The firelight in the chamber dimmed.
Orias stepped toward the wall and touched a dormant panel that hadn't opened in centuries. With a hiss of old air and stardust, it revealed a hidden vault behind the flame altar—etched in forbidden glyphs and chained with shimmering sigil-binders.
Skyler stared.
"Wait… that's your name on the door."
Orias didn't answer. He simply raised his hand and spoke a word that shouldn't have existed.
The chains fell.
Inside, a single artifact floated—encased in layers of psychic shielding. A flame sphere wrapped in black thread and frozen echoes. Within it: fractured images, trapped voices, burning glyphs spinning in slow, mournful orbits.
"This," Orias said, "is all that remains of me."
Skyler's chest tightened.
"You're standing right here."
Orias looked over his shoulder, eyes glowing faintly gold now.
"Am I?"
The flame pulsed.
He stepped aside, and the Book of Recalled Flame flipped itself open to a sealed page—marked not in language, but silence.
Skyler approached the vault. The air grew heavy, thick with memory density. He felt tears form—not from sadness, but from overload. Emotion from every version of himself clashed in his chest.
"I wasn't always called Orias," the man finally said.
"In the first Archive, I was the Witness Prime. I carried the memories of the original Novaah continuum—the first ever formed."
He stepped into the projection, and his form rippled slightly.
Skyler took a step back. "You're not fully… real."
"I'm a fragment," he said simply. "A remnant stitched into your timeline. A safety echo."
Saya gasped. "You're his memory anchor."
Orias nodded. "The real me was erased from time completely. Not killed. Removed. They called it the Unwitnessing."
Skyler whispered, "They can do that?"
"The gods couldn't destroy the Novaah line outright. So they began with the strongest of us—me. They shattered my timeline, scattered my echoes, and used me as the basis for the Suppression Genome."
He touched the vault, and a projection burst out—millions of simulations.
Each one showed Orias in different roles:
A general of flame
A father holding a newborn Skyler
A traitor burning the Archive
A martyr consumed in a war that never happened
A god… kneeling to Skyler
Skyler dropped to a knee, overwhelmed.
"Why me? Why did you leave this for me?"
Orias knelt too.
"Because I was the first to see the true end of the Witness Line. And you… are the last to stop it."
He extended a hand toward the vault.
"Absorb the memory fragment. And you'll unlock Seal Two."
Skyler hesitated.
"I'm not ready."
Orias smiled sadly. "No Witness ever is."
The vault flared open.
Skyler reached inside.
And the second glyph burned into his chest—red and white fire wrapping around his heart. His mind snapped back through ten thousand memory strands.
He saw:
A universe on fire, with himself at its center
A child crying across timelines for a name she could no longer remember
Orias, disintegrating in slow silence, whispering, "You must carry what I could not."
Then everything went black.
And from the dark, a voice—not Skyler's—spoke:
"Seal Two breached. Identity fracturing. Flame threshold exceeded."
When Skyler awoke, the flame sphere was gone.
And Orias was no longer in the chamber.
Just a burning echo etched into the wall:
"Witness what I could not. Remember what they buried. Flame forward, Veritas."