The storm came without warning.
One moment, the air around Caldrith's Basin was still—crisp with the scent of stone and ash. The next, a low hum began to rise from the Convergence Stone like a heartbeat quickening in panic.
Kaelen jolted upright from his uneasy rest near the fire, instinct pulling him to his feet before thought could catch up.
Lightning lanced the sky in silence. And then—
The glyph flared.
Not one.
Three.
His. Selene's. Seraphine's.
All at once.
Kaelen gasped as the glyph across his chest burned white. Seraphine shouted something, but the words blurred, pulled apart by the wind. Selene was already reaching for him—her hand brushing his arm—and then everything tilted.
The world shattered.
He didn't fall. He was dragged.
It wasn't real.
And yet it was.
The dreamscape bled in around him—shards of memory suspended in violet light, fragments of thought strung together by pain and time.
He stood in a field of broken stars.
Not alone.
Selene stood to his right, eyes wide with terror and wonder. Seraphine to his left, one hand lifted, tracing the threads of glyphs hanging in the air like musical notes frozen mid-song.
Kaelen stared ahead.
There—across the field—stood a boy. Barely twelve. Dark-haired, wrapped in tattered robes. His sigil glowed faintly beneath dirt-streaked skin.
The boy looked up.
And he had Kaelen's face.
Seraphine exhaled sharply. "This is your memory?"
"No," Kaelen whispered. "It's… it's his."
The child didn't move. He just stood there, staring, tears streaming down his cheeks in silent rivers.
The sky above twisted. A Tower loomed in the distance—but not like the one they knew. This one bled light, runes spiraling in slow agony down its sides, screaming against the heavens.
Selene stepped forward slowly. "He's showing us something…"
The vision lurched.
Suddenly they were inside the ruins. Broken stone halls. Screaming in the distance. Magic unraveling in the walls. Kaelen's younger self ran through the corridors, clutching a burned glyph-script to his chest.
Behind him—men in robes. Tower-marked. Chasing him.
A woman's voice—soft, fractured by memory—echoed behind them.
"He's the last! Don't let them take him—don't let the bloodline vanish again—"
A blast of energy tore through the memory. Walls exploded into flame. Kaelen felt his knees buckle, the pain of memory not his own crushing his breath.
Selene cried out. "Kaelen!"
But Kaelen didn't hear her.
He was back inside the boy's mind now.
He was remembering.
Not a child.
Not a student.
A weapon.
He had killed someone in this memory.
A Tower Adept. Right before they silenced his mind.
And buried the memory so deep, it bled into his bloodline.
The vision snapped.
And the three of them were thrown back into the waking world—gasping, retching, drenched in sweat and fog-light.
Seraphine was the first to rise.
Her hand glowed faintly with a stabilization glyph, her body trembling.
"That boy… was you."
Kaelen shook his head, dazed. "He wasn't me. Not exactly."
Selene knelt beside him. "He had your eyes. Your pain. What else could he be?"
He looked up at her, jaw clenched.
"I think I've lived more than one life."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
But Seraphine didn't back away. She took a step closer, eyes sharp, voice trembling with realization.
"That's why the glyphs obey you even when you don't understand them. Why the Convergence Stone called your true name. You're not just a scion of Veritas… you're a fragment of the origin."
Kaelen stared at her.
"I'm a what?"
Seraphine exhaled shakily, voice distant. "The first Veritas line wasn't founded. It was remembered. Passed down through rebirths. Lives sealed in glyph-marks. If what we saw was real—then you're not just the heir."
She looked down.
"You're the beginning."
Far away, at the Tower Citadel, the Envoy trembled for the first time in years.
"They've touched the Wellspring."
The Herald knelt before her, glyph-blade sheathed. "Shall we intervene?"
"No." The Envoy's eyes burned with violet flame. "Let them remember. Let the boy wake. And when he does... we claim the truth he holds."
Later that night, Kaelen sat alone beside the embers.
He barely heard Mira's snores, or Arkyn's restless shifting. His chest still ached from the glyph-burn, and his thoughts spiraled around that child's face.
The fear in those eyes.
The blood on his hands.
He didn't remember it clearly.
But he felt it.
The guilt.
The power.
And something else.
A warmth beside him.
Selene.
She didn't say anything.
She just sat, her fingers brushing against his.
He looked over.
And for once, didn't pull away.
"I'm not him," he whispered.
"I know," she murmured. "But whoever you were… you're still you now."
Kaelen turned toward her.
And in that moment, it wasn't a vision. Or a prophecy. Or a glyph.
It was just two people, broken in different ways, finding a quiet in each other that no magic could name.
And in the dark, Seraphine watched from the shadows.
Not jealous.
But aching.
Because she knew now what she'd always feared.
She wasn't the one in his past.
She might be the one meant for his future.
But not his present.
Not yet.
Chapter End