The forest gave way to stone.
It began subtly—tree roots curling around shattered columns, moss climbing ancient staircases that led nowhere. Half-buried statues, their faces weathered blank by centuries of wind and silence. A civilization dead long before Serelith was even named.
I didn't find it so much as feel it. A pull in my bones, not my body's, but something deeper. The kind of knowing that didn't belong to this life.
"Left," whispered a voice—not external, not hallucinated, but remembered.
"Seven steps past the broken sentinel. Speak the gate's name."
The sentinel was there: a towering stone knight with no head, sword plunged into the earth. I stepped past it—one, two, three...
At the seventh, I stopped. A cracked archway yawned before me, woven with dry vines. In the stone above, a name half-chiseled out.
I didn't know it. But my lips moved anyway.
"Anzekar."
The vines withered. The archway shimmered—and split open into darkness.
I stepped through.
---
It was not a temple. Not anymore. It was a tomb.
The Hall of Forgotten Names.
A cavern beneath the earth, lit by flickering blue fire that clung to the air like dust motes. Shelves of ancient tomes stretched into the shadows, many bound in hide—some human. Sigils lined the walls, glowing faintly as I passed. And in the center: a pool.
Still. Silent. Black as oil, but reflective like glass.
I approached it, and the whispers began.
Thousands of voices, murmuring in a dozen languages. Names. Spells. Pleas. Echoes.
This was where they buried the past lives that got too loud.
"Drink," said the memory in me.
"Or drown in who you were."
I knelt. I didn't trust the water. But I trusted the fear more. So I drank.
It tasted like fire and frost and grief. I screamed as the memories surged—my own and not—a lifetime of battle chants, ancient symbols burning into my mind, fragments of spells in forgotten tongues. I fell back, shaking.
When I woke, the runes on my arms had changed. Expanded.
I could feel the Essence now. The flow of it through stone, through air. It wasn't mastery—far from it—but it was the beginning of control.
And knowledge.
Because in that tangle of stolen memories, one thing stood out clear as starlight:
This wasn't my first time in Serelith.
And in one life—I'd helped build the Sanctifiers who now hunted me.