The morning after the world began again was quiet.
Too quiet.
The sea lay flat as a mirror, reflecting the red-fading moon above and the slow emergence of gold across the horizon. Arenne stood at the edge of the city's highest terrace, the wind stirring her hair, her hands resting on the cold marble rail. Below her, Elarion — reborn yet not — glowed with new life. But the silence of it unsettled her. It felt as though the city were breathing through borrowed lungs.
She could still feel Seraphyne in the air — a faint pulse just behind every sound, every flicker of light. It was not absence she felt, but distance. A thread stretched across the veil of dawn.
Arenne closed her eyes and whispered into the wind, "If I am to reign again, let me remember how to begin."
The wind answered with warmth.
When she opened her eyes, the light had shifted. A small crowd had gathered in the plaza below — people dressed in pale fabrics, their faces half-familiar, as if shaped from her half-remembered dreams. They looked at her as one might look at something holy.
"Lady," one of them called. A girl no older than twenty, with skin like moonstone and eyes clouded as frost. "We saw your light upon the water. The stars fell, and then you rose. Who are you?"
The question hung in the dawn.
Arenne felt her heart tremble. The old answer rose first — I am the Eternal Queen, the one who loved a mortal and defied the gods — but she did not speak it. That name belonged to the past world. This was another.
"I am…" She hesitated. "A keeper of memory."
The crowd murmured softly.
"What memory?" the girl asked.
Arenne smiled, gentle and sad. "Of what it means to dream."
The girl bowed her head. "Then guide us. We have forgotten how."
Arenne descended the marble steps, her bare feet whispering against the stone. The light clung to her as if the sun itself followed her movements. As she reached the crowd, they parted instinctively, forming a circle around her. The air felt thick with reverence, fear, and something deeper — longing.
She spoke to them then, not as a queen of the old world, but as a guardian of its soul.
"The dawn is not a gift," she said softly. "It is a memory returning. Every world that dies becomes the dream of the next. You are born from that dreaming — from what was loved, what was lost, what was never forgotten."
Her voice trembled slightly. "I have lived before, though you may not remember me. I have reigned before, though my throne was made of sorrow. This time, I would not rule through power, but through remembrance. So tell me — what do you love, that it might live forever?"
The people looked at one another. None spoke. Yet something shifted in their faces — a glimmer of recognition, as though love itself were beginning to wake inside them again.
Arenne's heart ached. Seraphyne, she thought, do you see? They are learning to dream.
The sky above the city shimmered, and for a heartbeat, she saw her again — not in form, but in light. The shape of wings in the morning clouds. A warmth like breath against her cheek.
She whispered into the rising wind, "Wait for me beyond the moon. I will come when this world learns to sleep in peace."
And the wind — tender, eternal — seemed to answer: "I will."