Five years passed in a flash.
The world changed little, but Hector did. Where once a boy sat beneath the Tree of Life humming to the roots, now stood a young soul carved by dreams older than himself. He was only eleven, but his spirit had walked through centuries.
His white hair flowed past his shoulders now, brushed and tucked behind his elven ears. His ember eyes had grown quieter, not dull, but deeper—reflecting not just wisdom, but mourning. His aura pulsed with something other than magic. Something harder to name. A quiet, sorrowful empathy.
Each night, Hector dreamed.
But these were not the dreams of a child.
They were not random, not imaginary, and certainly not kind.
His Imprint—gifted by Thren the Moon-Eater, guardian of memory before consciousness—had long revealed its terrible blessing: he could feel the echoes of lives that had never been remembered. And through him, the universe ensured they would not be forgotten.
Some nights, he dreamed he was a farmer. His hands thick with calluses, soil under his nails, back bent from work. He watched as corrupt collectors took everything he had, and when winter came, he died huddled beside his animals. No one buried him.
Other nights, he was a sailor, lost at sea in a storm no one would remember. Or a child abandoned in a war-torn city, stolen by slavers and silenced before his name was ever written.
Sometimes he was old when he died. Sometimes barely five.
In a hundred dreams, he died alone. In a thousand more, he lived lives that no longer had meaning, forgotten even by the earth that buried them.
He woke most nights crying silently. Not for himself—but for them. For the faceless, nameless lives that he was cursed—or chosen—to remember. Not one life a hero. Not one death noble. Only lives erased by the grinding wheel of history.
And still, he remembered them.
Every cut. Every hunger. Every humiliation. Every scream.
His tutors noticed his silence more than his brilliance. He excelled at magical theory, sword forms, and elven script. But it was how he listened—how he seemed to understand sorrow in every word—that marked him as different.
"Hector, you look tired," Queen Elaria said one evening during a dinner of moonfruit and sage bread.
"I had a dream," he replied quietly, pushing food across his plate.
"Another one?" she asked gently.
He nodded. "This time… I was a baker. In a city made of limestone. I loved a girl who never loved me back. I died in a fire I tried to stop."
There was no way he could have known that city. It no longer existed. The name had been lost to rot and sand. But he knew the way the flour clung to his apron. The weight of the bucket in his hand. The shape of the girl's laugh.
Elaria placed a hand on his.
"I don't know why you carry them," she said softly, "but I believe they matter."
He didn't answer. He just stared down at his hands, still remembering how they had burned.
---
The only dreams he ever forgot were the good ones.
He tried once to remember a dream where he had been a child of peace—his mother singing to him by a fire, his siblings laughing. But it slipped away the moment he woke, as if it had never existed at all.
Pleasure was fleeting.
But pain endured.
And so, he cataloged suffering like a historian. Not just the events, but the feeling of them. He had felt hunger so sharp he couldn't cry. Loneliness so wide it became a landscape. The final moments of drowning. The way snow bit at bare feet.
He sometimes woke with phantom aches. Soreness in joints that had never bent that way. A limp that faded by noon.
He never told the other children of Kael-Terun. Most didn't speak to him. They respected him, yes, and admired his composure, but he moved like someone who belonged elsewhere. He wasn't cold, but distant. And unknowable.
Sometimes, late at night, the Tree of Life would send its pixie down to sit on his windowsill.
"I felt your sorrow again," she would whisper.
"I'm sorry," he'd reply.
"Don't be," she'd say. "I remember because you remember."
They would sit in silence, him at the edge of his bed, her in a soft green glow beside him.
He never feared the dreams. But he feared what they meant.
Were they meant to shape him? Warn him? Harden him?
Or were they simply the burden of one who walked the edges of fate?
He never sought pity. Instead, he studied harder. He practiced sword forms in silence. His control over mana was already near-elfin. But he went beyond what any tutor could teach. He learned how to feel the mana of others. How to listen not just to spells—but to hearts.
One night, he asked the Tree, "Do you think I'll become like one of them?"
"Like the ones you dream of?"
He nodded. "Forgotten."
The Tree thought for a long time.
Then the pixie answered, "No. Because you remember."
That was the night he started writing.
Not essays or spells. But names. Faces. Lives.
Whatever details he could remember, he recorded in a growing book he hid beneath the roots. He wrote in a language he invented—a language only the forgotten would understand.
It wasn't about legacy. It wasn't even about honor.
It was about truth.
And about giving voice to those who had none.
---
On his eleventh birthday, Hector stood alone in the Grove of Light, holding the book under his arm.
The Elven King had gifted him a cloak of starwoven silk, and the Queen a dagger with his name etched in celestial script.
But he didn't wear the cloak. And he didn't touch the dagger.
He stood under the branches and whispered one of the names from his dreams—a child, seven years old, who had died in a stampede while fleeing a raid.
"I remember you," Hector said.
The tree stirred.
And for a moment, the breeze itself whispered back.
It wasn't power that moved Hector forward. Nor prophecy. Nor ego.
It was the pain of a thousand voices.
And the promise he had made silently in his heart:
To never let them vanish.
Not again.