Revelations of Ruin

Ash clung to the towers of Ashwater like old regrets. Dawn seeped wan and colorless through sooted windows as Lyra and her companions pushed forward, deeper into Master Orin’s sanctuary of shards and secrets. Every step was muffled by dust, every breath tinged by the lingering sense of too many memories.

Orin’s eyes didn’t leave Lyra. His lined hands moved with brittle certainty as he fanned scraps of parchment across the table.

“Sit,” he said, voice like a cracked bell. “You seek truths no sane soul should crave.”

Jax looked ready to protest, but a raised eyebrow from Mira silenced him. Lyra sat, clutching the Shard, which thrummed faint relief at escaping the hunt outside. Mira hovered behind, arms folded tight. Kalen lingered at her shoulder, a shadow with watchful eyes.

Orin studied each of them in the dim, fractured light. “You want to survive? To topple Mask’s reign? You must understand the Shards. Their song is older than any empire—older than hate or hope. But song turns brittle under tyranny.”

He gestured toward a door veiled in braided beads and black feathers. “Come. The answers are buried in the old heart.”

They followed—a somber procession through halls lined with snapped relics, crumbled sculpture, and carved bones. The back chamber yawned wide, a shattered rotunda beneath a dome daubed with the ghosts of color—faint reliefs twisted by time, outlining a sun split to shards, figures kneeling before it, and a shadow rising behind.

Beneath the rotunda floor, a massive slab lay cracked. Bands of inlaid gold flanked runes scorched and half-buried beneath moss. Mira knelt, brushing away grime. “These aren’t imperial sigils.”

Orin began to chant—low, a tongue more music than speech. Lyra felt the Shard inside her warm, as if in answer. The others circled: Jax suspicious, Kalen silent, Arlen clutching his wounded side, pale with fever. Mira deciphered the glyphs, her lips moving.

“It’s a warning. Or a prophecy.”

Lyra moved to her side. The runes below her fingertips echoed—a pattern she almost recognized from her dreams: dawn-fragments, hands reaching, a tower falling.

She traced the lines.

Immediately, the Shard pulsed—a burst so bright she staggered.

Light spilled out. Not mere glow: a skein of memory unfurled, golden and cold as winter sun.

A vision pierced Lyra’s senses—

She stood in an age before the empire: an unbroken city of crystal and flame, towers rising toward a molten dawn. At its center, a host of figures—faces masked in silver, voices braided in song—held a single, radiant source aloft: the First Shard. The power cascaded through them, bringing life, forging kinship. Until one voice grew hungry, its harmony souring into discord. The song split. The Shard fractured. Splinters rained down as war unfolded, shadows coiling into flesh—until the Masked One seized the largest fragment, his face blank as midnight, forcing the rest to submit. Civilization burned. Survivors fled, the Shards scattered and buried until only rumor remembered their promise and curse. Fire, blood, ruin.

The vision ended. Lyra gasped, knees digging into cold stone. Mira’s hand found her shoulder.

“What did you see?”

She described the age before—the breaking, the Masked One’s rise. Mira’s face went pale; Orin only nodded, as if confirming a wound too old to heal. “So it’s true,” Mira whispered. “Mask was there—he is one of them.”

“Not a man,” Orin agreed. “A shadow corrupted by the Dawn.”

A hush. Jax spat, needing something to hate. “Makes no difference. The city still bleeds.”

A new sound broke the silence: slow clapping from the passage behind. Lyra spun, heartbeat battering. From the arch stepped Arlen, his arm bandaged, face drawn and strange. His eyes shimmered gold, eyes she’d thought were brown.

“Oh, you clever fools,” Arlen mocked, voice twisted by poison magic. “You dragged me all this way. Led me right to the heart.”

Jax reached for his knife—but Arlen flung out a small relic, lips curling in pain as runes flared. Blue wires lashed from ceiling to floor, spinning a cage of light around the party.

Imperial footsteps thundered behind. Sable entered, blade drawn, another three masked Hunters at her back. She regarded Lyra with a mix of respect and dread.

“Lay down the Shard. Or I kill them,” Sable said. “Choose quickly.”

The cage flickered—crude, but strong. Mira whispered: “Dawnlight, Lyra. If you can call it.”

Lyra pressed the Shard to her chest. Power coiled within her, hesitated—fear, exhaustion, Arlen’s betrayal gnawing at her trust. But another memory gnawed louder: You are enough.

She stood up. Dawnlight flared in her palm, burning through her doubt. The runework shuddered, buckled, then burst as a tidal wave of light rolled out. The cage shattered, Sable staggered, Arlen crumpled.

Jax booted a Hunter aside. Mira dragged Kalen through the breach. Sable howled—a sound half-human, half-grief—as Lyra wove the Shard’s power behind them, blocking pursuit in a wash of radiant fire that left streaks of afterimage burning in her mind.

They stumbled through collapsing corridors, over broken tiles choked with vine and bone. A hidden stair revealed itself behind a shattered altar; Orin, wheezing, led them upward. Outside, the day had turned storm-black, rain scouring their faces as they tumbled across a roof and down into a maze of alleyways.

Only when they’d run until even fear flagged did they pause, gasping. Behind, the temple blazed—whether from magic or imperial torches, who could say.

Jax rounded on Mira. “He was with us for months. How—?”

Mira’s eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “Mask’s grip reaches further every day.”

None answered. Lyra stared at the Shard, at the knowledge she now bore: the empire’s founder was no mere tyrant, but a being shaped by the same power she had barely survived. Their hope for resistance—woven through betrayal, revelation, and flight—rested now more than ever in secrets no sane soul should crave, and in the fragile light she alone could kindle.