Before memory. Before time. There was the wound.
Elen was born in it.
Her first Whispered Event didn't happen in a temple or battlefield. It happened in a forgotten cellar beneath the Ash-Spires, where her blood cult carved truths into their skin and erased memories like offerings. At six years old, Elen walked through the mind of a dying priest, saw a hundred lives he'd lived, and came back screaming in languages no one taught her.
Her gift memory-walking made her sacred. And dangerous. To survive, she learned not to flinch at horrors. She dissected trauma like scripture. When others forgot pain, she memorized it.
But that came with a cost. She couldn't forget.
Her second Whispered Event came when the cult was raided by the Silent Blades. Fire tore through their sanctum. Elen, trapped beneath rubble, fell into a trance. In that moment, she walked into her own memory a recursive loop of abandonment, ritual, whispered lies and couldn't find the exit.
She spent what felt like years inside. Rewatching her mother sell her name for power. Her kin draining memory from children like hers.
She only escaped by tearing out her own emotional core from the memory and discarding it.
When they pulled her from the ruins, she had no tears left. Only cold precision. And an eidetic mind filled with things no child should carry.
Vera was different.
Raised far above ground in the Sky-Lattice Archives, she was the daughter of the Chrono-Weaver herself a woman who feared her own child. Vera's talent was terrifying: she didn't just manipulate time, she breathed it. Could see alternate sequences before they unfolded.
Her first Whispered Event came at eight. A failed containment ritual opened a micro-rift in her room. Vera fell in. Time fractured. She lived three thousand timelines simultaneously. In one, her mother smothered her. In another, she destroyed entire cities in sleep. In the worst, she was utterly alone, immortal, watching stars die.
She returned from the Event with white streaks in her hair and hands that never stopped trembling.
Her second came under testing by the Crucible. They wanted to know her limits. They pushed too hard.
The rift they induced backfired. Vera disappeared for 0.7 seconds.
To her, seventy years passed.
She came back gasping, feral. Eyes too old. Voice too silent. She didn't speak for a month. When she did, her first words were: "No one should see forever."
The test was called Inversion Mirror.
Two candidates enter. One's past invades the other's mind. No control. No filters. Just collision.
Elen and Vera were paired.
From the first moment, tension brewed. Elen moved like a ghost, every step calculated. Vera twitched at shadows, blinking as if she was tracking events ten seconds ahead. The instructors watched with interest.
The Mirror activated.
Elen stumbled. Her calm unraveled as Vera's memories all seventy years of isolation, madness, screaming stars flooded her. She curled into herself, whispering equations, trying to lock them in.
Vera fell to her knees as Elen's abandonment stormed into her soul: cold rituals, nameless childhood, screams sealed behind her eyes. For the first time, Vera wept.
They attacked each other. Not with weapons. With minds.
Vera accelerated Elen's thoughts into overdrive. Elen countered by force-feeding Vera recursive loops of her own timeline.
Blood vessels burst. Minds cracked. They collapsed just as the dome threatened to fracture.
Hours later, they sat side-by-side in recovery. Neither spoke. Just… breathed.
"I felt everything," Vera whispered eventually.
"So did I," Elen said. "And I hated it."
Pause.
"But I also understood you."
Another pause.
Vera nodded. "Same."
They didn't become friends. That wasn't the point. They became something better.
Known to each other.
When the five of them Seren, Elen, Vera, Lira, Sorin stood atop the Black Spire, their wounds weren't gone. But they were quieter. Managed. Understood.
They awaited their true test.
Above them, the sky churned black. Instructors watched from invisible eyes.
No more simulations.
No more theory.
The Final Trial was about to begin.
Five awakened.
Five minds sharpened by madness and memory, time and trauma.