The Ash-Gleam-Whoa of Virellen

A story of one Aevori woman lost to the storm

Chapter I – Born Beneath the Singing Moss

A child that comes to reveal what is unseen

Virellen came into the world beneath the long, breathing limbs of a twin-branched Syal moss tree, in the heart of the Silvan Grottos where light to this day, moves slowly and nothing rushes to speak. The air here is thick with sweet decay and the fragrance of stone, rich with the kind of damp warmth that clings to skin and never quite lets go. The moss drapes over roots like sleeping cloth, and dew hangs from every surface like breath that hadn’t decided whether to flee or stay. No direct sunlight reaches this place. Instead, the light drifts down in silver threads, scattered by mist and blanketing spider silk into something soft and reverent. Everything that grows here does so in silence. As it did then.

The Aspects had stood in a circle when she was born. Women older than most remembered, their bodies marked by glyphs that shimmered faintly even in shadow. The lines on their skin, not just language, but history—memories sung into form by magic and pain. They didn’t speak the child’s name aloud. They hadn’t needed to. The name arrived in the space between them, shared like an emotion: Virellen—gleam upon still water. A name that didn’t declare. It reflected. It held the sky without breaking the surface.

Even as a newborn, she didn’t cry. One living elder still remembers her eyes. They had opened wide in the pale light, and she stared up into the moving moss as if trying to remember it. Her pupils didn’t flinch. They absorbed. Another of the Aspects, an elder named Thirenna, remembers leaning close to study her. She spoke to all present, “She listens already.” She then murmured to no one in particular with subtle shock. “Like the stone listens.”

Virellen had no memory of this moment, of course, but in her quieter hours later in life, she would sometimes imagine the moss above her shifting gently in rhythm with her breath.

From the beginning, she was different.

Among the Aevori, every child was different—some wild, some fierce, others radiant or sharp or dream-lost—but Virellen’s difference didn’t announce itself. It made the world lean in. While other girls came into their glyphs in bright torrents, streaking across skin with urgency and color, hers arrived so softly they were almost missed. Faint spirals on her shoulder, fine curls of ink that looked like they might lift off and vanish. They came like condensation. Like thought.

Some wondered if she was slow to awaken. But Virellen wasn’t behind. She was simply still. Where others danced and called and wove themselves loudly into the forest, she moved quietly. She pressed her ear to stone warmed by the sun and listened for the sounds beneath it. She walked barefoot through riverbeds, hands trailing in the water not to stir it, but to feel how it flowed. She laid on her stomach in the moss, nose almost against the dirt, watching the smallest insects make their way between blades of light.

She didn’t speak often, but when she did, she asked questions that made people pause.

“Do the trees remember when they were seeds?”

“Where does sound go after no one hears it?”

“What if the roots dream of walking?”

Most shrugged and smiled. Some, like Elder Lihari, paused longer than others.

She eventually earned a quiet nickname among the tribe: dream-bound. It wasn’t cruel in any fashion. It was a way of naming the way she lived slightly to the side of the world, as if one foot was always somewhere else. And yet, no one excluded her. Even those who didn’t understand her left small offerings—braided threads on her sleeping mat, carved seed shells filled with scented oils, even a quiet melody hummed and left hanging in the air near her communal window.

She never took part in the ritual hunts. She didn’t sing the louder songs. But the tribe made space for her nonetheless. Not out of obligation, but loving respect. In a community built on mirroring memory, even the softest presence left a lasting mark.

Her glyphs continued to grow through the cycles and seasons, slowly and in curves that never quite aligned with the more standard sequences. They didn’t tell clear stories, not yet. They whispered. Shapes like wind writing on sand. Others trained harder to bloom faster, chanting through the night, submerging themselves in the ritual rivers to accelerate their magic. As most all blossoming into adulthood venture. Virellen walked into the deep woods instead, barefoot and unguarded. She sat beneath fallen trees, leaned her back against stone faces half-buried in moss, and watched the dust rise in long sunbeams. She didn’t ask the forest to teach her. She simply stayed long enough for it to begin speaking back.

And for all her quiet, she wasn’t lonely.

Not after she met Aureli.

It happened without ceremony. Virellen had been walking the cliff paths above the southern pools. Many cycles mature and still radiating her youth bound gift of quiet echo. Her steps careful along the edges where mist clung to the rocks like skin. When a voice had called out from below—not shouting, but close: “You’re going to fall walking like that.” Virellen had turned, and there she was. Barefoot, arms crossed, tattoos glowing with a wild flicker like flame rising up stormwood. Her wide grin was unashamed.

“I won’t fall,” Virellen had said.

