Memory Fragment. The Whisperer's First Gift
(5th year, final year, separation)
Interlude: For the Ones We Love
**
There was no door. Only a Breath of cold across his cheek, then the darkness parted, peeling open like cloth.
Elyas stepped forward, though he hadn't meant to.
The chamber was smooth as glass and too quiet, yet it pressed against his skull until his thoughts narrowed. No true walls. Just folding angles, collapsing inward like geometry no mind was meant to hold.
And in the center, the Whisperer waited.
Not a figure. A presence draped in shape.
No face, no heartbeat, only a voice that slid straight into his skull.
"You seek answers. But your questions are still small."
Elyas tried to speak; the words tangled in his throat.
The presence drifted closer, soundless, limbless, bending where nothing should bend.
"You would save her. The Deathtouched girl."
His pulse hammered. Liren.
"You don't know anything about her," he managed.
A shift in shadow, like agreement.
"You carry her fate. I offer form for it."
Something unfolded. A hand, if it was a hand.
In its palm: a crystal blacker than shadow, etched with crawling veins of impossible light, each one twitching as if it hated stillness.
"This is not a cure. It is a cost. Accept it, and she will live."
Elyas reached.
Stopped.
"What's the price?"
The Whisperer bent lower, and the air smelled of burnt feathers and old rain.
"You will forget."
"Forget what?"
"The choice."
"The reason."
"The part of you that would beg to take it back."
A flash.
A scream, his own, or hers.
Then nothing.
He opened his eyes on the steps outside Bastion's university.
Dawn filtered through archways. The stone was cold against his back. His hands were trembling, like they'd been clenched around something for hours.
Liren lay beside him, breathing.
Skin pale. Unmarked. Alive.
He said her name and reached for her like prayer.
"Liren."
Her lashes fluttered.
Her eyes opened.
Clear.
Empty.
She looked at him carefully, like he was a stranger who had spoken her name too confidently.
"Are you hurt?" she asked, voice small, polite in the way people get when they do not know what they're allowed to feel.
Elyas went still.
"No," he said, and the word tasted wrong. "You're safe."
She searched his face, trying to find a place to anchor.
"I'm sorry," she said, and the apology was honest, which was worse. "Do I know you?"
His throat locked.
In his coat pocket, the crystal pressed cold and heavy against his ribs.
He reached for the missing moment, the exact second he chose this, the sentence that would explain the cost.
Every time he grasped for it, his mind slid away like water off glass.
"I'm Elyas," he managed, as if saying it could stitch something back together.
Liren nodded slowly, accepting the sound without the history.
"Elyas," she repeated, testing the shape of it, gentle as a new wound.
Behind them, the city woke to bells and footsteps and morning smoke, unaware anything had been traded.
Elyas kept his hand close to hers and did not take it.
He was afraid of what her skin would not remember.
And he could no longer remember what he'd traded to make her breathe.
**
Arrival at the Research Sanctum
**
The lift rumbled beneath their feet, stone gears gnashing against obsidian rails as they descended into the Core. Ayame stood near the edge, fingertips brushing the crystal-braided safety rail, eyes fixed on the shifting light far below. Liren stood beside her, silent. The long descent to the Sanctum was never quiet; the Core's winds howled against the shaft like a living thing.
A low chime sounded, the third breathmark, signalling their passage below the outer Bastion wardline. The crystal beneath the platform dimmed briefly, responding to the pressure of ancient depth.
Ayame glanced sideways. Liren's hair had grown longer in the past year. She wore it differently now. She smiled less. She moved with a silence the old Liren had never known. But Ayame still caught glimmers, an unconscious tilt of the head, the way her fingers tapped when thinking. Pieces of the girl she'd loved like family, still buried somewhere.
"We're close," came a voice behind them. The scholar-guide adjusted his thick-rimmed lenses and tapped his crystal-tipped cane once against the lift floor. "Once we pass the second barrier, Sanctum protocol takes over. University rules won't mean much down here."
Ayame nodded. Liren said nothing.
The lift groaned again; a fourth breathmark pulsed, this one lower, thrumming in the soles of their feet. Above them, the last traces of surface-reflected light gave way to pure Coreglow, slow-moving pulses of violet-blue threading the rock like veins of Breath made visible.
