Echoes of the Forgotten Dawn

It took them the rest of the day to reach the outer edge of Iskari Reach—a narrow, windswept landscape where the ground glittered with pale sand and the air carried the scent of burnt stone. Towering cliffs loomed above, veined with glassy minerals that hummed faintly as the sun dipped low.

The fourth shard pulsed somewhere below, buried beneath layers of stone, time, and memory.

Kael stood at the cliff's edge, scanning the terrain. "The entrance is ahead. There's a crystal cavern network beneath us—natural, but twisted over time by echo storms. Memory runs wild down there."

Aela followed his gaze. "So we're walking into a minefield made of thoughts?"

"More like… walking into the mind of a broken god."

---

They descended through a narrow fissure between the cliffs, the walls close enough to brush their shoulders. The stone glittered with veins of silver and blue, warm to the touch and oddly reactive to breath and heartbeat.

As they passed deeper into the caverns, the silence thickened—not natural silence, but one imposed by something ancient.

The path opened into a wide chamber.

Crystalline columns grew like frozen lightning from the floor, each one hollow and lit from within. Images moved inside them—memories, caught and replayed.

Aela stepped close to one.

Inside it, she saw a vision:

> Her mother. Standing alone in the standing stones. Whispering her daughter's name with tears on her cheeks. Behind her, something dark pulsed in the shadows.

Kael reached for her shoulder. "Don't get too close. The memories can pull you in."

Aela nodded, backing away from the column. "There are hundreds of them."

"Thousands," Kael said. "The cavern collects all forgotten moments—echoes cast off when timelines fracture. This entire place is a graveyard of unspoken truths."

Aela moved deeper into the room. The fourth shard's call grew louder.

But with it came another sound.

Footsteps.

Voices.

Then a shout.

> "There! Through the glass!"

Aela and Kael whirled as figures emerged from the far side of the cavern—dressed in cloaks marked with obsidian runes and clockwork emblems.

Time-Thieves.

There were five of them, and they moved with grim purpose, flanking the chamber. Their leader was tall and masked, voice filtered through a distortion field that bent light around their face.

"You have something that doesn't belong to you," the figure said.

Kael stepped forward. "The shards don't belong to anyone."

"They belong to what was," the Time-Thief replied. "And you're making the mistake of trying to restore it."

Aela gripped the hilt of her dagger. "What do you want with the shard?"

"To keep the Dawn shattered," the figure said. "To let time heal without remembering."

Kael drew his blade. "You're trying to bury the truth."

"No," the thief said. "We're trying to protect the future from the weight of the past."

Then they attacked.

---

The chamber erupted into chaos.

Glass cracked. Light pulsed. Memory fragments burst from the walls, catching combatants in moments of time not their own.

Aela ducked under a blast of kinetic energy, rolling behind a crystal column. Her pendant burned against her skin—the fourth shard screamed like it knew the others were nearby.

Kael fought two of the thieves head-on, his blade singing with precision. He moved like someone born to combat, every strike calculated, every block purposeful.

Aela saw an opening.

She sprinted past a collapsing pillar and toward the center of the chamber, where the fourth shard floated within a suspended crystal prism.

As she neared it, one of the Time-Thieves appeared from the shadows.

A younger man—barely older than her—with tear-tracks down his cheeks and fury in his eyes.

"I saw what happens if you take it!" he shouted. "You kill everything!"

Aela hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"I saw the seventh shard. I saw what you become."

Before he could say more, the ground buckled.

A pulse of raw energy blasted outward from the shard, knocking them both off their feet.

The chamber cracked in half.

And a vision consumed Aela.

---

She stood in a ruined city.

The sky was black.

The sun was gone.

Time hung in the air like a slow, painful heartbeat.

Bodies littered the streets.

And in the center of it all stood her—older, cold, surrounded by floating shards.

Not seven.

But eight.

The final one—the unspoken one—hovered above her hand like a blade made of forgetting.

"Echoes don't restore," the future Aela said. "They rewrite."

Then the vision shattered.

---

Aela gasped awake.

The fourth shard floated before her.

Waiting.

No longer in a prism.

She reached for it.

It came to her willingly.

And for a moment, everything in the cavern fell still.

The Time-Thieves retreated. Their leader vanished in a blur of warped air, leaving only the echo of a warning behind:

> "Four shards is enough to fracture the stars. You take the fifth, and the echoes may never let you go."

---

Kael helped her up. "Are you alright?"

"No," Aela said, trembling. "But I think I'm ready to keep going."

Kael gave a grim nod. "Then we follow the map."

But when they checked the map… something had changed.

A new path had appeared.

One that curved away from the known world and into a sea of stars.

Not a place.

A memory.

The shard had revealed the impossible.

The seventh shard wasn't at the end.

It was at the beginning.