Chapter Text
Date: 1st Lunaris, 103 years after the Cycle break (103 a.C)
Location: Elythara, Hidden Temple Library
Character: An unnamed priestess
In Elythara, the new year was not celebrated – it was whispered about.
The nameless priestess moved silently through the long, dark corridor of the temple library. Stone, centuries old, lay cold beneath her bare feet, smooth from the footsteps of those who had walked here before her. She had left her sandals at the entrance so as not to make a sound. Every step was a risk, every breath a violation of rules that no one spoke aloud.
From afar, she could hear the muffled tinkling of golden bells—an echo of the celebrations taking place in Solthara, the floating golden city. There, the Elythari would dance in their flowing, shimmering robes made of magically enhanced fabric under a starry sky controlled by the priests. She remembered the gentle floating of the platforms between the eternal flames that illuminated the sacred temples, the intoxicating scent of magical elixirs that were only served on special occasions and were known throughout Ikaril.
But down here, in the hidden depths beneath the golden towers, there was only the smell of old parchment, stale water, and dust that was older than she was. A smell that captured the true nature of Elythara better than all the golden facades up there.
She had learned to be invisible. A shadow among many, a mask without a face, hidden under a hood of dark linen. Even her eyes, deep brown and alert, disappeared almost completely in the darkness. Only her hands betrayed her nervousness—white and trembling with cold and anticipation. She wore a simple robe, unlike the magnificent robes of the immortals of the Council who floated above in the golden light.
Outside in Solthara, people wore masks, laughed softly, and kept the lights burning until night was over. She herself could hardly remember these celebrations, even though she had loved them so much as a child: dancing on floating platforms, the gentle vibration of the air from the currents of magic, the sweet smoke of burning herbs from the secret gardens accessible only to the Elythari. But the older she got, the more she realized how much Elythara was trying to cover something up on this day. No celebration, she thought now, is so loud that you can't hear what's hidden beneath it.
The Hidden Library—for that was what she was looking for—lay far away from these festivities. It was a quiet place where history piled up as if time were nothing more than a burden that had to be laid down somewhere. A burden that the Elythari pretended to bear while calling themselves immortal. The priestess had come here because something was troubling her, a feeling she couldn't quite put her finger on – like a dream that faded after waking, but always left an echo behind.
A single ray of moonlight fell through a tall, narrow window, revealing tiny dust particles dancing in the air like tiny stars in a forgotten universe. The priestess paused and gazed at the light—it came from one of the three moons, the smallest one, whose silvery light shone so intensely only once a year. A sign, the elders said. A promise from the Circle of Light that true immortality existed—somewhere beyond the limits of even the most powerful Elythari's understanding.
Her destination was a forgotten chamber at the end of the corridor, hidden behind a wall that shouldn't have been a door. She did not know how she had found her way here, or how she even knew that this chamber existed. It was as if something inside her had always known that this room existed, hidden behind legends and forbidden knowledge.
When she finally stood in front of the wall, she took a deep breath and gently ran her fingers over the stone. It felt cold, and her skin seemed to absorb the faint vibrations of the past—an echo of the currents that had once coursed through the world. A pressure, a barely audible click, and the wall opened silently, as if it had been waiting for her.
The room behind it was small, barely larger than the chamber where she slept. But it was full of shelves filled with scrolls and books whose covers had become brittle with age. The light from the crystal lamp she had brought with her—a small, forbidden jewel she had stolen from the main altar of the Hall of Memories—made the shadows on the shelves seem menacing, as if they were about to close in on her at any moment.
She stepped inside and the air changed immediately. Cold and dry, and something else—a hint of something older than Elythara itself. She approached the shelves cautiously, running her fingers over the backs of the scrolls until she stopped at one. No inscription, no title, just bare, worn leather. But at the edge she recognized a symbol, so faint it was barely visible: two intertwined circles, broken by a single jagged cut. The symbol of the broken circle—the sign of Velir'Kaal.
Her fingers seemed to pull the scroll out almost automatically, as if her decision had long since been made. The parchment felt warm in her hands, almost alive, as if ancient magic pulsed within it.
