The words lingered in the hollowed air, heavy as chains.
You are the last story it remembers.
Adrielle’s knees threatened to give way. The ashstorm hung frozen around her, every grain suspended like stars caught midfall. For a heartbeat, even time itself seemed unwilling to move.
Alex’s grip on her shoulders tightened. His eyes widened, not in anger—but fear. Fear of her. Fear of what she might already have become.
“Adrielle… don’t let it define you. That voice—it’s not yours.”
Maren stepped closer, unscathed by the storm. His presence felt like an echo that had been waiting all along.
“No,” he said softly, as though speaking to a child caught in a dream. “That voice is her. It’s the memory she carries. The veil knew her name long before she was born.”
The coin pulsed again, brighter this time, and the silver veins along Adrielle’s arm burned like rivers of molten glass. Her reflection shimmered in the ash—except it wasn’t just her reflection. Faces stared back: strangers, shadows, entire lives flickering inside her outline.
She gasped. “They’re… stories.”
The coin’s voice hummed in answer, not with words but with weight: Every ending you thought forgotten. Every beginning swallowed by silence. You are their vessel.
The storm roared back to life, scattering ash into endless wings above. The veil did not bleed anymore. It breathed.
Adrielle screamed as the flood of visions struck—battles long ended, lovers torn apart, children who never drew breath. A thousand voices rushed through her veins, begging, demanding, remember us.
She collapsed to her knees. Alex fell beside her, trying to shield her from a storm that didn’t touch him. “Fight it, Adrielle! You’re not just a vessel—you’re you!”
But Maren only watched with reverence, his eyes bright with something dangerously close to worship.
“Don’t fight it,” he whispered. “Become it. That’s the truth the veil kept from us—she is the story. And when she chooses, the world will rewrite itself.”
The ash above coalesced into a single, massive form—wings blotting out the dim sky, eyes like burning voids, its breath rattling the dead silence of the wasteland.
Adrielle clutched the coin as though it were her only anchor. Her voice broke through the storm:
“Tell me then… if I’m the last story—what happens when I end?”
The creature of ash and memory lowered its head, the sound of its answer rumbling through earth and bone alike:
Then everything that follows begins with you.
The ground split beneath them. The hollow wasn’t gone. It was awakening.
