Those who were never born

The fire cracked low beneath the stones, throwing soft shadows on the ruined archway overhead. Mist crept through the shattered spires like a living thing slow, quiet, cautious. Calyx sat beside the fading warmth, eyes wide open though the others slept around him.

He hadn't closed his eyes since the Moonbinders vanished. He couldn't.

Every time he blinked, he felt the weight of something else stirring inside him like the world no longer spun the same way.

Across the fire, Serah lay motionless, her sword drawn and flat against her chest. Even in sleep, her fingers stayed curled around the hilt. Wren had slumped against a broken column, cloak wrapped tight, muttering now and then under his breath. Bast snored with the low, guttural rumble of a bear caught mid-dream.

Calyx didn't envy any of them.

He wasn't dreaming at all. Because something else had taken root in him. Not just the spiral. Not just the ash. A voice. No, worse. A presence. Sometimes it whispered things. Sometimes it just listened.

But it never left.

He stared at his palm. The spiral had cooled, now just a faint mark in the flesh, black as dried ink. But the echo of its fire still burned somewhere deeper, under skin, under thought.

The moon above hadn't moved. It never did. He found it comforting once. Now it felt like an eye that refused to blink. He didn't remember falling asleep.

Only that when he woke, he was not in the ruins. He stood at the edge of a silver plain, flat as glass, beneath a sky of bleeding stars. No wind. No sound. Just stillness and something watching.

The landscape stretched into darkness. Every so often, faint pillars rose in the distance like broken teeth, monuments to things long gone. And the ground when he looked closer was made of pale masks. Thousands of them. Blank faces piled together, silent and weathered, their eye sockets hollow and endless.

A place of forgotten names.

"Where am I?" he whispered.

The air did not answer with sound.

But in front of him, a single figure stepped forward hooded in deep violet, robes dragging like mist.

"You are in the Hollow Reflection," it said. "The space between what is remembered, and what was never born."

Calyx felt the weight of those words settle in his bones.

"Why am I here?"

The figure tilted its head. "Because you remembered too loudly."

It raised one hand. The plain rippled. And then the masks began to move.

One by one, they turned. Faces twisting upward. Eyes empty but locked on him. Some smiled. Some screamed. Some opened mouths wide in silence, as if trying to speak.

"They want their names back," the figure said. "And now that you have a Name, you shine like fire in the dark."

Calyx stepped back, heart hammering. "I didn't steal from them—"

"You didn't have to." The figure's voice grew colder. "You awoke. And in doing so, you've disturbed every soul left in silence."

He turned to run but found no escape. The plain stretched endlessly.

"You are the Ashwrought now," the figure said. "And what you carry is not your burden alone. There are others… who will come for you. Not for vengeance. Not for power. But for the right to be remembered."

The masks began to rise.

Not just faces anymore but bodies. Figures formed from ash, bone, smoke, and sorrow. They reached toward him not out of anger.

But desperation.

"I'm not your enemy!" Calyx shouted. "I didn't choose this!"

The dream world shattered. He woke screaming, choking on cold air. Wren bolted upright, blade drawn before he even opened his eyes.

"Shadows take us what was that?!"

Calyx hunched over, gasping.

Serah was already by his side. "What did you see?"

He shook his head. "Nothing I understood."

"Try anyway."

Calyx stared at the ground, knuckles white against stone.

"There are people… or things. Masked. Forgotten. They want their names back. They said I shine like fire in the dark. That I awoke something."

Serah's expression darkened.

Wren glanced at Bast. "Ever heard of a place called the Hollow Reflection?"

Bast grunted. "Old tale. Old enough to be false."

"It's real," Calyx whispered. "I stood on it."

Serah's fingers twitched. "Then we need to move. Now."

"But where?" Wren asked. "We've no safe roads left. The Shadeknots are spreading. Moonbinders are thinning the Veil. Even the rivers bleed memory now."

Bast stood, shouldering his axe. "We go east."

Everyone turned to him.

"To the Skar."

"The Skar is madness," Serah said. "A sunken ravine haunted by things older than time."

"Exactly," Bast replied. "If the world wants him dead, we go where the world won't follow."

Calyx looked up. "Why would anything help us there?"

Bast's grin was sharp as a blade. "Because it hates the same things hunting you."

They left the ruins by dawn not that dawn ever came. But the moon shifted slightly behind a veil of clouds, casting a sickly glow across the dead forest.

They walked in silence.

The road was no longer stone or soil, but dust. A white powder that stuck to their boots and whispered with every step.

And then without warning Calyx stopped.

A voice. Not his own. Not the spiral's. Something else. Soft. Female. Sorrowful.

"Calyx…"

He turned. No one there.

"Calyx, I remember you…"

He spun again, panic rising.

Serah grabbed his arm. "What is it?"

"I—I heard someone. A voice. Saying my name."

"Where?"

"Everywhere."

Wren muttered, "We're being watched."

"No," Bast said. "We're being followed."

And from the trees, a new shape emerged. Not masked. Not cloaked. But human.

A young girl, barefoot, wrapped in tattered robes. Her eyes glowed silver. Her mouth moved but no sound came.