She carefully unrolled the parchment. It rustled softly, the sound seeming unpleasantly loud in the silent chamber. Her gaze wandered over the old lines. The writing was pale, barely legible—she had to move closer, almost bringing the paper to her face. What she saw made her breath catch in her throat: the writing was Ikaril, the ancient language of the world they lived in, which only a few Elythari still spoke, and she had studied it her entire life – ⨥⩎⩖'⩪⨭ ⨳⨯'⨍⩜⪣. ⨥⩖⩢'⨥⩎⩢ ⨳⨯'⩪⨭ ⩎⫸ – ⨥⩎⫸ ⩢⩎⫸ ⨅⨯ ⩪⨭ ⨥⩎⩖. ⨥⩖⩢'⩥⩎⩢ ⨳⨯'⩎⫸ ⩖⨦⩢. ⨥⩖⨍⩖⩢ ⨳⨯'⩎⫸ ⨥⩎ ⪨⨯⩎⫸ ⩢⩎⩸. ⩪⩪ ⨳⨯'⨍⩜⪣ ⪨⩎⩥ ⨳⨯'⨥⩖. –
She blinked and rubbed her burning eyes. Some of the symbols were smudged, others so faded that they were barely recognizable. She traced the lines with her finger, trying to breathe life into the fading text.
"Kael'nir thal'... xor'zarien," she murmured as her brain tried to interpret the runes. 'Velir'Kaal xor'nir... vel'ar lor...' Here, an entire word was illegible, just shadows on the parchment. "...kael. Vel'mir'kaar xor'ar thir."
She frowned, concentrating harder. The next line contained a symbol she had never seen before—a confusing squiggle between two familiar characters.
"Vel'quor xor'ar ka thal'... mir," she continued, her voice uncertain. "Nai... thal'kaar xor'kael."
She leaned back, sweat beading on her forehead. From what she could decipher, the translation was something like:
"There are years that never... Velir'Kaal was not a year—it was a breath between... a heartbeat that stopped and did not return. Our world paused when the... broke. Not... time itself dared to move on."
The words, even fragmentary, echoed within her, pulsing in her blood. The name Velir'Kaal was little more than a myth in Elythara. A warning that no one took seriously anymore, a bogeyman for wayward novices. The Elythari, who so proudly called themselves the Immortals, had relegated it to a footnote in their history.
But here, in these dusty pages, lay something else. Not a legend, but a testimony. And between the lines she read, something else awoke: handwriting, hasty and small, as if someone had written it in the dark. Marginal notes, fleeting and fearful.
"The currents were never separate—they connected more than just our world. We should not have broken them."
An icy chill ran down her spine. The currents Elythara's priests spoke of were considered paths of magic, ways of power. In Solthara, they celebrated them as the source of their immortality, proof of their superiority. But what if they were more than just metaphors, more than images given to children to explain magic?
She carefully turned the page. The crystal in her hand flickered briefly—a warning sign that its magic was weakening. Her hands trembled almost imperceptibly as she sank deeper into the lines. Each movement sent up small clouds of dust that caught the light of the crystal lamp and turned into tiny golden galaxies before disintegrating like lost dreams.
"The paths connected everything. Stars and shadows, life and death, here and there. We didn't know how fragile they were until we abused them for our own gain. We saw the paths as power—not as connection."
Next to these lines, even smaller, was a shaky note:
"Whoever finds this—forgive us."
The priestess felt her breath catch. The room around her seemed to grow smaller, as if the walls were closing in to better guard its secrets. The paper suddenly felt warm, almost alive, as if these words had not been written but breathed, straight from the memory of a long-dead soul.
She forced herself to continue reading. Every word tasted of dust and truth.
"One wanted to control them. One wanted to be master of the currents, wanted to open and close their gates as he saw fit. But the currents tolerate no master. The circle broke under his grip, and the paths sank into silence."
A note, almost illegible, was written underneath:
"We believe he is still alive. Somewhere. Somehow. In a memory that will never die."
The chamber suddenly felt smaller, as if the words were growing and taking her breath away. She knew the legends about Velir'Kaal, about the year that never ended, but this was different. It was not a metaphor, not a poetic description of a cosmic misunderstanding—it was a fact, carefully hidden behind myths and fairy tales.
