They left the Hollow Below the Sky with the weight of an unanswered question pressing behind their ribs.
Cael didn't speak for most of the journey back to the surface. Even the ambient hum of Essentia currents in the glacier air seemed muted. Something in the world had acknowledged him—and now the silence was watching.
They crested the ridge at dusk.
The wind returned. Real wind—biting, howling, full of substance. The first familiar thing he'd felt in days.
Mireth broke the silence.
"You touched a Root Thought, Cael."
He nodded, slowly. "It touched back."
She stared at him. "You didn't answer it."
"No," he said. "But I think I will. One day."
She considered that, then pulled a scroll from her pack—a torn map from one of her relic expeditions. She laid it flat against the ice, weighting it with mana.
The map shimmered.
At its center, a new glyph had appeared—small, faint, like a dot burned into the paper by accident.
It marked the Hollow.
But now, six other points around the known world glimmered faintly.
Some were on mountaintops. Others deep in sea caverns. One floated above a shattered plateau.
Cael frowned. "What are these?"
Mireth whispered, "Echoes. Something awakened. And they're responding."
They set up camp in a wind-cut cove that night, halfway down the ridge. Cael tried to rest, but his dreams were sharp now—full of things he almost recognized.
Seven thrones arranged in a spiral.
Each throne faced inward, yet none saw the same thing.
A glyph rotated slowly in the center.
He awoke before dawn, heart pounding.
The next morning, Cael spent hours writing in his field journal. He sketched the spiral. The Root Thought. The branching lines of fate he'd seen for a moment. He wrote not just in ink, but with Essentia tracing—pressing his mana signature into the page, so that the words would remember even if his body didn't.
Mireth watched, not interrupting.
Eventually, she spoke.
"You're changing."
Cael looked up, pale from focus.
"I know. And I don't think I can stop it."
That night, they reached an abandoned outpost near the base of the Eastern Shelf. It had been built before the Fracture—when ice mages still tried to study the deeper glacial strata. Now, it was just empty stone and faded sigils, dusted over by time and snow.
Cael explored while Mireth set up wards.
In the outpost's collapsed archive, he found a wall carving—half-buried under frost. With a spark of Void Essentia, he brushed the ice away.
The mural depicted a man with stars for eyes, standing in front of a door with seven locks.
Below, a single line in runes older than kingdom-ink:
"One will hold what the world forgot, lest the world forget itself."
Cael's hand went to his chest. The glyph under his skin hummed.
And for a second, he remembered something that had never happened.
Later, by the fire, Cael asked, "What happens if I become one of them?"
Mireth looked up. "One of what?"
"Those thrones. The ones from the Root Thought's memory. I think… I think I'm being placed."
Mireth's eyes didn't flinch. "Then you'll have to decide if the throne shapes the mind, or the mind reshapes the throne."
Cael chuckled faintly. "That's a very poetic way of saying I'm screwed."
"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe you're becoming what the world needs, not what it wants."
As they packed the next morning, a storm gathered.
But Cael didn't sense it like he normally did—not with his weather glyphs, not with Essentia pulses.
He felt it in the void between thoughts, like the Root Thought had begun rearranging the world's narrative threads.
A snowstorm whispered his name.
A relic from the past had begun dreaming again.
And far to the south, something ancient blinked for the first time in an age.
The world hadn't forgotten the Void.
It had simply buried the name of the one who would hold it.