Ravine closed her eyes.
"There was laughter, once," she said.
Arana remained beside her, still and patient, as Ravine's voice dipped into memory like a slow river winding backwards.
"We were happy. Before the end. Before the gate. The six of us travelled for months. Roads that didn't have names. Forests that spoke in colours. We joked about sleeping under stars and waking up in myths. Tovin sang too loud. Eryn snored. Kaesa couldn't cook to save her life. Lysa carved everything into trees. Niva made us remember why we were doing it at all."
She gave a soft, aching laugh.
"We thought we were ready. We thought we had mapped every step, calculated every thread. We even had matching rings. Can you believe that? Tovin made them from bent copper and said they'd hum if any of us lied."
Her shoulders shook slightly.
"When we entered the Dead Zone, we were... still joking. Still light. The Record Keeper met us at the gate. One of those old men who looked like he'd been born in the dust. He took our names, our regions, our resonance types. And when he handed me the scroll to confirm, I remember signing it too fast."
She opened her eyes, smiled faintly through it.
"I wrote my birthplace wrong. I mixed it up with where I was living. One line. One stupid, simple mistake. I remember thinking it was nothing. Just ink. Just a line."
She exhaled.
"But it was the moment. The exact moment. If the ruins were watching, that's when they started to shift."
She looked down at her hands.
"We entered the ritual site on the third day. It was shaped like a basin, deep and cold. We set the anchors, aligned the symbols. Kaesa mapped the gate. Lysa carved the bounds. Tovin began the harmonic loop. Eryn stabilized the ground layer. Niva sang the resonance into place."
Her voice faltered.
"And I stood in the centre, holding the Bloom."
Silence hung.
"We knew the gate might resist. But the structure was flawless. We triple-checked it. I had designed the arc myself."
A pause.
"But the ruin shifted."
She said it like it broke something in her.
"The wall behind us—it changed. No movement. Just new inscriptions. Ones we hadn't seen. Ones that shouldn't have been there."
She looked up at Arana, eyes glassed.
"It was like the ruin chose to rewrite itself in that moment. And we didn't have time to respond."
A breath. A tremble.
"Everything collapsed. The gate surged. The Bloom screamed. I felt them all being pulled apart."
She began to cry.
Tears slid quietly down her cheeks as she shook her head, as if trying to dislodge the memory from her skull.
"I thought I had made a mistake in the math. In the magic. But it was the name. The origin. That was the thread I tangled."
She covered her face with both hands.
Arana stood slowly.
Without a word, she stepped across the space between them and knelt.
She wrapped her arms around Ravine.
Ravine didn't resist.
She fell into the embrace like someone finally allowing the weight to fall.
And she sobbed.
Long, unrestrained, wracking sobs that bent her body forward into Arana's chest. The kind of grief that came not from one moment, but from many. A hundred small heartbreaks stitched together until they split.
Arana held her through all of it. No words. No fixing. Just presence.
And somewhere in the breaking, the past finally let go of its silence.