With a shudder, the lift passed through a final crystalline threshold. Defensive wards flared in concentric rings, bathing the cage in cold white light. Ayame's Breath caught, not from fear, but awe.
Beyond the threshold stretched the Sanctum, a great arc of pale stone and braided rootglass, grown like ribs into the Core's inner wall. Golems in segmented armour watched from alcoves above, their limbs locked in perfect vigilance. Deeper still, towers of scrolls and mirrored vaults glimmered with security glyphs.
The scholar cleared his throat. "Artifacts currently under active study are housed in the upper chamber. You'll be assigned a minder, and all activity will be recorded. No direct magic within five paces of a sealed relic. Breath anomalies logged."
Ayame arched a brow. "You sound practiced."
The scholar beamed. "I've given this tour twelve-hundred and six times. First time someone actually listens."
Brivan, he'd introduced himself on the climb, led them across a spiral bridge that curled around suspended crystal vaults. Another soft tone rang out, the fifth breathmark, this one sharper, crystalline, the pitch rising like an alarm swallowed too soon.
Halfway across, Brivan slowed, and even his cane taps seemed to soften.
"You know," Brivan said, tapping the rail once, "some say the Sanctum wouldn't exist if not for the first descent. Expedition Zero."
Ayame glanced up. "Reva's expedition?"
Brivan nodded. "Eight centuries ago. They mapped the upper Core, catalogued Breath-vents, and proved the depths could be studied, not merely feared. Reva dreamed of a place where terror became knowledge. These walls are that dream."
He stopped before a broad alcove. A living wall pulsed behind glass, carvings shifting in slow recursion, loops within loops. At a glance it looked like abstract art; stare longer, and forms suggested themselves: a watcher on an inverted pillar, a gate shaped like a spiral, a human figure sinking upside-down.
"Most visitors call it decoration," Brivan murmured. "But if you ever glimpse deeper, truly deeper, those shapes stop feeling abstract. They start feeling like warning."
Ayame exhaled, unsettled. Liren's gaze lingered on the shifting stone, but she said nothing.
They continued. Breath-lanterns flickered as they passed containment shells: a mirror that showed only the past; a knife that bled when touched; a cracked monocle rumoured to glimpse time sideways.
Ayame moved through it all with quiet urgency. She was here for one purpose.
Liren followed, arms crossed. She didn't ask questions or stare. She walked like someone expecting disappointment, but too tired to protest. She didn't want this. But she wanted Ayame not to give up. Her jaw was tight, eyes fixed straight ahead, as if afraid that looking back might pull her under.
And Ayame wasn't ready to stop hoping.
Tomorrow they would meet the Sanctum's chief archivist. Tomorrow they might earn access to the sealed reliquary vaults, the last, brightest chance.
Ayame slowed, waiting for Liren to match her stride. "It's going to work," she whispered. "It has to."
Liren didn't look at her. But after a moment, her fingers found Ayame's, just briefly, just enough.
A silent promise.
Tomorrow. The last thread of hope, still unbroken.
**
The vault doors parted like the jaws of a slumbering titan, blacksteel slabs exhaling a Breath of chilled, compressed magic. Inside, the light dimmed not from shadow, but from pressure. Raw power crowded the chamber, humming in Ayame's teeth, pressing against her ribs.
Xiati awaited them at the heart of the vault.
She stood tall and motionless, robes the colour of storm-slate. Her blind eyes were pale as polished bone, unmoving, yet unmistakably aware. Hovering beside her drifted the Whisperglass Maw, faceted in violet and silver. It spoke with Xiati's voice, smooth and resonant, like glass drawn across crystal. At her other side loomed a pale-robed guardian, broad-shouldered and watchful. Containment runes glowed faintly along his gauntlets. He carried himself with the quiet precision of someone trained to intervene only when magic demanded restraint.
"Welcome," the Maw intoned. "You enter the heart of memory. Be still, and let the past speak."
Ayame bowed low. Liren followed, more stiffly.
Xiati inclined her head with practiced grace.
"These relics are proven," the Maw continued. "They do not soothe. They do not lie. Only truth lies within them. No hopes. No fictions. Are you prepared to know what cannot be changed?"
Ayame hesitated.
Then she nodded.
