Ink.
