"To forget is not to lose. It is to become unrecognizable to your own soul."
—Inscription on the shattered archway of Elyth Seran, the Lost City
The journey to the Second Gate led them westward, across the charred winds of the Starless Expanse—a land that no maps dared name.
It was Mira who first heard the whispers.
Not words. Not thoughts.
Memories.
They clung to the air like mist—fragments of lives once lived, echoing through stone and dust. Faces flickered in broken glass. Songs hummed from beneath collapsed towers. Names drifted like ash.
"Something… happened here," Mira said, her hand on the hilt of her blade.
Kherys nodded gravely. "This was once Elyth Seran. The city where dragons and men dined at the same table."
Amine stared across the horizon.
"Why did it fall?"
The silence that followed was answer enough.
Elyth Seran had once been a marvel.
A city of floating walkways and mirrored towers, where dragonkind and humans forged a fragile peace. The Second Gate had been sealed within its heart—worshipped by some, feared by others.
But peace is a memory.
And memory, like all things, can be erased.
The Gate had called to the city.
Offered it power.
And when the people sought to own it… the Gate unmade their names.
Literally.
They forgot themselves.
Not metaphorically.
Their identities were ripped from time.
By the time Amine, Mira, Thanor, and Kherys reached the gates of the forgotten city, the streets were silent. Buildings stood like bones. Statues wept black ichor. And in the distance, rising from the center of the city like a wound that had never healed, was the Second Gate.
This one was different.
Not circular, but spiral.
Black stone woven with gold veins that pulsed faintly with each step Amine took.
It was asleep.
And dreaming.
They entered a grand plaza littered with broken masks.
Mira crouched to examine one.
"These were ceremonial. For the Concord Rite."
Kherys grunted. "When man and dragon shared breath and story. Before they forgot what those stories meant."
Suddenly, Thanor stopped.
Growled.
Something stirred.
A figure stepped from the shadows.
Hunched. Armored in rags of silk and bone. Its face was carved from polished stone. No mouth. No eyes. Just a single glowing rune on its forehead:
⸸
The symbol of Unmaking.
Kherys stiffened. "Name-Eaters."
Amine summoned a barrier.
"Explain."
"They were born from the Gate's regret. When it began to realize it had taken too much, forgotten too deeply. These creatures devour memory. Entire lives—consumed."
The figure raised its hand.
Dozens more stepped from the shadows.
Silent.
Soulless.
Empty.
They did not scream.
They drained.
Combat erupted like a flame starved of oxygen.
Amine's summons surged forward—a phoenix made of song, a jaguar of living script, a child-sized golem stitched from notebooks and shattered ink.
But the Name-Eaters did not bleed.
They absorbed.
When the jaguar struck one, it convulsed—and vanished into vapor.
Amine gasped.
"They're feeding off the memory of my summons—erasing their existence."
Mira sliced one clean in half. It dissolved like fog.
But three more replaced it.
"We can't kill them all," she shouted.
Kherys stepped forward.
"I can. But the cost is steep."
He opened his chest.
Not literally.
His scales parted, revealing a furnace of pulsing light—flame script circling a small crystal that burned white-hot.
"The Memory Core," he said. "The last true Word. If I speak it, they will fall."
Amine shook his head. "You'll die."
"I was never meant to last this long. I was a container. A keeper. I've done my part. Now let me do the rest."
Thanor roared—softly.
Kherys smiled at the young dragon.
"Remember me."
Then, he spoke.
The sound was not a sound.
It was an undoing.
A reverberation through reality itself—a reminder of what had been before everything forgot how to be.
The Name-Eaters froze.
Cracked.
And wept.
Tears of glass and fire.
Then they crumbled—one by one—until only Kherys remained, kneeling, his body disintegrating into flakes of golden ash.
He looked at Amine one last time.
"You carry fire not to destroy," he whispered, "but to remember."
And then he was gone.
The Gate awakened.
The spiral now pulsed with life.
Amine stepped forward.
His body trembled.
Mira touched his shoulder. "We do this together."
He nodded.
But as he raised his hand toward the Second Gate, something moved within it.
A silhouette.
Tall.
Scaled.
With wings of starlight and eyes like endless wells.
A dragon.
But not like Thanor.
This one was ancient.
And bound in chains of memory.
A voice boomed from the Gate itself:
"You who walk with the name of another—
Are you here to remember us?
Or to bury us again?"
Amine didn't flinch.
"I came to learn your names."
Silence.
Then laughter—deep and weary.
"Then enter, Flame-Keeper.
And see what it costs to remember a god."
The spiral opened.
Light swallowed them.
And Elyth Seran faded once more into silence—its memories now shared, if only barely, with the last living witness.