Xiati turned, guided by her assistant, toward a long table draped in deep blackcloth. Faint grooves marred its surface, etched not by tools, but by fingernails. There had always been others who came hoping.
Three artifacts waited beneath Breath-lanterns, each pulsing softly with restrained power.
**
The Memory Pool
At first glance, it resembled a curved mirror, silver-backed and obsidian-trimmed. Up close, the glass rippled faintly, resisting stillness. A second relic hovered nearby: the Breath Extractor, its glass claws poised like a surgeon's fingers.
Liren sat when instructed. Ayame gently placed her friend's hand into the extractor. The device hummed, and threads of amber Breath streamed from Liren's wrist, coiling into the mirror's surface. The pool vibrated, forming not reflection, but tension.
"Place your brow to the pool," Xiati instructed. "Let it answer."
Liren leaned forward slowly. Her Breath caught. Then she pressed her brow to the surface.
The mirror flared.
Scenes shimmered into being: shared lectures beneath cracked chalkboards, whispered jokes in late-night libraries, rooftop silences under violet dusk. All from the past year. All after the reawakening.
And then, nothing.
The mirror dulled to flat silver.
As if memory itself had forgotten.
Xiati said nothing. The Whisperglass Maw released a low, melodic hum. Not comfort. Mourning.
Liren blinked rapidly, like waking from a dream that left no warmth behind. Ayame's jaw clenched, her hand twitching near the extractor, fighting the urge to try again. Even the guardian shifted, eyes fixed on the mirror until its light fully faded.
**
The Mourner's Bell
The second artifact was a delicate bell suspended in a breathing-glass cage, its clapper fused from polished soulstone. Xiati's aide lifted it with reverent care and placed it against Liren's chest.
Ayame stepped back.
The bell rang.
Or rather, it tried to.
It trembled, then stilled. No sound. No echo. No resonance.
Xiati bowed her head. "The soul is not veiled," she said. "It was reborn. Not hidden. Not stolen. Made new."
Ayame's throat tightened. "But she's still… she's still Liren."
"She is," Xiati replied gently. "But not the one who walked beside you."
The guardian's fingers hovered near the bell, not to restrain it, but as if ready to steady Liren should the artifact demand something her body could not give. When it remained inert, he stepped back.
**
The Braided Echo
The final relic was a bracelet of bone-white crystal beads, woven with living silver thread. Xiati's aide fastened it carefully around Liren's wrist, whispered a glyph, and activated the link.
Whispers bloomed in the air.
Ayame's voice, strong and certain. Brivan's laughter. A researcher calling out a mistimed glyph. Sounds from the past year.
And then, nothing.
Where childhood should have spoken, where lullabies and early names should have returned, there was only void.
The bracelet unwound itself like a spent vine.
Liren sat frozen.
Ayame's hand hovered, then fell limp at her side.
**
Ayame stared at the artifacts, willing them to change. To glow. To crackle. To offer one more path.
There had always been another method. Another scroll. Another secret. Another hope.
Her palms pressed tight; her nails bit into her skin. She didn't feel it. Her Breath had gone shallow and fast, like her body was already bracing for impact.
This can't be the end.
The mirror lay inert.
The bell, mute.
The bracelet, dead.
Xiati stepped forward. "You have done what can be done."
It was not judgement. Not mercy.
It was truth.
Liren reached out and grasped Ayame's hand. The grip was steady. Human. Present.
"I'm still here," Liren whispered. "I just… don't remember how we started."
Ayame nodded slowly. Her lips trembled, but she said nothing.
The last hope did not shatter loudly.
It simply stopped asking to be believed.
And still, even in the silence, Liren did not let go.
**
Xiati's History of the Sanctum
**
As Xiati's aide guided her toward the exit, Xiati paused beneath the high archway carved in crystal-veined stone. The Whisperglass Maw drifted forward, casting flickering light across the walls.
"You deserve to know where you stand," Xiati said through it. "Before you walk further into the unknown, or return with less than you came with."
The Vault doors rumbled behind them, beginning their slow seal.
"This sanctum was not born in glory," the Maw continued. "It was carved by calloused hands, by criminals, by outcasts, by those the surface had discarded."
