The road wound through blackened forest, branches clawing at the pale sky like broken fingers. Aethel kept the Key of Echoes wrapped in a strip of cloth at her side, but even muffled, its presence was undeniable — a low, constant hum at the edge of hearing. As they journeyed east, the key began to react: it pulsed not just with light, but with memory.

  “They’re watching,” Ithan muttered.

  Aethel nodded. “No… they’re remembering. That’s what we woke.”

  They traveled into a region once called Carthwyn Hollow, now known only as The Shattered Vale. Legend told of a noble line that ruled here in ages past — the House of Elmareth — whose cryptic disappearance marked one of the first great silences in the realm’s history. But the Key had begun pointing them here, its glow intensifying as they entered the dead woods.

  No birds sang in the Vale. No wind stirred. The fog here was thick, clinging to their skin and seeping into their bones. But deeper within the vale, something shifted.

  They came upon ruins — shattered mansions, broken statues, overgrown with moss and time. And there, at the heart of it, stood the entrance to a mausoleum: a great domed structure of white stone stained with ash.

  Carved above its entrance were the words:

  “Let none disturb the silence that binds our guilt.”

  Ithan glanced at Aethel. “This doesn’t feel like any tomb.”

  “It’s not,” she replied. “It’s a memory prison. And the Key… it wants in.”

  The key’s light grew hot as Aethel approached the sealed iron doors. When she touched the key to the lock, the seal shattered — not in sound, but in sensation, like a scream muffled by earth.

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  The doors creaked open.

  Inside, they found not dust and bones, but people.

  Figures, frozen in posture but not stone — nobles in regal attire, a court caught mid-gesture, as if someone had stopped time in the moment of betrayal. Each figure’s face was twisted with emotion: grief, horror, fury.

  “Are they dead?” Ithan asked.

  “No,” Aethel whispered. “They’re bound.”

  The Key pulsed. As its light touched the first of the frozen nobles, the figure shuddered, then gasped — collapsing into Aethel’s arms like a puppet released from string.

  Her name was Lady Serel Elmareth, and she remembered everything.

  She spoke of how her family discovered the first fracture in the Bright Court’s harmony. A crown forged by mortal hand, tainted not by evil but by despair — a despair so potent it began to unmake truth itself.

  “We tried to contain it,” she said, her voice trembling. “We locked our memories away, and with them, our guilt. We thought ignorance would protect the realm.”

  Aethel knelt beside her. “And instead, you created the first Hollow.”

  One by one, the court awakened.

  With each noble, a different piece of the puzzle came to light: oaths broken, truths silenced, and magic warped by grief. The Elmareth line had once stood against the rise of the Hollow Crown — but in trying to erase their own shame, they had fed its power.

  “You must go to the Chasm of Thorns,” Serel urged them. “It lies beyond the northern cliffs. It was there the first unmaking began… and where the Crown’s shadow still feeds.”

  The moment the last noble spoke, the mausoleum began to collapse.

  Memory, unsealed, was too potent a force to be contained again.

  Aethel and Ithan barely made it out before the stones fell inwards, the tomb sealing behind them with a final sigh of dust.

  But they did not leave alone. Lady Serel, gaunt but unbroken, had chosen to come with them.

  That night by the campfire, as the Key of Echoes pulsed in her lap, Aethel stared into the flames. Serel slept nearby, wrapped in a borrowed cloak. Ithan sat across from her, sharpening his blade though they both knew it would be no good against what lay ahead.

  “Do you think we’re ready?” she asked.

  “No,” Ithan said. “But I think we’re necessary.”

  Aethel closed her eyes. For a moment, she thought she heard the faintest echo of a familiar voice — Madeline’s — whispering through the fog:

  “When memory returns, so too will the reckoning.”