“How do you know?” She had paused for a moth wing sore. Then tilted her head slightly to reply.

“The stone doesn’t want me to.”

Aureli had laughed, loud, deep, and full, the kind of laugh that startled birds and warmed skin like a hug from a distant love returned. “You’re strange.”

Virellen had nodded. “I know.”

Aureli didn’t try to change her. It wasn’t in her nature. She was captivated by her. She seemed more real to her than the mountain beneath her feet. She had a gravity that only Aureli could see. From that moment on, she followed Virellen with a confidence that felt like fate. She was fire in motion, always shifting, always drawing attention, but never demanding it from Virellen. Never. They walked together without needing to speak, and when they did speak, it felt like returning to something known. A memory present that had never happened. But had seemed to have always existed. On the nights Aureli trained beneath moonlight, her body moving with fierce grace, Virellen watched from the dark, her arms wrapped around her knees. She wasn’t studying. She was simply witnessing, like watching a storm roll over the sea. A reverence of wonder and awe upon a moving poetry that words or song could never touch.

Their closeness didn’t need explanation. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a memetic polarity. The way Virellen lingered near Aureli’s hand, without ever reaching for it. The way Aureli’s laugh changed when it was only for her. They curled around each other without effort, like vines choosing the same branch. Virellen didn’t burn while Aureli did. Together, they held balance—one catching light, the other throwing it. A perfect harmony.

Cycles spiraled in Velun as they do. Virellen wasn’t sure when, in this bliss that she orbited; the unthinkable happened. Her glyphs began to change. One bright day she looked down and the lines along her forearm were darker, steadier, pulsing faintly beneath her skin like breath. She felt different. Not louder. Just more awake. More formed. She said nothing. She had come to terms quite easily when the ‘time of making’ and then ‘the dreaming echoes’ came and went. It was unheard of in her culture. All matured adults went through these physical changes. She hadn’t. Though cycles later, here it was. And, no one else had noticed.

But Aureli noticed.

That night, as they sat under the canopy of Syal moss, Aureli shifted closer and wrapped an arm around her waist. Virellen leaned into the warmth, heart aching in a way she couldn’t name. It wasn’t a bad ache. It was a glorious release. It flushed through her in waves. Though she didn’t cry. Well, not at first. But eventually, the weight of being seen broke her silence. Not because of the act itself. But because it was Aureli. The one person that it mattered most to be seen by. The witness in Virellen’s small world that held a reverence only sung in fabled myths.

Aureli didn’t ask what was wrong. She knew this was sacred. A rite of passage finally reached. She felt its memory when it started, it wove over her skin as if it were Virellen’s gentle fingers. She simply kissed the top of her head and whispered, low and firm, “Where you go, I follow. Always.”

Virellen never forgot the way the moss above them seemed to sway more softly in that moment, as if listening. A harmony so invisibly thick in the air, that only the hearts of a bound pair can hear it sing.

She never let go of that memory.

Ever.

Chapter II – The Breaking Sky

A jealously rout from divine necessity creates a purpose to be unfolded

It was the season of the High Violet Moth. The air had changed—not colder, not yet—but stiller. The wind had thinned and taken the insects’ voices with it. People moved more slowly, not because they were tired, but because everything around them seemed to ask for quiet. During this season, the storms that passed over Velun weren’t like ordinary storms. They didn’t roll in with wind and warning. They waited above the horizon for days, heavy and watching. The Aevori didn’t fear them. They prepared.

The tribe had begun its slow ascent up the Steps of Veu-Nahra in the early hours, winding single-file across the wide stone curves that circled the mountain’s lower slopes. The climb wasn’t dangerous, but it required stillness of breath and a kind of internal listening. The Steps weren’t built for haste. They spiraled toward a wide ridge plateau where the sky felt close enough to reach, where the color mist gathered just below the edge, and where the ancient rite of convergence was performed—the ritual of watching, not summoning. The place where the Aevori honored stormbirth.

Virellen had made the climb before, but not like this. She hadn’t been distracted, exactly. But something in her had felt off since waking. The wind felt wrong on her skin. The air tasted metallic, like water carried in iron bowls. She kept her pace behind the others and didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. Aureli was waiting for her at the summit. She too knew what Virellen was experiencing.

She stood barefoot at the ridge’s edge, arms loose at her sides, the skin of her back exposed to the wind. Her glyphs pulsed like embers under the surface—glowing orange-red with flickers of blue at the edges. Her posture was relaxed, but her presence was unmistakable. Virellen’s breath caught when she saw her. Majestic beauty and fearless comfort.

“You’re late,” Aureli said without turning around.

“I’m not,” Virellen replied softly, stepping up beside her.