Ayame frowned. "But the 108th Expedition was celebrated. Brivan said they fought a matron, cleared the nests, made the Breath well usable…"
"All true," Xiati replied. "And not the whole truth."
She stepped aside, fingers brushing the wall until they found the faint etching of a name, one among thousands.
"Before the 108th," Xiati said, "came a long line of expeditions. Most filled with scholars and soldiers. The finest minds, the bravest hearts. Most of them fell, swallowed by the Core. A few returned with their hands full, shaken, richer than they'd been, and unwilling to go further. They bought comfort, they bought silence, they told themselves they'd earned it."
Her voice stayed calm. That was what made it worse.
"Eventually, Bastion stopped sending heroes. They sent criminals. Repeat offenders. Debt-duelers. Enemies of the state."
Liren stiffened slightly.
"And among them," Xiati said, "was a man named Aivel Rhaas."
Ayame's Breath caught.
"He was no nobody," Xiati continued softly. "Born in the Dust Reaches, dirt poor, Breath-blind, and determined to make something of it. By twenty-three he'd exposed three trade cartels tied to the Council. By thirty, he'd passed laws banning price-gouging of healing services. And by thirty-four he was accused of corruption, stripped of title, and exiled without trial."
Ayame whispered, "Framed."
"The Council feared what they could not own," Xiati replied. "They called him a thief. A liar. The public turned. And so he was thrown into the Deep alongside murderers and thieves, given a blade and a Breath stone, and told to serve penance."
She paused, then: "But even there, he led. Even there, he gave people purpose."
Xiati gestured toward the Vault itself.
"They say he found the first Breath vein beneath this place. That he and his crew held the line against a Broodflare Matron swarm long enough for the generators to stabilise. That he burned alive sealing the last gate so the rest could escape the collapse."
Liren stepped forward. "Then why does no one speak of him?"
Xiati tilted her blind eyes upward. "Because it is easier to rewrite a victory than admit who was sacrificed for it."
A beat of silence followed.
Then the Maw's tone shifted, gentler now, fuller.
"There are evil people in this world," Xiati said, "and yes, when bad things happen, we're quick to blame, to point fingers, to tell only the worst parts of ourselves. The transmission scrolls, the archives, they highlight betrayal, collapse, blood."
She turned her face toward them, not seeing, but speaking as if reading a truth carved into Breath itself.
"But if humanity were only cruel, if we had never worked together, we would not be here. We survive not because of singular glory or perfect heroes, but because nameless hands reached out in the dark and chose not to let go. Because ordinary people bled beside strangers. Because someone, somewhere, refused to give up."
The Vault's runes flared behind her, echoes of old failures whispering in the stone.
"It is easy to forget. Scandal travels faster than honour. But we are still here."
Xiati bowed her head.
"And we do not endure by accident."
**
Sanctum Quarters, Late Night - Ayame
**
Ayame stood by the narrow stone window, fingertips tracing the cool edge of the sill. Beyond the glass, the Core pulsed with its quiet Breath, violet haze curling like mist across the distant chasm's lip. Breath-lanterns along the walls flickered low, their light too soft to chase the dark.
This was the view the first Solís healers once dreamed of reaching. Not this deep into the Core, but this far into hope.
One Solís apothecary had traded tonics for safe passage across poisoned marshes, stitching wounds in damp caves and carrying news of Bastion wherever she walked. Another had erected canvas wards outside the city walls during the fungus plague, turning no one away when fear sealed the gates.
Every plaque in Bastion's Hall of Lineage carved the same refrain: motion, mercy, invention.
And Ayame? She had been born into privilege those ancestors never tasted. Before she drew her first Breath, her parents infused her cradle with rare Breath crystals, polished artifacts, and tonics designed to shape the perfect healer. Expectations, as carefully brewed as any elixir, hung around her like a scent no scrub could wash away.
She, gifted, certified, celebrated, couldn't heal one friend.
The thought bit into her ribs like rusted wire. She pressed her forehead against the cold stone, Breath fogging the glass.
Behind her, Liren slept in the narrow bed they'd shared since arriving. One blanket, two souls, and a silence stretched thin.
A faint tang of burnt sage still clung to the mortar, a ghost-scent from the last forbidden ritual she'd tried in Bastion's sub-level infirmary. At first, Ayame hadn't noticed it. Now it clung to memory like smoke.
