...
The mana-beasts were gone, but the ruin still hummed.
Even after her first battle, Aelira couldn't stop replaying it in her mind the heat of the magic, the way the flames had listened. She felt different now. Not powerful exactly, but… seen. Connected. They rested briefly while Oren re-inscribed a protective ward over the ruin's entrance. Thorne sharpened his axe nearby, pretending not to watch Aelira with quiet curiosity.
"There's something else here," Oren said after a time, hopping down from a vine-covered ledge. "I felt it when you lit the flame."
Aelira blinked. "Another spell?"
"Not quite." He cocked his head. "More like an echo. A memory caught in the stone. And it wants you to find it." That word again echo. She felt it too, now that he said it. A distant pulling, like a whisper just beneath hearing.
They descended deeper into the ruin. The hallways narrowed, winding downward through earth and silence. Strange murals lined the walls—depictions of starbursts, winged figures, and a symbol that reappeared again and again: a stylized sun entwined with a spiral. "The Sunvale crest," Oren confirmed. "This place may have once been a sanctuary of your ancestors." They reached a sealed door, etched with runes that pulsed faintly when Aelira approached.
She laid her hand on the stone. The door sighed and opened. Beyond was a circular chamber, its center dominated by a cracked crystal pedestal. Dust floated in the still air. And near the pedestal, half-hidden in rubble, lay a figure motionless, cloaked in tattered robes. Aelira knelt beside it...
It was a woman, skeletal now, but once regal. A faded sigil marked the cloak's collar: the same sun-spiral crest. And clutched in her hand was a pendant shaped like a tiny mirror. "She was waiting," Oren murmured. "Perhaps for you." Aelira reached for the pendant and as her fingers closed around it, her vision shifted.
---
The chamber transformed.
She saw it whole, radiant with light. The woman now alive, standing proud, facing a gathering of mages. She spoke with passion warning of something coming, something tearing holes between worlds. "If the Veil weakens," the woman said, "souls will drift. Lost ones will return… but not as we remember them."
Aelira gasped....
The vision flickered. The crystal pedestal cracked. The woman fell. Magic surged and collapsed in on itself. And then nothing.
---
When Aelira opened her eyes, she was back in the present. She clutched the pendant tightly, her hand shaking. "She knew," she whispered. "About the Veil. About reincarnation." "Perhaps she tried to stop it," Oren said softly. "Or perhaps… she made sure someone could find their way through."
Aelira stood slowly. The pendant was warm against her palm. Whatever this place had been, it was more than a ruin. It was a message a memory preserved for her. As they stepped back into the sun-dappled clearing above, Thorne glanced at her.
"You look like you saw a ghost."
"I think I did," she said. "But she wasn't scary. She was waiting to be remembered."
And with the pendant resting at her chest, Aelira felt it again—that growing light inside her. A light not just of power, but of purpose.
.....