Malrec felt it the moment the shard awoke.
The ripple tore through the fabric of his sanctum like a scream held underwater—subtle, yet unmistakable.
He froze mid-ritual, the obsidian basin before him flickering with distorted reflections. The Beast, coiled in the far shadows like mist given flesh, stirred with unease.
"She found it," he murmured.
For the first time in years, his hands trembled.
He dismissed the basin with a flick of his wrist. The dark waters hissed into silence. No more illusions. No more memory-weaving. Something far older had been touched—something he thought buried.
He crossed the chamber, deeper into the Veiled Vaults, to the sealed alcove he had forbidden even his shades to enter. The door was etched with a single symbol: a flame bound in chains.
Malrec pressed his palm to it.
The lock resisted him.
It always did when he was unsteady.
He gritted his teeth and forced his will into the sigil. It clicked open with a reluctant groan.
Inside, the chamber was barren—except for one pedestal.
On it rested a broken memory shard. Pale, brittle. Dead.
Liera's final trace.
He had thought it shattered when she fell—her mind fracturing under the strain of holding so many foreign memories. He had watched her collapse with tears in her eyes, whispering his name as her mind slipped into silence.
He had burned this place to forget.
So why was it stirring again?
"She retrieved the echo," he whispered, brushing a hand across the dead shard.
No spark answered him.
But something had changed.
He turned, eyes narrowing. The Beast stood behind him now—silent as always. But its form was less stable. Its edges shimmered. A faint glow trembled at its core.
Liera's shard had touched it.
"How?" Malrec asked. "You were born of forgetting. Of silence. What is she doing to you?"
The Beast didn't answer.
It never did.
But it was watching him now.
Not like a servant.
Like a mirror.
Malrec stepped back, jaw tightening. "I gave you form. I gave you purpose. You are my will made manifest. You do not falter."
Still, the Beast watched.
And in its eyes—those hollow voids where no memory should dwell—he saw a flicker of something unbearable.
Recognition.
A thread of Liera.
A whisper of her voice, echoing from the void.
"Pain is not the enemy, Malrec. Oblivion is."
He staggered.
He could still hear her. After all these years.
He thought he'd silenced her forever.
But Chizzy had found the shard.
And the shard remembered.
"No," he growled. "She was wrong. She had to be."
He turned toward the Beast, fury rising. "You will hunt her. Burn the Hollow. Crush the ritual. Do not let her complete it."
The Beast didn't move.
Its gaze lingered.
Lingered.
And then it turned away.
It vanished into the mist.
Malrec stood alone in the chamber, hands clenched.
His sanctuary felt colder now. The walls less solid. The shadows whispered his name—not in reverence, but in warning.
He descended to his scrying mirror and called forth Chizzy's image.
She stood at the edge of the Hollow, speaking with the elders. Her satchel hung at her side, the shard inside it pulsing softly.
Malrec's breath hitched.
She carried a piece of what he had buried.
Of who he used to be.
He slammed his fist against the mirror. Cracks splintered across its surface, distorting Chizzy's face until it vanished entirely.
"I will not remember," he hissed.
But the echo of Liera's voice whispered still in the back of his mind.
And for the first time since creating the Beast…
Malrec felt fear.