Calyx stared at her.

"I've seen her before."

"Where?" Serah asked, weapons drawn.

"In a memory."

The girl raised one hand. A spiral marked her palm inverted. Wren swore.

"She's a Neverborn."

And just like that, the world around them began to bleed shadow.

The silver-eyed girl took a single step forward and the ground around her breathed.

Calyx felt it, not in his bones, but in the memory of his bones. A strange, hollow ache that made him doubt if he was entirely real. The dust recoiled from her, whispering across the stone like something afraid.

Serah's blade was out in a flash, the edge catching what little light the moon offered. Bast moved beside her with surprising speed for someone of his size, axe gripped so tightly his knuckles cracked.

But Wren said nothing. He only watched the girl, his eyes narrowing.

"She's not real," he muttered. "Or… not all the way."

Calyx stepped toward her.

The girl didn't flinch. Her gaze never left him. Her mouth still moved in silence forming his name again and again like a broken prayer.

"Who are you?" he asked softly.

Her head tilted.

Then, with a movement that didn't match her body—too smooth, too precise—she reached into the folds of her tattered robe and drew out a shard of glass.

No. Not glass.

Memory.

The shard shimmered with something alive. Not light. Not fire. Remembrance. It pulsed once, then twice, in time with Calyx's heartbeat.

And then she threw it. Straight at him. He caught it without thinking.And the world twisted. He stood in a village he didn't know.

Smoke rose from chimneys. Children laughed in the distance. The air smelled of salt and moss and firewood.

But none of it was his. It wasn't a memory. Not truly. It was someone else's forgotten life.

He turned and there she was. The girl. Human. Smiling, holding a wooden toy. Her name, spoken by a faceless mother, echoed faintly: Lysha.

This was her memory. A life erased. And now it lived inside him. He dropped the shard. It clattered to the ground but didn't vanish.

"She gave that to me," Calyx whispered. "She gave me her memory."

"She gave you her name," Wren said darkly. "That's what the Neverborn do."

Calyx looked to him. "Why?"

Wren sighed. "Because they were never allowed to have one. They exist in the margin between death and life. Not raised, not born. Just… cast off. Echoes of might have-beens."

"She remembers me," Calyx said. "Why?"

Serah looked pale. "Because you called something back when you named yourself."

"She's not here to harm you," Bast said, eyeing the girl warily. "But she is marked."

"By what?"

Before anyone could answer, the girl flinched and screamed. No sound. No voice. But the ground around her split open.

Black vines surged from the dust like barbed snakes, wrapping around her arms and legs. She tried to run but they yanked her back. Her mouth opened again in silent terror.

Calyx moved. He didn't think. He acted. And the spiral in his palm burned to life. He raised his hand and fire spoke. Not flame. Not heat. But pure, raw truth.

The vines shrieked. They recoiled from the fire as if seared by sunlight, hissing and writhing as they slithered back into the dust. The girl collapsed, shivering.

Calyx knelt beside her, unsure what he was doing. "It's okay," he whispered. "You're safe."

She reached up and touched his face. And for a moment, just a moment he felt the entire weight of her non-life.

A thousand possibilities. A thousand deaths she never had the chance to earn. She pulled back. Her lips moved one last time. A word. Calyx heard it.

"Remember."

Then she turned to ash and was gone.

No one spoke for a long while. The dust drifted where she had been, rising slowly like snowfall in reverse.

Bast broke the silence. "The Neverborn are spreading. That should not be happening."

Serah frowned. "Then what's changed?"

Wren rubbed his temples. "Calyx is what changed."

"I didn't mean to—"

"You don't have to mean anything," Serah snapped. "You just have to be what you are."

"And what is that, exactly?" Calyx asked.

Bast's voice was like gravel. "The first Thornbearer since the Sundering. Maybe the last."

The silence returned. They walked again. Eastward. Toward the Skar.

And as they went, Serah finally broke the quiet. "There are stories," she said, eyes ahead. "Of people who gained too many memories not their own. They stopped knowing who they were. Started to split."

"Like Name-Eaters?" Calyx asked.

"No. Worse." She glanced at him. "They became Vessels."

"For what?"

Wren answered softly. "For the moon's reflected will."

The landscape changed slowly. Trees grew thinner, darkrer. The ground sloped downward in uneven steps. Cracks appeared in the stone, wide enough to swallow entire wagons. Here, nothing lived. Even the mist thinned out as if afraid to linger.

And then they saw it. The Skar. A jagged canyon, miles wide, plunging into an endless black abyss. No bottom. No echo.

Only a single bridge stretched across it a crumbling span of obsidian, cracked in the middle like a broken spine. Beyond it, the land shimmered with distortion.

Like a mirror with too many cracks. Calyx stepped forward, peering over the edge. It pulled at him. Not with gravity. With recognition.

"I've been here before," he whispered.

Wren muttered, "Then may the moon have mercy on the rest of us."

Serah unsheathed her blade.

"No turning back now," Bast said.

Calyx took the first step onto the bridge. Behind him, the spiral on his palm pulsed. Far below, something ancient stirred and opened its eyes.