The wind on the Plateau of Shattered Suns howled like a dying god.
Craters stretched across the land, glowing with threads of leftover cosmic radiation. Crystals the size of towers jutted from the earth, humming with dormant energy. The sky above was fractured, purple and gold, with twin moons cracked in their orbit. Time here stuttered. Days moved sideways. The light arrived before the sunrise.
And at the center of it all stood the girl with silver hair — the Fifth Starborn.
She had no name, not anymore. Not since her world had fallen. Her people were ashes. Her Flame had burned too late to save them. And yet she had survived, pulled through the fractures of reality, reborn in stasis, hidden until the Weave deemed her necessary again.
She walked barefoot across the plateau, every step blooming with golden dust.
Around her, the wind whispered memories.
"You are the last of Caelun's Light," the wind seemed to say. "You are the Echo-Flame. The Memory-Binder."
She reached the center of the crater field and knelt. Pressing her fingers to the dirt, she exhaled — and the world responded. The ground pulsed with life, and from beneath the surface rose a glyph, ancient and massive, glowing like a heartbeat.
The Starbrand sigil.
Each Starborn bore a unique gift — Kaelen, the Ash-Burner who erased. Lyra, the Phoenix-Flame who cleansed. Sera, the Frostflame who froze fate itself. Riven, the Silent Blade of Truth.
And her?
She was the Memory of Stars.
Her Flame didn't burn.
It remembered.
Far above, the Nightingale cut through the void in silence.
The crew hadn't spoken much since the sparring session. But a signal had interrupted their tension — faint, distant, buried under layers of encryption.
It had originated from the Plateau of Shattered Suns.
Riven ran diagnostics. "The frequency… it's older than anything we've seen."
Lyra leaned forward. "Older how?"
"Before the Shattering," he said. "Possibly before the Realms were Realms."
Sera crossed her arms. "Is it a trap?"
Kaelen stared at the screen.
"No," he said. "It's a message. A beacon."
Lyra glanced at him. "You recognize it?"
"I do," Kaelen said. "Because I activated it once. A long time ago."
They descended in silence.
The ship landed on the edges of the plateau. Frost hissed beneath its feet. Kaelen stepped out first, his cloak trailing behind him like liquid night.
They walked for an hour before they saw her.
The Fifth Starborn stood in the center of the field, eyes closed, arms raised toward the sky. The Starbrand glyph pulsed beneath her like a heartbeat. Around her, the air shimmered with memory — flickers of lost cities, names forgotten, friends long dead.
She opened her eyes as they approached.
"I remember you," she said to Kaelen.
He froze. "You were only a child."
"And you burned my Realm," she said without malice. "I remember that too."
The silence that followed was a wound.
Lyra stepped forward. "You're one of us."
"I was," the girl said, "Before the rest of you awoke."
Sera's eyes narrowed. "How did you survive?"
"I didn't," she said. "Not truly. The Weave held me in stasis. I only returned because the Flamechain realigned."
Riven looked to Kaelen. "She's older than you."
Kaelen nodded slowly. "She might be the First."
The girl looked at them all, her gaze distant.
"The Void stirs," she said. "It seeks the True Starborn — the one whose flame is not fire, but time. One of you holds that potential."
Lyra frowned. "Time?"
The girl nodded. "The Realms are not just broken in space, but in sequence. The Void-King's greatest weapon was never destruction. It was corruption of causality."
Kaelen stepped forward. "What do we call you now?"
She smiled faintly. "Call me Aeris. I was once the Starborn of Memory. But now… I am something else."
She turned toward the horizon.
"The Dreadspire has opened its gates. The Void-King is summoning the Unwritten. If we do not act, every Realm will echo in silence."
Back aboard the Nightingale, Aeris sat in the central chamber, a star map floating around her. Her Flame didn't glow — it resonated, linking strands of forgotten truths into a lattice of guidance.
Sera watched her silently. "You carry your past like armor."
Aeris nodded. "And Kaelen carries his like a wound."
Lyra looked to the map. "Where do we go from here?"
Aeris pointed to a point on the far edge of the Realms.
"The Weave is fraying at the edges. There is a place known as the Veil of Before. It contains the first lie. The first fracture. We must go there before the Void does."
Kaelen stood. "Then we move."
But in the darkness between Realms, the Vowless smiled.
For the Unwritten had already begun to gather.