The shard grew heavier the longer Riven carried it.
By the time they stumbled across shelter, Riven could barely stay upright.
The world blurred at the edges, colors dulling to washed-out grays. His breathing slowed into shallow gasps, each one scattering his thoughts like ash on the wind.
"Riven," Veyla said sharply, grabbing his arm. Her hand felt distant, like a memory slipping through mist. "You're burning up."
He shook her off with a faint smile. "I know."
They ducked into the ruins of an old shrine, a circle of broken stones half-swallowed by the earth. Crumbled pillars leaned inward, as if bowing toward the hollow altar at the center.
The air was thick with the smell of old smoke and something sweeter, sickly-sweet, like rotted blossoms left too long in the sun.
Above them, the sky stretched on, endless and colorless. A place where even the stars had forgotten to burn bright.
Riven staggered forward and dropped to one knee at the shrine's heart.
The Rune carved across his chest pulsed steadily now, warm, insistent, hungry.
The Shard of Sorrow answered in kind. Even wrapped in cloth, it bled faint ribbons of grief into the air, weaving through the shrine like invisible smoke.
It was time.
Hands trembling, Riven pulled the cloth loose.
The shard rose on its own, lifting into the air with a quiet hum, hovering inches above his open palm.
Veyla stayed back, rigid, her hand unconsciously drifting toward the hilt of her sword. But she didn't intervene. She just watched.
Riven placed his free hand against his chest, fingers splayed across the Rune. It throbbed once, hard enough to shake his bones.
"Bind the shard"
The whisper returned, softer now. More urgent. Closer, like a breath against his ear.
"Forge your name".
He didn't fully understand. He doubted he ever would.
But he moved anyway.
With a final breath, Riven pressed the shard to his chest.
The instant it touched the Rune, the world detonated.
Light devoured him, white and absolute.
Heat surged through his flesh, searing muscle and marrow alike. He tried to scream, but the air had been ripped from his lungs, there was only pressure, only pain.
The Rune writhed, the spiral at its core twisting open like a mouth stretched too wide. The shard was devoured, sucked into the gaping mark, each line of the Rune snapping into new patterns, burning brighter, hotter.
Visions flooded him.
Ash falling like endless snow.
An army of knights ablaze under a shattered sun.
A throne built from weeping stone, cracked and weeping streams of black blood.
And a face..
A woman's face.
Soft. Smiling. Tears streaming down her cheeks.
His mother.
The word hit harder than any blow. He reached out, desperate, his hands clawing at the fading image.
But it slipped from his grasp, burning away like paper touched by flame.
Gone.
Something inside him cracked, fractured.
And the Rune sealed shut once more.
He collapsed forward, hands slamming into the cold, cracked ground.
His heart thundered in his chest, deafening. His skin steamed, faint trails of heat rising into the cold air. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest, twitching with leftover pain.
Veyla was at his side in an instant, gripping his shoulder tight. "Riven! Talk to me! Say something!"
He coughed once, harsh and dry. Then again, each breath a knife through his ribs.
Slowly, he pushed himself back onto his heels.
He was alive, but not whole.
He felt the absence immediately. A hollow space carved into him so deep, it could never be filled.
He couldn't remember her face.
He knew she existed. Knew she had once mattered more than anything.
But her features, her laughter, her warmth...
All erased.
Like she had never been.
His hands curled into fists, nails biting into scarred palms.
The price had been paid.
And yet...
Across his chest, the Rune had changed.
New lines slashed across it, sharp and deep. At the center, the Spiral twisted tighter than before, coiling inward, encasing something fragile and faintly pulsing.
He could feel it now.
A new weight.
A new hunger.
Griefwoven.
The word unfurled in his mind like it had always been there, hidden and waiting.
He didn't know what it meant yet.
But he felt it, woven into him now. Strength, sharpened by sorrow. Focus, stripped clean of doubt.
And a coldness that hadn't been there before.
Veyla's gaze never left him. She knelt at a cautious distance, wary and waiting.
"What did it take?" she asked quietly.
He forced himself to meet her eyes.
"A memory."
Her expression softened, her hands lowering from her weapon. She didn't ask whose. Maybe she already knew. Maybe she understood far too well.
They sat there for a long moment in silence, the shrine walls casting jagged shadows under the failing light.
Later, after they built a small fire from broken branches and the shrine had faded to little more than shapes in the gloom, Riven sat apart, staring at his hands.
He flexed his fingers slowly, studying the way the light caught the grime under his nails, the way the scars stretched along the back of his knuckles.
Everything looked the same.
But nothing was.
The Rune throbbed faintly under his skin, steady as a second heartbeat.
Each breath he drew pulled more than air into his lungs. He could feel it now, grief seeping from the very stones around him, drifting from the ashes, the broken earth, even from Veyla's quiet breathing where she sat, half-dozing near the fire.
It was everywhere.
It always had been.
He just hadn't been able to feel it before.
Now, with a flicker of will, barely even a thought, he reached out.
The sorrow responded like a living thing, threads of sadness coiling toward him, wrapping around his spirit. It slid into him in slow, steady streams, filling the hollow spaces left by the memory he had lost.
And with it came strength.
Not the wild, brutal strength he had known before.
Something colder. More controlled.
A weapon, honed on grief.
Riven closed his eyes for a moment, letting the sensation roll through him.
There would be more bindings. More shards. More losses.
He knew it as surely as he knew his own name.
This was only the beginning.
Tomorrow, they would move again. Hunt again. Fight again.
But tonight, in the ruins of a forgotten shrine under a colorless sky, Riven sat with his sorrow, shaping it into something new.
Something unbreakable.