THE ASHES OF AETHRIA

Prologue – The Last Light of Aethria

The stars did not fall.

They were dragged from the sky-one by one-by hands that had forgotten mercy.

Aethria burned, not in flame, but in unmaking.

Its towers, spun from starlight and tempered by the songs of gods, unraveled into threads of forgotten time. Oceans boiled upward, swallowing the sky. Forests wept ash instead of leaves. The moon cracked like glass under the pressure of a broken truth.

And the people watched.

Some prayed. Others sang the last song of the Empire, hoping the gods would return.

But the gods were already here.

They were the ones doing this.

Nine of them stood atop the Mirror Spire, robes flaring like banners in a storm, faces hidden behind masks of gold and memory. They had once been Theurges, speakers of the Great Glyph, guardians of balance. But the Empire had grown too large, too loud. It had begun to bend time, to rewrite death, to forge new lives from old bones.

Creation, they whispered, had no more room to breathe.

And so the Theurges betrayed their Emperor.

They split his soul into seven shards and cast them across the river of time. His crown they shattered, scattering it into fragments-each bound to a different echo of reality. The capital city, Elaraxis, they folded into a pocket of unreality, locking it away with chains of paradox.

"Let no empire rise so high that it forgets the soil from which it came."

But one of them hesitated.

A woman in silver, eyes wet with memory, placed a single shard of the Emperor's soul into a woven vessel. Not a weapon. Not a vault.

A child.

The child would not remember. Would not know power.

Not yet.

But when the world forgot itself-when time began to hunger and the threads of creation frayed

the shard would awaken.

And Aethria would dream once more.

In the forgotten tongue, "Aethria" meant "the sky that sings."

In all the ages since, the sky has been silent.

Until now.

*************************************************

Chapter One – The Wrong Door

The night sky over Vireos was clear-unnaturally so. No clouds. No wind. Just the heavy silence of a city floating half a mile above the ocean, tethered to the world by little more than ambition and ancient machinery. The moon hung low, silver and swollen, casting its glow over the sandstone cliffs that held the lower ruins-where the past went to rot, and thieves like Kaelin Deyne went to get rich.

He crouched behind a broken obelisk, watching the cliffside entrance to the tomb with the same quiet tension as a predator before the pounce. The old gate had been half-swallowed by the earth, twisted from time and tremors. A perfect hiding place for history that didn't want to be found.

And gods, did this job stink of history.

"Two hours in, ten minutes out," Kaelin whispered to himself, as much a mantra as a plan. "In, out, no ghosts, no curses, no surprises."

The satchel at his side carried his tools: a lantern filled with storm-oil, a collapsible mirror-shard blade, a folded pry rod, and a thin velvet wrap for handling delicate artifacts. He checked each one, more out of ritual than necessity. Every job needed its rhythm. This was his.

He adjusted the scarf around his face and stepped into the dark.

Inside the tomb, the air was stale but dry, the silence pressing against his ears like cotton. His boots crunched softly against the brittle floor, dust and bone-pale sand grinding beneath his heels. The light from his lantern flickered along the walls, catching on faint glyphs-nothing local, and certainly nothing Virean.

This place was old. Pre-Vireos. Maybe even Pre-Collapse.

His client-a cloaked noble whose face Kaelin never saw-had described the object he wanted in obsessive detail: a pendant of black silver, circular, with a shifting mirrored center. "The Eye of the Sky," the noble had called it, though he'd offered no history, no explanation. Just gold.

Which was fine by Kaelin. He asked questions only when they paid better than silence.

The tomb's interior spiraled downward, its architecture shifting subtly the deeper he went. The walls, once rough stone, became smooth. Then impossibly so. Seamless. As if grown, not carved.

Kaelin slowed, heart thudding louder than his footsteps. He touched the wall. Warm. Buzzing. Like the hum of a dream.

The air had changed too-thicker, charged with something he couldn't name. The deeper he went, the more he felt like he was being watched. Not by a person. By the place itself.

It wasn't the first tomb he'd robbed, but it was the first that felt like it was waiting for him.

He reached a circular door, tall and without handle or seam. No obvious way in. Just more strange glyphs etched in faint spirals across the surface. He reached for his pry rod-then paused.

His fingers brushed a smooth indentation at chest level. His lantern's flame flickered violently.

He pressed.

The glyphs glowed. The door shuddered.

And with the groan of a mountain remembering its pain, it opened.

The chamber inside was vast. Silent. Moonlight filtered through a crack in the ceiling, illuminating the dust-heavy air in soft shafts. At the center, a stone pedestal stood alone, surrounded by a ring of floor etched with symbols that seemed to move when not directly looked at.

On the pedestal rested the pendant.

Kaelin stared. It was exactly as described-perfectly circular, wrought from dark silver, its center filled with a swirling liquid light that reflected no image. A mirror without memory.

He approached slowly, every instinct screaming at him. But instincts didn't pay coin, and fear didn't feed you in Vireos.

He reached out.

The moment his fingers brushed the pendant, the world shifted.

A sharp snap of air. Like a seal breaking.

His lantern went out. The chamber plunged into a lightless abyss-except for the glyphs, which now glowed along the walls in pulsating rhythm, as if they had begun to breathe.

Kaelin tried to let go of the pendant.

He couldn't.

His body locked, his hand frozen. His heartbeat thundered. His breath came in gasps.

And then the visions came.

Not dreams.

Memories.

But not his.

He stood in a mirrored hall, beneath a sky of violet flame, as cloaked figures bowed before him. He saw a city in the clouds-nothing like Vireos-vast, crystalline, filled with towers that moved like trees in wind. He heard language he didn't know, but understood. Felt the weight of a crown on his head.

And through it all, a single voice wove through the chaos. Feminine. Familiar.

"You are the Witness. The final thread. The empire remembers through you."

Kaelin fell backward, screaming. The vision vanished. The pendant clattered beside him, its glow dimming but not fading.

He lay gasping, sweat pouring down his face, body shivering despite the heat of the stone beneath him.

"What... in all the hells... was that?"

The glyphs dimmed.

The chamber was silent again.

He pushed himself up slowly, fingers trembling as he picked up the pendant with his cloth. The thing was still warm, still humming faintly. But it no longer clung to him.

He dropped it into the velvet wrap and shoved it deep into his satchel.

"Two hours in," he muttered again, trying to steady his breath. "Ten minutes out. No ghosts. No curses."

He took a single step toward the door.

And the entire chamber groaned.

A new glyph, high on the wall, lit up-a sharp, burning crimson. Then another. And another.

Kaelin didn't wait.

He ran.

The spiral passage twisted more than he remembered. The angles had changed. The slope was steeper. And the walls-they were watching him. Glyphs lit as he passed, pulsing in erratic patterns. A hum filled the air. Not a song. Not a voice.

A memory trying to become real.

He reached the entrance in a blind sprint, lungs burning, heart screaming. The stone collapsed behind him in a thunder of dust and roar. He tumbled down the last set of stairs, rolling into the moonlight like a man reborn.

He lay there for several long moments, coughing, wheezing, the night sky spinning above him.

The pendant was silent now.

But deep in the ruined tomb behind him, something had woken up.