They left at first light with nothing that looked like a mission and everything that moved like one. The paperwork said "convalescence and research." Their packs did not. Elira hid her silver braid beneath a plain hood; Mira buried the Twin Arcs under a shawl; Kael dulled the bronze seams of his new armor with ash until they read as shadow, not shine. No farewells. No witnesses.
By the third bend the Sanctum's bells had faded into rumor, and the trees ahead had begun to gather in a particular way—trunks too upright, crowns too still, light pooling on the path as if poured from a bowl.
"Ground rules," Mira murmured, eyes forward. "Say them while we can still speak loud."
Elira kept her gaze on the incline. "We don't trade memory."
"Not ours," Kael said. "Not unless it saves a life."
"Or ends a lie," Mira added, softer. Her glance snagged for a heartbeat on the silver thread at Elira's throat, then slid away like good manners. "So—truth first."
The mountain track surrendered to meadow, then to a low, weathered fence where sheep had once puzzled at the world. Beyond it, the air changed temperature. The Forest of Dawn did not begin so much as resume. Someone—someones—had set a ring of stones the height of kneeling men, each carved with three spare lines in a hand that refused to age:
Speak no names aloud.
Wake no fire to frighten the green.
Walk only where the morning leads.
"They mean it about the morning," Kael breathed.
"Because the morning moves," Mira said. She lifted two fingers and exhaled a ribbon of cool, obedient fog that drifted at knee height across the leaf litter, ready to borrow whatever light it was given. "We stay behind the haze. If it flows wrong, we stop."
Elira touched the breeze and asked it to read the world instead of her. Air slid out along the fog's front and came back in quiet gestures: not here; a little left; slower.
They stepped past the last stone, and the light behaved like an animal that had learned to be patient with people.
The first hour taught them humility by way of birdsong. A thrush called high to their right; the same thrush answered from the left; then behind. Following the sound bent the path into a shape that returned them to their own footprints without the dignity of a circle. Elira set a wind-bridge the size of a table leaf in the exact patch of dirt where patience had wobbled and anchored it with a breath of green she did not name. They paced around it until the forest's trick lost interest. The song returned to being a thrush.
They learned to move like conspirators with the air. Mira's fog took on the canopy's pale gold and turned into a narrow, honest lane. Kael wore his steps as a dialect the ground remembered: weight truthful, hips low, no contempt for roots. Twice, as they rested without speaking, light sifted into shapes that looked like people they had lost. A shoulder at the next bend. A hand lifting. Elira did not look twice. Mira raised a flat disk of water; the image met its reflection, folded, and slid away. Kael put two fingers to the soil and let his pulse match the dirt's.
At midday a root bridge threw its shadow across a gulley. Living wood braided itself into an arch between one mound and the next, wet-looking though the leaves above were dry. When Kael leaned his weight, the whole curve rose a hair, lifting him from the ground.
He stepped back at once. The bronze under his sleeves went quiet in warning.
"Three beats," Elira said, counting with her fingers. "You set tempo. Mira draws the lane. I catch whatever the bridge tries to take."
Mira raised a ring just high enough to sketch a calf-high crescent of frost along the arch—no wall, only a boundary. She fed the line a breath of water until it gleamed: a wet edge telling feet where not to go. Kael exhaled into his heels and stepped on the first beat. The bridge tried to lift. He asked it not to with his bones, not his hands. Elira raised a thin pressure of air beneath his sole—no gust, a promise. The wood remembered how to be still. Twelve slow steps took the length of an old memory and delivered them to the far mound without incident.
Beyond, the forest softened its throat and made room for a clearing—a shallow bowl of stone and root where the light pooled as if it had seen temples and found them a little naive. In the center stood a rectangle as tall as three men, too dark for wood and too patient for iron. No jamb. No handle. No seam. Before it, a low pedestal held a slab the size of a lap, blank as cloud.
They did not touch it.
"Names?" Kael asked, head bowed.
"None," Elira said. "We offer proof before we offer anything else."
Mira hovered her hand above the slab without contact. She cooled the air a fraction; faint lines rose from the surface like shy ink—veins, intersections that might become letters—then faded, the stone tolerating that much curiosity and no more.
"Later," Mira said. "We earn it first."
They took one more step toward the dark rectangle.
The air cooled, not in degrees but in request. Something behind the door—not breath, not gears—cleared a throat made of silence. The slab brightened the width of a finger. The world did not blink.
And the door spoke:
"Is what you seek worth forgetting who you think you are?"