The door sighed open like it hadn't in centuries.
No creak. No groan. Just a hush, like the final exhale of a sleeping giant. What lay beyond it wasn't darkness—but absence. Not the absence of light, but of meaning. A void that rejected definition.
Liora stepped in first.
The world behind the door didn't obey shape or structure. It rippled like oil over glass, constantly shifting—corridors that led in impossible loops, staircases folded like origami, hallways that bled into oceans without a horizon.
"I can't… I can't feel the ground," Bran said, his voice distant. "Are we walking or falling?"
Kael didn't answer.
His hand burned more now—the ink from the page crawling across his skin in patterns that shifted when you tried to read them. A forgotten script writing itself on living flesh.
The walls whispered as they walked. Words that had no tongue. Memories of people that never were.
"Turn back. You are still dream. He is waking."
They came upon a room carved from mirrors. Hundreds of Kaels stared back—some older, some broken, one with hollow eyes and bleeding hands.
A question echoed from the glass:
"Who were you before the Realms lied?"
Kael didn't answer. He couldn't. Because he didn't know.
Liora looked at her own reflection. In one mirror, she was a tree. In another, a book on fire. In a third, she saw her mother smiling with no face.
Bran stared into a cracked shard.
Nothing looked back.
Just a black smear where his soul should've been.
"I'm not supposed to exist," he muttered. "I was a page, not a person. A margin thought. Why do I remember things that never happened?"
Kael grabbed his shoulder. "Because the Realms remembered you wrong. But that doesn't make you less real."
Bran shook his head. "Then why does everything here forget me the moment I look away?"
At the chamber's heart stood a pedestal of bone.
Upon it: a single breath.
Not air. Not wind. But the concept of a breath—caught in a crystalline vial, pulsing like a dying star.
The Forgotten God's Breath.
Liora reached out, hesitating. "This… this can't exist."
"It doesn't," a voice answered.
The girl of feathers stood behind them again, though none had seen her enter. Her eyes no longer reflected. Now they absorbed—pulling in light, hope, certainty.
"That's why it's so dangerous," she said softly. "This breath was stolen from a god before he was named. Before he was even imagined."
Kael frowned. "But what does it do?"
She smiled.
"It rewrites."
Kael's thoughts crashed like waves.
The stolen page. The missing Librarians. The burning mark. The clock that ticked backward. And now—a bottled breath that could rewrite the story of the world.
"Why show us this?" Liora asked. "Why now?"
The girl stepped forward. Her shadow didn't follow.
"Because the Realms are not as they were. Time is a spine—and someone cracked it. The Librarians tried to mend it. You three… you're the footnotes left behind. But that breath… that's the prologue to everything that could be."
Kael looked down at the vial.
It pulsed in sync with his heartbeat.
And for the first time, he felt something stir deep inside. Not fear.
But recognition.
Suddenly, Bran collapsed.
His shadow peeled from his feet and stood on its own.
It looked at Kael. And smiled.
"You shouldn't have come here," it said in Bran's voice. "Now the Forgotten will remember you."
And behind them…
Something began to breathe.