The road dissolved as they ran.
Not collapsed—forgotten.
Pebbles blurred into dust. Dust became air. Footsteps landed on things that might have been bridges or might have been years.
The path that smelled of rain led them into a low valley carved like a wound. Its floor shimmered—not with water, but with a slow-moving surface of liquid light.
The River That Remembers was silent. Yet every ripple carried voices, some screaming, some laughing, some whispering prayers no one living still knew.
Nyrelle slowed at the bank.
"Careful. It doesn't just recall. It returns."
Lys eyed the glowing current. "Meaning?"
"Step in wrong," Nyrelle said, "and you'll walk out somewhere—or somewhen—you've already been. And not as you are now."
Ashling's gaze followed the slow swirl of current. She felt the anchor inside her hum, not in warning, but in longing.
Keiran's voice brushed her mind:
"Here, I buried the choice I could not make."
Across the river, faint in the shimmering haze, stood a dark spire. Its base was wrapped in vines of glass, and above it, carved into the stone, glowed two interlocking circles—the twin moons touching.
"That's where the anchor wants to go," Ashling said.
Nyrelle frowned. "That's the Spire of Recurrence. Not even the Concordium maps it anymore."
Lys scanned the banks. "So… how do we cross?"
Nyrelle's answer was simple. "You don't cross the River That Remembers. You trade with it."
They knelt by the bank. The current's glow shifted toward them, like an ear turning to listen.
Nyrelle reached into her satchel and withdrew a small inked scrap—a record of her first kill. She let it fall into the water. The memory didn't sink. It dissolved into sparks, swept away downstream.
The current brightened, and for a heartbeat, the riverbed revealed a path of pale stones.
"It takes something you can't get back," she murmured. "And in return, it lets you through."
Lys hesitated. His offering was a silver badge—the only proof he had ever been more than a hired blade. The water claimed it without sound. Another section of the path revealed itself.
Ashling's turn.
The anchor's hum grew urgent. She knew what it wanted.
Her hand went to the memory-core.
She let the surface brush her fingertips. The river shivered, showing her an image: Keiran, standing in the Shaleven courtyard, holding out his hand to someone unseen.
The memory was hers now. She could keep it.
Or she could give it back.
Keiran's voice murmured:
"You can't carry all of me. Some pieces belong here."
Ashling let it go.
The river flared—blinding—then stilled. The full path across appeared, stones glowing like moons underfoot.
They crossed in silence.
Halfway across, the current began to run upstream, dragging sparks of traded memories back toward the spire. Ashling glanced down and saw her own offering drift beneath her feet, circling, as though considering returning to her.
But it didn't.
The far bank was colder. The air tasted like old storms.
Up close, the Spire of Recurrence seemed impossibly tall, its top lost in clouds that swirled in the wrong direction.
Nyrelle spoke first. "If the Hall of Severance was where he was broken… this is where he first began to fracture."
Ashling stepped toward the gates, feeling the anchor beat harder with every stride.
A voice met them before the threshold—familiar, sharp, and entirely unwelcome:
"You took the anchor."
From the shadows emerged a figure in obsidian and silver, helm under one arm—an Echo-Redactor they'd seen before.
But his face was wrong.
Because it was Keiran's.