“Then I must be early.” Bumping her gently with her hip. Then turning her head slightly to wink and smile her sly grin.

They stood there together, not speaking, not needing to. They had become one in a sense. Not all the time feeling what the other did. But always ever in contact. Even when far apart. The storm was gathering slowly above them—thick clouds rimmed with violet and gray, churning in high spirals. Below, the forest shimmered. It always did just before the break. The trees held their breath. The sky pressed down like a thought someone couldn’t quite say out loud.

Virellen exhaled through her nose and folded her arms. “The storm feels… different.”

Aureli gave another small, wry smile. “Yes. Maybe it’s not a storm.”

Virellen looked sideways. “What, then?”

“A reminder,” Aureli said, still watching the sky. “That the Spiral doesn’t have to speak. That it folds its wings to fall when it wants.”

Virellen didn’t answer. She didn’t disagree. There was something in the air that felt more like presence than weather. The ritual wasn’t meant to provoke—it was meant to bear witness. The tribe just stood in silence across the ridge, each woman holding her own meaning in the face of the storm’s looming stillness. Virellen pondered if they could feel what she did.

Aureli turned to her slightly. “Do you remember what I said the first time we climbed up here?”

“You said if lightning struck you, it would be because the storm was jealous.”

“Yes. I still believe that.”

Virellen smiled, but it faded fast. “Wait. Don’t joke like that.”

“I’m not. My love, I…” There was a pause, but not a silence. The wind had picked up slightly, brushing Aureli’s hair across her face. She didn’t move it aside. Virellen reached out and tucked the strand behind her ear without thinking. Aureli looked at her. “My love, I’m glad you came.”

“I will always come. You are my…” The storm cracked open.

Not with light—but with sound. A low, splitting roar that tore the air itself in two. There was no warning. No first flash. Just the sense of something ancient and merciless deciding that now was the moment.

Three forks of lightning shot downward in sequence.

The first struck an old fellow-wisp tree to their left, exploding it into a spray of burning splinters. The second arced through the open air to the right, passing through nothing, too fast to be seen clearly. The third—blinding, without remorse—hit Aureli.

Virellen’s body reacted before her mind did. She flinched and staggered, ears ringing, but her eyes were locked on the spot where Aureli had been standing. An angry after-burn of lingering light glow, static in the open air reaching from the sky. She expected fire. A scream. But there was only light. And then there wasn’t.

Aureli had collapsed.

There was no time to think, no space for logic. Virellen moved—she didn’t feel her feet or the ground, just the gap between her and Aureli now lying motionless on the stone. When she reached her, her hands were already shaking.

Aureli’s skin was scorched in places. Her glyphs—once alive with motion—were gone, some erased and the rest burned out. The lines were black, jagged, broken. Her body had curled slightly, one arm reaching out as if it hadn’t finished whatever it had meant to do.

But her face—her face was still. Not peaceful, not exactly, but… resolved. As if she had understood something in the last instant and accepted it.

Virellen knelt beside her and touched their foreheads together. Her tears came in silence, not from panic, but from a depth she hadn’t known was there until now. The world around them was becoming a blur—voices, movement, figures in the periphery. She couldn’t hear any of it. Only Aureli’s breathlessness, and her own heartbeat pounding against a moment that refused to pass. Someone behind her spoke softly. “She’s gone.” Virellen didn’t respond. She stayed with her until the storm ended. Until the last flash of light disappeared into the clouds. Until the wind quieted again. The others moved back, slowly, respectfully. No one tried to take her away.

That night, she didn’t sleep. She just sat beside Aureli’s covered body until the sun began to rise. When it did, she didn’t feel its warmth. It was there, somewhere, but it didn’t reach her. Not anymore.

She stood only when the moths began to rise from the trees—soft, glowing, slow-winged creatures spiraling into the still air like floating embers. They moved past her without fear. Some landed briefly on Aureli’s resting cloth before drifting off toward the forest’s edge.

The cycles became meaningless after that morning. Virellen never spoke again. Not out of defiance or grief, exactly—but because language didn’t seem to work anymore. It couldn’t reach the place where the loss had settled. She walked differently. She listened to different things. The river still sang, but she no longer heard its voice. The forest still shifted, but its patterns no longer made sense. Where she had once lived in the quiet spaces between sound, now there was only silence. No secret barriers to move between. Just a nothingness. And deep beneath all of that she used to be—beneath the grief, beneath the numbness—something else stirred. Not rage. Not madness.

A hollow space. A question with no answer. A shape waiting to be filled.

