Chapter 12: The Riftwind Ledger
Beyond the Hollow North lay a place that even the stars seemed reluctant to name.
Kaelen entered it alone.
The land did not resist him—it simply pretended not to exist. Trees without roots shimmered and disappeared when approached. Roads looped back into themselves. Echoes came before the sound.
Time was a rumor here.
Kaelen walked anyway.
Not because he knew the way, but because the path had already been written in him.
On the second day, a storm arrived.
But not of rain.
Wind peeled the sky into strips of light and shadow, tearing memories from the earth. Faces long forgotten rippled through the air like torn paintings—some Kaelen recognized, some he did not.
The storm was alive.
Not intelligent, but aware. Hungry.
Kaelen wrapped the silver thread around his wrist again. The Tower had given it to him. It was not just a relic—it was a tether. A spine of memory.
He drove it into the ground.
The storm bent around him.
Screaming.
Then faded.
Where the storm had passed, a path appeared.
Thin stones laid in a spiral, ending in a platform of black metal inscribed with names. Hundreds. Thousands. Each name carved by a different hand.
At the center, a seat.
A throne.
Kaelen approached it without hesitation.
When he sat, the world halted.
It was not a throne.
It was a machine.
And it read him like a book.
Waves of sound pressed into his skull. Thoughts spilled into the sky. His heartbeat slowed as his mind was pulled into the Riftwind Ledger.
He saw cities.
Fallen ones.
Burning, rising, dying again. Cycles of destruction playing out across centuries. Names he had once known as legends flickered in and out of truth. The girl with the frost in her breath. The man of iron and guilt. The queen who wore oblivion like perfume.
Kaelen lived all their endings.
And then—
He saw himself.
But not as he was now.
As he had been—before the fall.
And after.
Standing before the first Rift.
Hands covered in blood not his own.
Eyes not quite human.
Speaking a name that had not yet been born.
The machine spoke then.
A voice like a stone dropped into a well:
"You are not the first. But you are the last."
Kaelen asked, "Last of what?"
The voice replied:
"The Remembered."
He awoke from the trance not with clarity, but with direction.
The machine had left a scar in his mind. Coordinates burned into thought. A place that did not yet exist—but soon would.
He descended from the platform. The wind had stilled. The world was listening.
He spoke the name the Ledger had shown him.
A word that bent space around his tongue.
And the path opened.
Kaelen walked into the fracture.
Not a portal. Not a door.
A wound.
Between realms, between stories.
And on the other side, something waited.
Not an enemy.
Not an ally.
A choice.
He stepped through.
And the world changed shape.
He found himself standing on a plain of mirrors.
Not reflecting his body, but his mind.
Each step triggered a memory—some his, some belonging to no one.
He saw a field of corpses turned to stone.
A boy breaking a crown with a smile.
A shadow that called itself brother.
And a woman, standing alone, holding a flame that refused to die.
Kaelen understood nothing.
And yet, everything.
The mirrors ended at a gate.
Carved not from stone or wood, but from silence itself.
Above it, words:
"What you seek has a cost."
Kaelen placed his hand on the silence.
It broke.
And the next trial began.