The city of Elarion was no longer silent when Arenne returned.
She descended the marble steps from the citadel terrace into streets alive with murmurs — faint, fleeting, as though carried on the wind but coming from within the people themselves. Citizens paused mid-step, their eyes widening as if glimpsing something beyond their understanding. Children pointed at the sky, whispering names that Arenne had never heard. Old men muttered prayers that had not been spoken in centuries.
She slowed, sensing it before she could see it. Threads of light shimmered around the heads of the crowd, invisible to anyone but her. Those threads were not hers. They pulsed with something older: remnants of gods who had once walked openly among mortals, now remembered in whispers and fragments of memory.
Vaelen appeared beside her, silent until she looked at him.
"They've begun to remember," he said. His voice was careful, even fearful. "Not fully, but enough that some are waking to their own latent divinity. The sleepers… the remnants of the first world… they stir in them."
Arenne's silver eyes scanned the crowd. A man's laughter broke suddenly, replaced by a low growl as he clutched at his chest. A woman's fingers glowed faintly, tracing runes in the air that vanished before they touched anything solid.
"How many?" she asked.
Vaelen shook his head. "Too many, and too little. They are fragments, echoes — unstable, uncontrolled. They could help… or they could destroy."
Arenne felt the weight of the world settle on her shoulders. She had known this day would come, but feeling it so close, so alive in the breaths of these mortals, made her chest ache with an old, familiar grief.
"They are not evil," she said quietly. "Just forgotten."
Vaelen nodded. "And yet they can be dangerous. Even forgotten gods can tear a city apart if their memory is incomplete."
Arenne looked to the horizon, where the sun now fully rose, spilling gold across the glass-like sea. Light and shadow danced together in a rhythm only she could hear. The air hummed faintly with potential.
She lifted her hand. A soft pulse of silver light emerged from her palm, flowing outward over the crowd. It touched those whose threads of memory quivered, stabilizing them, grounding their echoes into something tangible yet safe.
The mortals shivered under the touch of her power, some looking around with wide eyes, others falling to their knees, sensing something vast and unseen but not frightening.
Vaelen watched her in silence. "It will not hold forever," he said. "They will remember more than you can control, and the sleepers beneath the world will sense it."
Arenne's gaze hardened, silver light reflecting in her eyes. "Then I will teach them to dream carefully."
She descended fully into the city, walking among her people. As she did, the echoes began to respond to her presence. They whispered names, histories, forgotten loves — not commands, not demands, but fragments of memory seeking guidance.
She reached a child whose hands flickered with tiny sparks of light. The boy looked at her, eyes wide, unafraid. "Who are you?"
Arenne knelt, resting her palm against his glowing shoulder. "I am a queen who remembers," she said softly. "And I will help you remember too, without fear."
The light from her touch steadied, and the boy's sparks settled into soft pulses of color, gentle and alive. Around them, others felt it — a calm spreading, but beneath it, a tension, like a thread stretched taut.
Vaelen's voice broke the silence. "The sleepers will sense this. Soon, you will not be teaching echoes — they will come seeking their place in the world. Some will bend toward you, and some… will not."
Arenne rose, eyes scanning the city and the horizon beyond. She whispered to the wind, the sea, and the sky alike:
"Then let them come. I am ready to remember… and to face what comes with memory."
The city hummed in response, alive with fragments of forgotten power, and Arenne knew the balance she carried was no longer hers alone. It was a living thing — fragile, radiant, and eternal.