Ira's full memory blooms. But in doing so, it attracts the attention of something that once hunted the Blackwood line to extinction. And it still remembers the taste.
The Blooming
Ira stood before the Hollow Mirror in the depths of the shrine below Noxvallis, the final seal on her fragmented soul cracking open. Asher watched from behind her, heart pounding.
When she breathed, the room breathed with her. When she blinked, the reflection in the mirror moved independently, peeling back not just memory—but intention. Her past didn't simply return. It reassembled.
The orphanage fire. The white-feathered mask. The girl in the grave with no headstone—forgotten by all but Asher.
"I was the first," she whispered, eyes widening as pieces clicked into place. "I was the one they left behind to make you stronger."
Asher stepped forward. "You weren't forgotten. You were stolen."
Ira's power surged, not as magic—but memory. And in this world, memory was identity.
Far above them, a creature stirred.
It was older than the city, older than names, older than lies. In Velvora, it had no voice. In Noxvallis, it found language again.
The Unhunted.
Born from the Nameless Woods where the First Blackwood made his pact, the Unhunted was a predator designed to find and consume those who dared to give themselves a name.
When the Blackwood line swore their Oath, they cloaked themselves from the beast's scent.
But Ira's memory re-bloomed. And the scent returned.
The Unhunted stepped through shadow and ash, its breath fogging glass miles away. Teeth made from broken prayers. Feathers like rotting pages.
It was coming.
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Feather and Fang
The group gathered in the safehouse beneath the Aether Spire. Lucien, Danya, Rosa, Hark. All were shaken by recent events, but nothing could prepare them for the sound they now heard in the wind:
chirr. scratch. sniff.
"Something is hunting Ira," Lucien said, drawing a spell-dagger. "And it remembers her from when she didn't have a name."
Hark's face paled. "The Unhunted... it's not a beast. It's a god that feeds on forgotten sins."
Asher turned to Ira, whose eyes glowed with more than power now—awareness.
"You don't run from it," she said, voice low. "You invite it. And then you kill it."
They faced it beneath the dying cherry blossom tree, the one that hadn't bloomed since Velvora fell. The petals were black.
The Unhunted arrived without warning. Not a step. Not a roar. Just presence.
It lunged at Ira. Asher blocked it.
It wasn't strength he used, nor spell. He used remembrance.
He reminded the world who Ira was. He spoke of her laughter. Her pain. Her silence beneath the orphanage's floorboards.
The more he remembered, the more real she became. And the Unhunted—
It choked on her name.
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Victory… Almost
The beast fell, impaled by a fang of light drawn from Ira's own spine—not literal, but symbolic. The memory of her pain had become weapon.
The creature dissolved into white ash.
But as it died, it whispered one thing:
"One city fell. Another will rise. You remember now—but memory is a door. And something worse is knocking."
Ira turned to Asher. "There are more like me. Other names. Other debts."
And across the Pillar Sea, the city of Lysdane—long hidden under a veil of silence—flared into existence.
[End of Chapter 131]
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Chapter 132 – "Gods in the Gutters"
Noxvallis begins to stabilize—but not in the way Asher hoped. As factions rise from old ruins, the gods once worshipped in alleys and gutters begin to stir. And they remember what the Blackwoods took from them.