Riven didn't sleep.
He sat by Lira's side in the infirmary wing, the soft hum of the healing arrays buzzing faintly in the silence. Her breathing had steadied, and the glow on her skin had faded back to its usual pale warmth, but something lingered beneath the surface. Something he couldn't quite name.
The Headmaster hadn't come.
No professors knocked.
No Council members returned.
It was as if the world had gone quiet, waiting to see what would happen next.
He leaned back, rubbing at his face with both hands. His body ached from the fight, and his thoughts churned like stormwater behind his eyes.
[System Notification: Memory-Bound Weapon — Blade of the Lost — sealed until emotional trigger is reengaged.]
[Warning: Residual Void Signature detected. Source: Subterranean Layer Theta.]
[Optional Quest Generated: Trace the Remaining Echo. Reward: Unknown]
"Of course it's not over," Riven muttered. He glanced at Lira. "Because why would it be?"
He stood, gently placing her small hand back onto the cot. She stirred but didn't wake.
His sword waited by the doorway, silent, faint runes still etched faintly across the surface. He took it, strapping it across his back. If the system said the threat wasn't done, he believed it. It never warned him without reason.
But he wasn't heading into the dark blindly.
There was one place in the entire Academy that might have answers about what Lira had become.
The Librarian's forbidden wing.
He reached the archive at the far side of the Academy an hour before dawn. No torches lit the path. No wards were active. Only the great iron doors marked with symbols older than language—and a sleeping creature above it. A silver-furred guardian owl with four eyes opened them all at once and tilted its head.
"Let me in," Riven said.
The owl didn't move.
He drew the cracked charm from his pouch—the one Lira had made him years ago.
The owl blinked once.
Then the doors creaked open.
He stepped inside.
The air inside the forbidden wing was thick with dust and time. The shelves weren't neatly arranged—they curled and spiraled like vines of knowledge, each one containing tomes that breathed faintly or whispered to themselves when passed.
Some weren't even books.
One shelf held a dozen memory crystals spinning lazily in the air, each one showing a flickering scene of forgotten wars and systems never awakened.
Another shelf dripped ink onto the floor, the words reforming themselves mid-air before retreating back onto the pages like spiders.
But Riven wasn't looking for knowledge.
He was looking for her.
He found the Librarian at the far end of the archive, standing in front of a sealed vault door. She looked older than before—wrinkles like fine carvings of stone, her robes trailing across the floor like dust.
"You shouldn't be here," she said without turning.
"I wasn't given a choice."
The Librarian finally looked at him, and something in her eyes… shifted. As if she saw more than just Riven's shape. She saw through him—his threads, his ties, the scars of what hadn't happened yet.
"She's waking up too quickly," the Librarian said. "The Root Chamber was supposed to remain hidden."
"I think the world missed that memo."
The Librarian turned back to the vault.
"This is the Index of the Forgotten. Books and records erased from the Codex by command of the Sovereign Circle. Not destroyed—merely… misplaced."
She raised her cane and touched the vault once.
It groaned.
Runes flared red. Chains of light snapped loose. Dust fell in slow, glittering arcs as the door cracked open.
Inside were only three books.
One was bound in dragonhide. Another in shadow-silk, impossible to look at directly. The third was blank—just pale silver pages, waiting.
The Librarian reached for the last one.
"She doesn't belong to any known system," she said. "Her class isn't just rare—it's pre-structure. Something born before the Codex we all live by. The Echo-Born… were the first experiments in will-bound evolution. Systems that adapted to the mind and memory of the host, instead of assigning fixed skills."
Riven felt the weight of her words drop like a stone in his chest.
"So she could… become anything?"
"She already is. She just hasn't remembered it yet."
He stepped forward. "What's in the book?"
The Librarian didn't answer. She let the silver pages fall open.
Lira's name was written across the center. Not with ink—but with threads of light, stitched in and out of the paper like a living tapestry.
And beneath it—
A symbol.
A dragon with a broken halo. One wing of white fire. One wing of bone.
It was the same mark Riven had seen in his vision… in the future that hadn't happened yet.
"You've seen it," the Librarian said softly.
"In a fragment," he admitted. "She was floating above a battlefield. That symbol was burned into the sky."
"She's the anchor. The end of one world. The seed of another."
Riven looked up sharply. "She's a kid."
"She is," the Librarian agreed. "And that's why she still has a chance. You both do. But others… they'll come. Now that the Sleepless One is gone, the Codex will send something worse. Something cleverer. The kind that doesn't just kill…"
"…but rewrites," Riven finished.
The Librarian nodded.
Outside the archive, the sun began to rise.
But deep within the shadows beneath the Academy, another presence stirred.
Far below even the Root Chamber, in a sealed tomb older than any map, a set of chained wings twitched. Not metal. Not bone. Something… else. Something once divine, now buried.
Chains cracked.
A voice like molten stone whispered through the dark.
"She calls… and we remember."
In the sky above the continent, within a drifting fortress cloaked in dimensional fog, the demon-king paced before a long mirror. His horns shimmered with inner fire, and his fingers danced across a map of burning constellations.
A voice slithered in beside him.
"The Sleepless One failed."
The demon-king said nothing.
"She awakens faster than expected," the voice continued. "We should accelerate the trials. The First Thread is pulling toward convergence."
The demon-king turned. His eyes were not red. Not gold. But empty—a void stitched together by command alone.
"Send the Memory Eater," he said.
There was silence.
Then a grin.
"At once."
Riven found himself back in the infirmary by mid-morning.
Lira was sitting upright now, a book in her lap. She looked calm. Too calm.
"Hey," he said, stepping inside.
She looked up and smiled faintly.
"I remember a dragon made of mirrors," she said. "It flew upside down."
"Sounds like a dream."
"No," she said, tapping her temple. "It was… a memory I hadn't lived yet. I think that's what this skill does. I see pieces of what might be."
"Does it help?"
She looked down. "Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me sad."
He sat beside her and rested his arm gently around her shoulders.
"We'll figure it out. Together."
She nodded.
And yet—somewhere deep in the labyrinth beneath the Academy—something new had begun.
The books whispered.
The tree pulsed.
And far, far away… someone else opened their eyes for the first time in centuries.