Ruins of the First Sin
Ashren
The city of Faethrin was dead, but not silent.
Ashren walked through its bones—crumbling towers, broken statues, and bloodless corpses frozen in ash. The Hollowborn's death had rippled here first. Faethrin was built on ancient magic, a city of secrets and sins buried under monuments to power.
He'd come seeking answers.
Instead, he found ghosts.
Not literal. Not yet.
But they whispered in the wind and scratched behind his eyes.
---
The Library Below
The Archivum Veilmaris had been sealed for five hundred years.
Ashren broke it with a word of blood.
The door hissed open, and dust poured out like memory.
Scrolls lined the stone walls, some glowing faintly with preserved enchantments, others too brittle to touch. He walked between rows of knowledge long forbidden, his eyes scanning for one thing:
The Gate.
The weapon beneath the world.
And what lay beyond it.
---
The Book of Chains
He found it in the last alcove. Bound in pale leather. No title.
He recognized the binding style—priestess-forged. Like the tattoos Selene once wore. Like the chains on the woman he'd seen in a vision three nights ago.
The Priestess of the Gate.
He flipped the cover.
Blood ink.
A sigil of seven spiral teeth.
And the first line:
> "The Hollowborn was not the first guardian.
Only the last one willing to remain."
Ashren felt a chill that had nothing to do with cold.
---
Seris
She rode hard, the runes on her staff burning.
The Gate's pulse was quickening, and with each beat, the world around her shifted—roots clawed at her horse's legs, stones cracked open to scream, and shadows moved without light.
The Gate wasn't just waking.
It was testing the world.
Testing her.
"Hold fast," she whispered to the chains on her arms.
One of them trembled.
A warning.
The Gate had sensed Ashren.
And it wanted him.
---
Ashren (Again)
The last page of the book held only a single line:
> "When the prince slays the Hollow, he will carry the Key."
He didn't understand it—until the scar on his chest, where he'd stabbed the Hollowborn, began to glow.
The soulbound blade had vanished.
But the wound remained.
It was not a scar.
It was a seal.
He was the Key.
And something on the other side was already turning the lock.