They left Graymere at dawn.
The road ahead twisted through the Vergewood — a forest that hadn't existed the day before. According to old maps, there had once been a town here called Thorneleth, but no one Kaelen had ever met remembered it. Not even Tareth.
Yet as they walked, Kaelen could feel its presence — like an echo she hadn't spoken yet. The trees whispered strange things. Names. Half-syllables. Questions no one asked anymore.
"What are we looking for?" she asked, breaking the silence.
Tareth didn't look back. "A city that remembers itself. Even when no one else does."
---
By midday, the mist thickened. Roots curled unnaturally along the path, and the air tasted metallic — like ink and blood.
And then, they saw it.
Not a city.
Not ruins.
Just a single door — standing upright in the forest, framed in dark stone, surrounded by nothing.
No hinges. No handle.
Just one word etched across it in cracked, luminous script:
LETHE
Kaelen reached for it, but Tareth caught her hand.
"Wait. This isn't a door to a place," he said. "It's a door to what that place remembers of itself. And that means…"
"It might remember us wrong."
She nodded.
"Then we go in together."
---
The door opened at her touch.
It didn't swing. It simply vanished, and the world folded around them like parchment catching flame.
---
They stood now in a city that no longer had shape — Lethe, a place formed entirely from disjointed memories.
Buildings flickered. Streets changed with each blink. Statues half-spoke their names before falling silent again. Some structures were only sketches — outlines in fading ink.
Kaelen stepped carefully.
The spiral on her wrist throbbed, drawn to a half-buried monument at the square's center — a woman's face carved into stone, eyes blindfolded, lips open in warning.
"Speak only what you dare forget."
Tareth scanned the square. "This place is too unstable. If we stay too long—"
A crack split the sky.
And then came the echo.
It wasn't a voice. It was a copy of Kaelen's voice — whispering something she hadn't said aloud since childhood:
"I remember my mother singing in a room with no roof."
Kaelen froze.
That memory had been gone for years.
The monument pulsed — and the city began to form around it.
---
Lethe's streets stabilized. A melody flowed through the air — familiar, sad.
And then… the Hollowborn arrived. But not like before.
These weren't hunters. They were reflections — malformed ghosts of Kaelen's forgotten past. A woman with her eyes. A child with her laugh. A man she couldn't name but somehow feared.
"They're not real," Tareth said. "They're yours."
"They feel real."
"They're trying to drown you in what you lost."
Kaelen stepped forward.
She spoke again — not to them, but to herself:
"Your names may be gone… but mine is still mine."
The spiral flared, and the ghost-forms shattered like stained glass in firelight.
---
Lethe Awakens
The monument's blindfold cracked.
And beneath it: eyes carved not with stone, but with swirling spirals — the same shape as Kaelen's.
A new word bloomed into her skin.
Not a name.
A place.
LETHE — anchored.
For the first time in decades, the lost city remembered itself.
And it remembered her.
---
Back in the forest, the door was gone. In its place: stone roots curling into the soil, and a carved phrase in the ancient tongue of Athrénn:
"One step restored. Seventeen still silent."
Kaelen turned to Tareth. "Seventeen?"
He nodded. "There were eighteen great cities. One by one, they vanished."
Kaelen's voice was steady now. "Then we wake them."