Rielun's POV:
I didn't hit the ground.
I drifted.
Weightless.
Directionless.
Suspended in a darkness that felt warm instead of cold, like someone had wrapped the night around me to keep me from breaking.
When my feet touched something solid, it wasn't stone.
It was grass.
Soft.
Cool.
Alive.
I opened my eyes.
And the world that greeted me was impossible.
A meadow stretched out beneath a sky that wasn't a sky at all — a dome of pale gold light, pulsing gently like a heartbeat. Flowers I didn't recognize swayed in a wind that didn't exist. A river of light cut through the field, glowing softly, like moonlight poured into a stream.
It was beautiful.
It was wrong.
It felt like a memory I had never lived.
My throat tightened.
"Where… am I?"
The meadow didn't answer.
But something inside me did.
A quiet ache.
A familiarity that shouldn't exist.
A longing so deep it felt like grief.
I took a step forward.
The grass bent under my feet like it knew me.
Behind me, faint and muffled, I heard Rowan shouting my name.
"Rielun! Rielun, answer me!"
Noctis's voice overlapped his, raw and shaking.
"Please— please say something—"
I spun around.
The meadow was empty.
No barrier.
No doorway.
No shadows.
No light.
Just silence.
"I'm here," I whispered. "I'm right here."
But the world swallowed my voice like it was never spoken.
I pressed a hand to my chest.
It hurt.
Not physically.
Not magically.
It hurt the way a scar hurts when you remember how you got it.
The air shifted.
Not violently.
Not suddenly.
Softly — like someone exhaling after holding their breath for centuries.
I turned.
He stood at the edge of the meadow.
Not flickering.
Not broken.
Not kneeling in grief.
Whole.
Radiant.
Terrifying in his gentleness.
The First Guardian.
His eyes were the same as the echo's — hollow with loss — but now they held something else too.
Recognition.
He stepped toward me slowly, as if afraid I might vanish.
"Rielun."
My name in his voice felt like a hand closing around my heart.
I took a step back.
"I don't know you."
He stopped.
Pain flickered across his face — not sharp, not angry, but deep, quiet, and unbearably human.
"I know," he said softly. "You don't remember."
The way he said it made my chest ache.
Like he wasn't disappointed in me.
Like he was disappointed in himself.
He lifted a hand, hesitated, then let it fall.
"This place," he murmured, looking around the meadow, "was yours."
My breath caught.
"No," I whispered. "I've never been here."
"You have," he said. "You lived here. You laughed here. You slept beneath that tree when you were small."
He pointed to a willow tree near the river.
My knees weakened.
"I don't remember," I said, voice cracking. "I don't remember any of it."
His expression broke.
Not dramatically.
Not loudly.
Quietly — like a man who had run out of ways to hold himself together.
"You died," he whispered. "And when you died, the world forgot you. Even you forgot you."
My vision blurred.
"I'm not him," I said. "I'm not the person you lost."
He stepped closer.
"You are," he said. "You are the heart I carried. The heart I failed to protect. The heart that kept me alive."
I shook my head, tears burning hot.
"I'm not your heart."
His voice softened to a whisper.
"You were."
Something inside me cracked.
Not loudly.
Not visibly.
Just… quietly.
Like a thread snapping.
"I don't want this," I whispered. "I don't want to be someone I can't remember. I don't want to be a ghost of a life I never lived."
He knelt in front of me.
Not as a guardian.
Not as a god.
As a man who had lost everything.
"You don't have to be who you were," he said. "But you deserve to know why you were loved."
My breath hitched.
Loved.
The word felt too heavy.
Too sharp.
Too dangerous.
"I don't know how to carry that," I whispered.
"You don't have to carry it alone."
He reached for me.
And for a moment — a terrible, fragile moment — I almost reached back.
A crack split the meadow.
Light burst through the ground.
A voice tore through the air.
"RIELUN!"
Rowan.
Another voice, shaking, desperate.
"Step away from him!"
Noctis.
The barrier shattered behind me.
They fell into the meadow, breathless, terrified, eyes locked on me.
The First Guardian rose slowly, light gathering around him.
Rowan stepped in front of me, staff raised.
Noctis's wings flared, shadows curling protectively around my legs.
Both of them spoke at the same time.
"Rielun— step away from him."
And I stood between the man who lost me
and the men who found me
with no idea which direction my heart was supposed to go.