There were no roads in the blue fields.
Only broken melodies that curled like smoke across the empty plains, whispering half-forgotten promises into the grass.
Cassiel adjusted the strap across his shoulder, feeling the weight of the relics they'd gathered so far press against him.His boots sank slightly into the strange soil with every step. It was soft, almost too soft—like stepping across the bruised memories of a dream.
No one spoke.
The crystal cathedral loomed ahead, impossibly tall, its reflection swallowing half the sky.Each spire was a needle stabbed into the clouds, refracting the sickly orange light of Ashreign's permanent dusk.
A city stuck between mourning and forgetting.
Mirae was the first to break the silence.
"Anyone else getting the feeling we're walking into our own funeral?"
Bastion snorted. "I've felt like that since the Begining."
Elior gave a strained smile. "Optimism. I missed that."
Cassiel stayed quiet.
Something was wrong with the air. It smelled clean—too clean. No decay. No dust. As if this place didn't age.As if it simply waited.
He tightened his grip on the hilt of his blade, feeling its quiet hum in response.
The closer they drew, the more warped everything became. The sky shifted shades—saffron to vermilion to a bruised purple—without warning.The cathedral seemed to breathe, its walls pulsing slightly, glass shimmering like wet silk.
And then they saw them.
Figures.
Standing between the blades of grass.
At first Cassiel thought they were statues. But then he saw the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of their chests.Living.
Trapped.
Each figure wore a mirror where their face should be, polished so finely that Cassiel saw himself reflected in a dozen distorted ways as they passed.
One version of him was smiling, serene.
Another wept blood.
A third burned in silent agony, mouth wide in a scream he could not hear.
Mirae stumbled to a stop beside him, staring.
"...This is wrong," she whispered.
Bastion pulled a throwing knife, but Elior caught his wrist. "Don't. They're not attacking."
"They're watching," Cassiel said, voice low.
Watching—or waiting.
The path to the cathedral's main doors was lined with them. Dozens, maybe hundreds, silent sentinels of reflection.
The group pressed on, boots crunching over brittle grass.
As they drew closer to the enormous doors—made not of wood or metal but of woven light—Cassiel felt it again.
That pull.That wrongness curling at the edges of his mind like smoke under a door.
The cathedral wasn't a place.
It was a memory.
And it was waking up.
They stopped in front of the entrance, unsure.
Elior reached out a tentative hand toward the door—and flinched back as it rippled like a pond disturbed by a stone.
Words bloomed across its surface, sharp and clear:
"One must sing to enter.One must remember what is forgotten.One must offer what cannot be returned."
A heavy silence.
Bastion made a face. "Great. Anybody pack a songbook?"
Cassiel exhaled slowly, gathering himself.
"It's a riddle," he said. "Three steps."
He turned to the others, ticking them off on his fingers."First: Sing. Something true. Something personal."
Mirae crossed her arms. "And if we don't?"
Cassiel glanced back at the mirrored figures.
They hadn't moved.Not yet.
"Then we join them," he said simply.
Elior swallowed hard. "What's second?"
"Remember," Cassiel said. "Something we tried to forget."
"And third?" Bastion pressed.
He hesitated. "Give up something we can't get back."
They stood there for a long moment.
The bells tolled high above, discordant and slow, each note hanging too long in the air.
Mirae stepped forward first.
Her voice was soft. Almost unsure. But true.
"Mother, mother,why is the sky so quiet?Where have the crows gone?Where have the wolves gone?..."
It was a lullaby.And it hurt.
Bastion went next. His song was rough, half-growled, more rhythm than melody. A soldiers' drinking song turned dirge by memory.
Elior's voice broke twice during his. His hands clenched white at his sides, but he finished it.
Cassiel... hesitated.
Memories pulled at him.Of old battles.Of friends lost, faces blurred by time and guilt.
He forced the words out.An old anthem from his home, sung in the early mornings when hope still felt possible.
The doors pulsed with golden light.
Step one, complete.
Now came the second.
"Remember," the door whispered.
Cassiel squeezed his eyes shut.
He remembered.The betrayal at the River of Glass.The day his brother disappeared into a rift, and Cassiel never found the body.The look in his mentor's eyes when she realized Cassiel had survived instead of her daughter.
Pain lanced through him, raw and sharp.
The others stirred, each fighting their own battles.
The doors trembled.
And then—The third.
"Offer what cannot be returned," the door breathed.
Cassiel fumbled at his belt, pulling free a silver ring.
It was simple, battered, the inscription inside half-worn away.
He pressed it against the door.
The ring vanished, swallowed into the light.
Elior gave up a locket. Mirae, a broken arrowhead. Bastion, a crumpled piece of a letter he'd never finished writing.
The doors unfurled with a sound like the exhale of an ancient beast.
They stepped through together.
Inside was not a cathedral.
It was a city.
A city built entirely of memory.
Streets of glass.Towers made from stacked pages of lost books.Statues of people Cassiel had never met, but somehow knew he'd failed.
The Choir's song drifted faintly through the air.
They moved slowly, careful not to touch anything.
The air shimmered, and sometimes memories played out before them—brief flashes of other lives.
A woman setting a table for a feast no one would attend.A boy carving names into a tree already dead.A knight weeping over a rusted blade.
They reached a plaza at the heart of the city.
And waiting there, beneath the shadow of a tree made from shattered violins—
Was the Hidden Boss.
He wasn't tall.Wasn't monstrous.
He looked like a child.
Barefoot. Dressed in tattered robes. His eyes were black pools that reflected nothing.
He smiled at them, sweet and terrible.
"You made it," he said, voice high and clear. "I was getting lonely."
Cassiel drew his blade.
The child cocked his head.
"Will you sing for me again?" he asked.
The world lurched.
Reality bent inward like a glass sphere about to shatter.
And the battle began.