To carry the silence is to remember what the fire forgot.
The brazier pulsed.
Blue-white light shimmered in slow rhythm — not flame, but ice given memory. It was not warmth they felt, but weight. The kind that wrapped around the bones. Ancient. Familiar.
Rei stood at the edge of the Seal, breath misting in the air. The others were still, silent.
Kaia's gaze narrowed. "That isn't fire. That's—"
"Skarnveil," Durik whispered. His voice cracked, not from fear — from reverence. "The sixth of the Seven Seals. The one bound beneath the Forge."
In the center of the chamber, on the obsidian slab, the figure lay unmoving — the Warden. Its skin shimmered with runic frost. In its chest, embedded like a frozen heart, pulsed the shard.
Skarnveil.
A teardrop of blue crystal. Frost-born. Alive.
Rei stepped forward.
The mark on his ribs began to stir — not in pain, but in conflict. The Void within him recognized what it saw: a cage meant for what he carried.
"Do you seek to break the silence?"
The voice did not speak in sound, but across the chamber like wind carved in stone.
Kaia flinched. Durik fell to one knee.
Rei held his ground.
"I didn't come to break," he said. "I came for truth."
The shard pulsed again. The Warden stirred — slowly. Its limbs moved like glacial stone thawing after centuries. Runes shimmered across its chest and arms, humming softly.
"The truth is bound. And every truth broken becomes hunger."
Durik muttered, "The Warden speaks the Last Script… no mortal tongue."
But Rei understood it.
He stepped closer, hand out. "If the truth can be carried… I will bear it."
"You carry silence already.You carry the wound.But can you carry the frost that remembers… when the fire forgets?"
The shard cracked — a hairline fracture blooming from its core.
Kaia stepped forward. "Rei—don't."
But he already had.
His fingers met the surface of Skarnveil.
Not warmth. Not chill.
Weight.
The brazier's glow flared — a flash of white-blue brilliance that swallowed the room.
A scream split the silence.
Not a voice.
The Seal itself.
The Warden arched backward — runes blazing across its chest, before shattering into fragments of ice-dust. The stone beneath them cracked. The brazier exploded outward in a bloom of frost and mist.
And in Rei's hand…
A gem.
Rough-cut. Clear. Shimmering blue-white with frozen fire inside.
Skarnveil was no longer a Seal.
It had become a memory. Bound to crystal. A shard of truth no longer chained, but fragile — and dangerous.
Rei fell to one knee, gasping.
Durik caught him. "What have you done?"
Kaia stared at the fragments of the Warden. "You didn't destroy it."
"No," Rei whispered. "I… became its witness."
The gem pulsed once in his palm.
A final echo, cold and distant.
"Six remain. The Eight is lost. The Silence begins to crack."
The walls of the chamber groaned.
Far above them, in the depths of Druvadir…
The mountain shuddered.
Rei clutched the gem — Skarnveil's memory now his burden.
The brazier had fallen cold. The Warden lay in pieces.
But in the silence that followed, beneath the layers of mountain and rune and weight…
A breath stirred.
Far above — where cold anvil met long-forgotten coals —a faint crack echoed.
Not stone.
Char. Ash.
Then came a pulse.
From the old Forge.
Not warm. Not cold.
Alive.
Durik looked up. His voice was barely a whisper. "The Forge... it's waking."