He opened his eyes, but the world did not return.Only shadows moved — slowly — like drowned things beneath the skin of reality.

  Orrny remained still.The silence screamed louder than any death he could remember.

  The air smelled of ashes and forgotten names.

  He stepped. His foot crushed something soft — not stone. Not dirt.Flesh.

  Then came the whisper:

  — “You survived... but did you remain?”

  His vision trembled. The walls twisted into ribs. The sky wept in reverse.

  He saw Lyssara’s smile — a flicker — her ughter echoing through time.And then her body, lifeless. But untouched.As if death had apologized.

  The boy screamed without sound.

  His knees gave out, but the earth did not embrace him.

  Something held him.

  Bones. Roots. Veins of memory growing from the ground like hands.

  — “They did this to you.”

  He turned.

  The path began — bodies half-buried in soot. Cw marks on stone.Mouths frozen in apology.

  His hands trembled. His chest burned where the cursed mark still pulsed —throbbing like a second heart.

  And deeper inside him...

  A voiceless voice.A breath without lungs.Something that slept in the cracks of his soul.

  — “You are what remains of us.”

  He fell. Not from weakness — but from memory.

  Fragments returned:

  — Lyssara drawing stars in the dirt as elders screamed in the distance.— The two hiding in the temple ruins, eating stolen bread, dreaming of wings.— A moment where she kissed his mark and whispered:

  — “Even if they hate you... I won’t.”

  He cried. Not as a boy. Nor as a man.But as a wound that understood it would never close.

  Then the wind carried something — something ancient.

  A tower of bone and smoke, rising ahead, glowing with a dim red light.

  The Cn’s Urn.

  Their sacred pyre.Where ancestors were offered.Where the failed were burned.

  He knew he had to go there.

  But something was watching.

  A shapeless shadow. A gaze made of silence.

  Orrny took a step toward the Urn.

  The ground trembled.

  And the whispers smiled.