The dream began like a whisper.
A single drop of ink falling onto paper.
Then the sound of parchment burning from the edges inward, and a scream half-swallowed by the weight of time.
Hector stood in a crumbling tower that rose from nothing. There were no stars in the sky, no sun, only an endless horizon of drifting ash. Shelves sagged with scrolls bound in flesh and tomes humming with trapped echoes. The air buzzed with mana gone sour—too thick, too sharp.
In the center of the tower, a scholar laughed.
The man had torn robes and eyes wild as cracked glass. His skin pulsed with blue light where mana tried to escape him, bursting through every pore like steam from a sealed kettle.
"You see? You see!" he shrieked, his voice shattering into seven tones at once. "The core is a prison! A leash! We do not contain magic—magic contains us!"
He raised a trembling hand, and raw mana pooled from the air, bending to his call like mist drawn to a flame.
It began to form—into a sword, then a serpent, then a star.
But his body began to fail.
Skin cracked, bones glowed from within. He screamed, veins glowing white. Then—nothing. The body collapsed to dust, and the magic with it.
Mana poisoning.
It was a cautionary tale among scholars. Most humans used the core within their bodies to cast spells—drawing on internal reservoirs to avoid direct exposure to the volatile wildness of ambient mana. The scholar had defied that, trying to command the world instead of flowing with it.
"He died forgotten," said a voice behind Hector.
He turned, and saw Thren the Moon-Eater, mouthless, void-faced, humming in reverse.
"Memory is not truth. It is weight."
And Hector remembered.
---
He woke in the elven palace, breathing hard.
The moon outside filtered through the Tree of Life's branches, casting soft fractal shadows across his room. Books lay open across the floor, and mana diagrams still glowed faintly from his study the night before.
He sat up, and the weight of the dream did not leave him.
He had seen death.
Not war.
Oblivion.
But also—a truth beneath it.
The scholar had failed because he tried to bend mana, a wild thing, to human will. But what if one did not command it?
What if one listened?
He remembered the teachings of the elves. How they wove mana like threads through a loom of thought, not force. How they let the world move through them.
And he remembered the hollows. The lost ones. The half-born. The broken dreams.
Thren had shown him the Imprint: the weight of what never came to be.
He closed his eyes. And he felt it.
Not mana.
Life force.
Not just his. But the breath of the earth beneath him. The sleeping tree above. The starlight drifting like pollen through his open window.
He reached out with his hand.
And the air listened.
---
The next morning, Hector did not go to the library.
He walked past the guards, past the tutors, past the training ground. He walked barefoot through the dew-laced grass, until he stood in the heart of the elven grove where the tree's roots spread far and silent beneath the soil.
He knelt.
And he hummed.
Not a spell. Not a song.
A memory.
The same tune he had always known. The same one that Victoria had hummed far away without knowing how. A melody unanchored to time.
He pressed his hand to the ground.
And began to weave.
Not with mana.
With memory.
With hope.
With the life force of forgotten dreams.
At first, there was only stillness. Then a shimmer in the air, like heat rising from stone. Threads appeared—thin as spider silk, golden and faint. They looped between his fingers, pulsing softly.
Shapes formed.
A flame, flickering in the palm of his hand.
But it wasn't fire. It was the idea of fire. A symbol. A memory of warmth, of destruction, of birth.
He had shaped life into form.
He opened his eyes.
And saw the world shimmering, breathing, alive in a way he had never noticed before.
Every blade of grass whispered.
Every leaf held sorrow and song.
He looked up at the Tree.
It rustled once.
A soft voice drifted down.
"You heard them... didn't you?"
The pixie form of the Tree descended like a glimmering ember, her wings humming with ancient music.
"The forgotten ones," Hector said.
She tilted her head. "No one remembers the dreams that died."
"But I do," he whispered. "I think I always did."
She hovered closer. "That flame in your hand... it is more than magic. It is grief."
He nodded. "And love. And longing. And everything that could have been."
"Will you carry them with you? Even when no one else can see them?"
Hector looked at the flickering light.
"I already am."
The pixie touched his forehead.
And in that moment, the flame shaped itself again—into wings, into a blade, into a heartbeat.
---
That night, when Hector returned to the palace, the stars felt different.
They didn't shine at him.
They remembered him.
And in the sky, beyond what the elven eyes could see, a formless god stirred.
The gods were silent now.
But the children had begun to remember.
Not what was.
But what was forgotten.
And in that forgetting, they found power.
And in that power—the promise of what was still to come.