The stars had gone silent.
Aelric stood alone in the hushed expanse, the last echo of Nyara's warning still ringing in his ears. The chamber he had stepped into—the space beyond the Crownless Path—was unlike anything that had come before. Neither hall nor wilderness, it was a horizonless void of fractured light and floating ruins, where time pulsed and retreated like a living tide. The sky above was not sky at all, but a swirling dome of broken constellations, like a shattered mirror reflecting pieces of memory and fate.
He was no longer within the bounds of the Temple of Stars. That much was certain.
And yet… this place was familiar.
It thrummed with a resonance deep within him, like a half-remembered lullaby sung in the cradle of the cosmos. Aelric looked down and found that the ground beneath him was glassy and dark, rippling under his feet. Each step he took left a trail of pale light, as though the path remembered him, or perhaps was remembering itself.
He pressed onward.
For what felt like hours—though time was as elusive as breath here—he wandered the shifting terrain. Broken archways drifted lazily overhead, remnants of structures no hand had built. Columns crowned in starlit fire turned slowly in the air, forming fleeting corridors that reshaped themselves when he blinked. Glimpses of faces flickered in the distant void—some known, some forgotten, some his own.
He passed a floating brazier, where flame curled in reverse, falling upward in slow arcs of blue and gold. Aelric paused, mesmerized. As he stared into the fire, it shifted and bloomed outward, revealing a memory he hadn't yet lived.
He stood at the edge of a battlefield, older, eyes harder. Nyara lay wounded at his side, and in the distance, a figure cloaked in black—one with no face—raised a blade forged from dying stars.
The vision shattered.
The brazier vanished, and Aelric stumbled back, his heart pounding.
"What is this place?" he whispered.
The Hollow Star, came the answer—not spoken aloud, but pressed into his mind like a seal. Where truths are forged and names unmade.
He turned.
At the center of the expanse stood a figure cloaked in luminous shadow, its form neither male nor female, human nor beast. Stars orbited its head like a silent crown, and its voice carried the weight of entire galaxies.
"You have passed the first of the trials, Aelric of the Flameborn Line."
The words froze the air around him. "Who are you?"
"I am the memory of the First Watcher, cast here by those who shaped the stars before your kind had names. I am a guardian, a remnant... a question."
Aelric's throat tightened. "Why am I here?"
"To be unmade. And to be remade."
The figure gestured, and a circle of starlight appeared beneath Aelric's feet. Sigils bloomed around him—some he recognized from Thalin's tomes, others ancient even by Eldra's reckoning. They burned into the ground, forming a wheel of celestial fire.
"You seek to master the power of the stars," the Watcher said. "But to wield such light, you must pass through shadow."
Suddenly, the world erupted.
Aelric was hurled into memory—not his own, but those of the Starborn who came before. He stood in their bodies, felt their fears.
He was Elenya the Seer, crying out in anguish as her lover was devoured by the dark flame of the void.
He was Kaelir the Bound, shackled to the Spire's heart, his body torn asunder to seal a breach between worlds.
He was the First Starborn, whose name was long forgotten, kneeling alone beneath a bleeding moon as he gave his soul to the sky.
Each memory tore through him like flame. He cried out but found no voice. His hands shook. His knees buckled.
And still the Watcher stood, unmoving.
"These are the legacies you inherit. These are the burdens you must bear."
"I'm not them!" Aelric gasped, teeth clenched.
"No. But you will be more."
The circle beneath him erupted in white fire. Aelric screamed as his body felt split into a thousand fragments—memories, regrets, doubts, hopes—ripped apart and scattered like sparks into the dark.
He fell.
—
When he awoke, it was beneath a sky of swirling light.
He lay upon a stone disc floating in endless dark, and Nyara was beside him, her starlit fur dimmed. But she was real.
"You survived," she said softly.
"I'm not sure," he whispered. "I don't know what's left."
She nuzzled his hand. "Only what was always within you."
He sat up, breath shaky, and took in his surroundings. Around him, the shattered stars were beginning to realign. The broken constellations overhead reformed, slowly knitting themselves back into shape.
The Hollow Star was healing.
A figure approached. Not the Watcher, but Thalin.
Or… a reflection of him?
This Thalin bore lines of power etched across his face like runes, his staff crowned with a living flame.
"You walk the path still," the phantom Thalin said. "But the stars no longer wait for you. They demand."
Aelric stood, weak but resolute. "Then let them see me."
The image of Thalin nodded and stepped aside, revealing a new path—narrow and flickering with light and shadow. Along its length floated symbols of unknown meaning, and at its end rose a gate of starlit obsidian, humming with power.
"This is the final threshold of the Trial," Nyara said. "Beyond it lies the first true step toward your becoming."
Aelric exhaled, staring at the gate. "And beyond that?"
Nyara's eyes turned to the sky, now slowly forming a new constellation. One shaped like a sword piercing a ring of flame.
"Beyond that," she said, "are realms untouched by time. The Eclipsed Realm. The Glass Thrones of Derynth. The prison of the Ashen Ones. And the one who waits at the end of it all."
Aelric stepped forward, heart pounding.
The gate began to open, and a wind like none he'd ever felt before howled out—a wind filled with forgotten names and dying stars and songs unsung.
He did not flinch.
For the first time, he did not feel like a boy chasing fate.
He was fate.
—
As he crossed the threshold and vanished into the storm of starlight, far above in the waking world, a different storm brewed.
Morvath stood atop a ruined tower, staring at the sky.
His eyes—once mortal, now endless void—narrowed.
"The stars realign," he muttered. "The Hollow awakens."
Beside him, a new figure emerged from shadow—tall, cloaked in a mantle of bone and darkness.
"The boy approaches the Forge," the figure rasped.
Morvath's voice was iron. "Let him come. I will meet him in the place where stars are born and gods fall."
~to be continued