As she read on, she learned more: The Immortal Council, which outwardly appeared to be the sole power in Elythara, was in truth only a facade. The real power lay with the Hidden Elders, a group so secret that not even all members of the Council knew of their existence. And they, these Elders, were the guardians of knowledge so dangerous that it had been erased from history.
Suddenly, everything seemed different to her. Elythara, the floating city of masks and power games, was just a small dot in a much larger story—and perhaps not even the most important one. The golden towers, the magical elixirs, the controlled downpours—all of it was just an illusion to hide something much darker.
The priestess swallowed hard. She remembered a gesture that Aldaris, one of the few Elythari who could still speak Ikaril, had once shown her—a small movement with his hands that looked like a prayer but was different—older, deeper. The movement was meant to symbolize the circle of light, he had explained to her. She hadn't understood it at the time, but now it became clear what Aldaris had wanted to show her: it was a reminder of the broken circle, hidden in gestures that no one understood because no one knew the truth behind the words anymore.
She began to carefully roll up the scroll again, but a noise made her freeze: footsteps. They were muffled, but they were getting closer. Was it one of the immortal messengers who could fold through time, as the legends said? Her pulse raced. Hastily, she pushed the scroll back into the niche from which she had taken it and tried to calm her hands. The footsteps came closer, paused briefly, then passed and faded into silence.
Her legs trembled. She leaned against the wall, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. The truth about Velir'Kaal was dangerous—more dangerous than any political intrigue in Elythara. A violation of the balance of immortality—the greatest crime an Elythari could commit. But she knew she could no longer remain blind.
After a few minutes, she had gathered enough composure to leave the chamber. She carefully closed the heavy wooden door, which turned it back into a wall. She looked around, but no one had seen her. It was Lunaris, the festival was outside, but here in the temple there was a silence that weighed heavier than any celebration.
As she walked back down the dark hallway, she stopped at the archway whose symbol she suddenly understood. Time had made it almost invisible, but now she could feel every line, every curve, every crack. It was the symbol of Velir'Kaal—of the rift that no one wanted to admit existed.
She spoke softly to herself, but her voice sounded strange, almost like an echo in her ears:
"If that's true... then we've never been alone."
The words hung in the air, hovering between hope and fear. Then she walked on, out into the cool wind that blew through the open windows, carrying with it the smell of smoke and festivity. But suddenly that smell seemed wrong to her, artificial and empty—like everything in Elythara.
She looked up at the star-studded sky and wondered for the first time if the currents she believed in were not just fragments of a much larger network that no one could see anymore. Was the immortality of the Elythari really a gift—or a curse, as the forbidden lines suggested?
Slowly, thoughtfully, she walked on, clinging to the thought that Velir'Kaal had never ended. And as she heard the festivities in the distance, she suddenly knew why Elythara welcomed the new year with masks—because no one wanted to wear the face that recognized what had been lost.
High above her floated Solthara, the golden city of the immortals, its flowing robes shimmering in the moonlight. The hidden elders would now gather in the Eternal Chamber, a place no one but them had ever entered. Would they talk about him—the nameless man who had broken the Cycle and was still supposed to be alive? Was he the reason for their immortality—or for their downfall?
Her footsteps echoed on the stone slabs, and the further she walked, the clearer it became to her that she had crossed a line. Not just the line of the chamber, not just the line of her duties—but a line from which there was no turning back.
And deep inside her, a thought flickered that would accompany her from now on: What if the Cycles had never really been broken, but only forgotten?
What if the truth about Velir'Kaal was not the end, but a beginning?
She looked up once more at the sky, where the golden towers of Solthara shimmered in the moonlight, untouched by the dust and secrets of the earth. Like the Elythari themselves, they seemed to float above everything, immaculate and timeless—and yet she now knew that they too were prisoners. Prisoners of a history they themselves had written and then forgotten.
"We are not the rulers of time," she whispered, repeating the words of an unknown Elythari sage she had found in the hidden lines, "we are its prisoners."