"A lie protects a kingdom. A truth breaks it open.
What you build from the pieces… that is your kingdom's soul."
—Seluin, before the Ash Pact
Seluin stood at the edge of the Tower's highest spire, her cloak billowing like a wound in the sky. The storms roared around her. Lightning kissed the metal veins of the airships moored below. Yet her eyes remained on the distant mountains—the place where memory and fate would soon collide.
She had cast the vote.
She had defied twelve centuries of silence.
And now, she would face the consequence with her own feet on the path.
She would find the boy.
She would tell him the truth.
Forty Years Ago
The desert had no name.
Just wind. And silence.
And a gate—small, crude, little more than a ring of bone and starlight buried in sand.
Seluin had found it by accident.
No one else remembered it existed.
She hadn't told the Council.
Because she had heard it whisper.
A voice. Faint. Childlike.
"Please. I didn't mean to fall."
She reached out.
And for a moment—less than breath, more than eternity—she saw another world.
Glass towers. Neon skies. Boys pushed into rivers of sorrow. And a name she could not pronounce, only feel:
Amine.
She had sealed the gate that day. Not to bury it—but to wait.
Present Day
Now she soared across the sky in a craft shaped like a manta ray—its wings made of woven wind and dragon silk. The Council did not know she'd left. Her aura was cloaked. Her magic silenced. Only two companions rode with her:
Ephraim the Still—who had once carried the flame of history.
And Elder Grin, a mage whose body was stone, but whose soul still wept.
"I am afraid," Grin admitted, as they approached the black cliffs of Elyth Seran.
"Good," Seluin said. "It means you're still human."
Beneath them, the ruins of the Lost City pulsed faintly.
The Second Gate had quieted again—but the echoes were still raw.
Amine was there.
So was Thanor, the young dragon whose bloodline now stirred memories older than bones.
And Mira, his blade at his side, her loyalty forged in fire.
The manta-ship descended. Air shimmered around its hull. Stones whispered as Seluin stepped down.
Then she saw him.
Amine.
Seated atop a broken obelisk, feeding Thanor slices of dried fruit while Mira inspected the broken architecture with measured distrust.
He looked up.
And froze.
The wind stopped.
The air thinned.
Thanor growled low.
Mira reached for her blade.
But Seluin did not raise her hands.
She removed her hood.
Let the storm see her face.
Let Amine see it.
"I was there," she said softly, "when you fell."
Amine stood. His voice cracked. "How do you know my name?"
"I knew it before this world ever shaped your soul."
They sat by the shattered fountain that once bore the city's promise.
Seluin explained.
About the experiments.
The theft of starlight.
The forging of dragons from seed-thoughts stolen from other galaxies.
She spoke of the Gates—how they were never just portals, but memories made sentient. Each one a story the world wanted to forget.
And how Amine's soul—in its final breath back in Tokyo—had pierced the veil between worlds, triggering the awakening of the First Gate.
"You did not escape," she said. "You were invited."
"By who?" Amine asked.
"The Gate. And perhaps…" She hesitated. "By me."
Amine rose.
His expression unreadable.
"You knew this would happen."
"No. I feared it would. But I hoped it wouldn't."
"Then why come now?"
"Because the Third Gate is waking. And when it does, the world will need your truth, not the Council's lies."
Thanor tilted his head. "And if he refuses?"
Seluin looked to the sky.
A crack had formed in the clouds—light spilling through like truth breaking through denial.
"Then we all die remembering nothing."
Meanwhile: The Third Gate
Far away, buried beneath the deepest trench of the ocean, a tower of light cracked open.
Inside, a single being stirred.
Not a dragon.
Not a mage.
But a hybrid.
His wings were jagged. His eyes like broken glass. His blood churned with both fire and spell.
He was the first.
The child of dragon and human.
The one both races tried to erase.
His voice was a whisper across continents.
"I remember you, Amine Toku."
He smiled.
"I remember everything."
Back at Elyth Seran, Amine turned his gaze eastward.
Something had awakened.
Something that remembered him.
He clenched his fists.
Then looked to Seluin.
And asked the only question that mattered now:
"Will you fight with me?"
She bowed.
"Until the end of memory."