She hadn't spoken since leaving the Vault. There'd been no need.
A year unspooled in her mind: carrying a body that looked like Liren but remembered nothing; reading letters aloud until her voice cracked; humming childhood tunes, hoping a melody might anchor a lost soul. A blind seer's ink-bath that showed only swirling snow. A dozen rituals, each promising a miracle, each ending in quiet failure.
A thin scar crossed her palm, the mark of a desperate blood-binding rite meant to summon history back. All it summoned was silence.
It wasn't fair. To gift Breath but not memory. To stand beside her every day and feel like a stranger.
But the Vault had spoken, with stillness, with truth.
Liren was gone.
No bell would ring for her. No bracelet would echo.
Some breaks, Ayame knew, never set the same. But they could still hold weight.
She turned.
The woman who slept behind her, calm, steady, curious, was not a ghost. She was something else.
Tousled hair; a brow furrowed in gentle dreams; one hand curled near her chin in a gesture so old the body remembered it even when the mind did not. An echo with new life.
Not a replacement.
Not a resurrection.
A rebirth.
Liren was dead.
But someone had come back in her place.
A packed satchel waited by the door, their ticket home at dawn. A folded note from Xiati rested atop it, sealed with wax: Travel clearance, Bastion Surface Gate. Time was running short, choices narrowing like Core tunnels.
Ayame's gaze drifted to the journal lying half-open on the sill, pages inked with stories Liren no longer owned. She brushed the cover but did not open it.
There was no path back.
But maybe, together, they could carve one forward.
Behind her, Liren stirred; a soft sigh escaped. An old habit resurfacing from another life. Ayame let it anchor her and, for the first time in a year, allowed tomorrow to come, not as a shadow of the past, but a shape of their own making.
**
Sanctum Quarters, Lights Out- Liren
**
Liren lay still beneath the blanket, eyes wide open.
She hadn't moved when Ayame returned from the window. Hadn't shifted when the note was placed atop the satchel or when Ayame's Breath hitched in the dark.
But she'd heard everything. Felt everything.
The grief. The silence. The ache in every careful footstep.
Ayame had protected her all year, fed her, clothed her, defended her in ways Liren still didn't fully understand. And not just from the world outside, but from judgement, from the weight of others' expectations. She'd stood like a wall between Liren and the stares of healers, archivists, students. Even from Brivan.
But now Liren couldn't stop wondering.
Had Ayame done it for her?
Or for the sister she wanted her to be?
Would she still be here now, if the Vault had answered differently?
If one relic had rung, if one whisper had echoed, would Ayame be holding someone else's hand right now? Someone she'd lost, but hoped to reclaim?
Liren blinked, eyes adjusting to the low light.
The room felt like it had been built for ghosts. The stone held echoes, muffled voices from the corridor, the soft creak of Ayame's Breath shifting at the window, and beneath it all, the near-silent hum of sealed Breath-conduits in the walls. Ancient protections thrumming faintly like a heart too tired to beat louder.
She didn't know who she used to be. She'd accepted that long ago. But something about this trip had shifted things. The Vault. The artifacts. Xiati's stillness. The cold certainty in Ayame's eyes when she turned away from those relics.
That's when Liren had realised:
She wasn't unfinished. Just unseen, measured against memories that weren't hers.
They kept looking for someone else in her face.
What if Ayame stopped looking?
What would she be then?
She curled tighter under the blanket.
She didn't know how to protect herself. Didn't know her own Breath affinity, if it still even existed. She'd trained in nothing, remembered no glyphs, no combat forms, no chants. No old names whispered by friends.
She was, in truth, a child walking in an adult's body. A newborn, with a face that stirred grief in every mirror.
And after tonight, she understood just how dangerous this world could be.
A single artifact, harmless looking, could unmake someone. A relic could rob Breath from lungs. A vault could offer silence instead of truth.
How long could she last on her own?
Ayame wouldn't abandon her.
Would she?
Liren closed her eyes and listened to Ayame's breathing, steadying herself by the only rhythm she trusted.
For now.
Tomorrow would come, and with it, the world that expected her to be someone she could not remember.
But she was still here.
Even if no bell would ever ring for the girl Ayame lost.
**