Chapter III – The Stillness Beneath the Roots

After tragedy comes, what follows can be more potent

After Aureli’s death, the forest changed around Virellen. It no longer whispered. The winds didn’t curl around her the same way. The trees still moved, but without rhythm. What had once been presence became pressure. She didn’t return to the her mountain dwelling. She didn’t speak to the other women who came to leave food, gifts, or words of soft sorrow. They meant well, but she couldn’t hear them. She moved through the valley floor like something that had already left.

No one knew exactly when she descended. One day, she was gone, and the next, there were murmurs on the sorrow breeze of her passing into the lower root caverns—into the oldest veins of Velun. Few had ever ventured down there. The Sunless Hollows weren’t forbidden, just avoided. The air beneath the forest floor was thick, humid, and filled with the kind of fungal growths that pulsed faintly with light and released infructuous spores like sighs. Roots hung from the ceilings like limp cords. The ground was soft in places, dangerously so in others. Sounds carried differently. Breath echoed, strangely delayed. The deeper one went, the more the world began to feel like it had stopped spinning. Or even caring to be.

She didn’t bring supplies. She didn’t prepare. She simply walked until there was no light left, and then further still. Her fingers had to feel the tunnel walls to move forward. Reaching touches that had been meant for Aureli. She finally found a place where no one had walked in generations and stayed for a while. Some said in the passing communions that she was still mourning. Others whispered echos that she might be unraveling. The hunter-sisters, always fearless, refused to follow and seek. Yet one of them, Haruni, had tried. She came back pale, lips cracked, mumbling something about Virellen’s eyes—not their strange shape or wrong color, but the absence inside them. “They looked at me,” Haruni said, “but nothing looked out.”

Down in the hollows, Virellen didn’t eat. She couldn’t see. She just slowly wondered and drank the moisture that gathered on rock. The root soil’s sweat from a nervousness blanched. When she finally was able to make sound after so long, she sang, it was in fragments. Short ferruled bursts. Cracks in the air formed to then heal. The kind of muffled pops made by wood under pressure, by something splintering from the inside. Then there were the glyphs on her body—which had once moved so slowly, softly—stilled entirely. Their color dulled. Their edges blurred. It was as if her skin had been told to stop speaking and began to siphon away. There were no new markings. No motion. She had to close her eyes. The darkness down there became too bright. In time, her body became a quiet that she had never been. A mutated quiet, if there ever was such a thing, she was its reflection.

You must know, among the Aevori, when a woman’s glyphs go dormant, she is known as an Aspect-in-Stillness—usually an elder, someone who has chosen silence, who walks in reflection and memory. But Virellen was not at peace. Her stillness didn’t resemble wisdom. It felt like a door that had slammed shut from the inside.

Then she carved.

It wasn’t ritual. It wasn’t guided. She broke a rib from her own side, bracing it against stone until it snapped. Digging it out in agony. From pitch deep pain, to numbing purpose. As a burrowed splinter, she slowly removed it. To then sharpen the end into a point. She moved deeper. Until she found gnarled roots of a poison fig—an old tree that exhaled bitter fumes and twisted its own trunk—she dug the bone into her thigh and began to draw. The wound wasn’t clean. The blood wasn’t controlled. Her hands trembled. But the glyph that emerged was deliberate.

It didn’t belong to the 39 sacred forms. No one in Velun would have seen it before. It didn’t echo any known pattern. Lines bent where they shouldn’t. Some spiraled into themselves. Others forked like split branches. If someone had tried to interpret it, they might’ve heard concepts like imbalance, descent, dissonance, lost fire in pyrrhic ash. But it was not meant to be read. It was an act, not a message.

After that, the surface hollow changed. The air thickened. The fungus grew faster, then reversed itself, decaying and blooming again in cycles that didn’t match the seasons. Insects stopped moving. Some began to weep—a high, rhythmic chirping that made no ecological sense. Even the stone seemed to bleed panic. The roots below twitched as her meandering movements brushed by. The tunnel walls pulsed. The syrup thick air in that ancient network began to take its first breath. Then halted in denial.

Virellen smiled.

It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t relief. It was closer to recognition. She had not summoned anything. She had made space for it. Whatever waited in those tunnels hadn’t needed an invitation—it had needed a shape to inhabit. Nothing sentient. But of dark, purposeful, and demented memory. The glyph on her leg pulsed like a second heart. No glow. No color. Just rhythm. Slow. Steady. Alive.

A new cycle had started and the moss in the Vastland above browned and stiffened. The trees leaned away from Veu-Nahra’s base. The wind circled the mountain but no longer entered its inner paths. Something had shifted in the Spiral—and Velun felt it before the people did.

Virellen finally opened her eyes once again.

The memory of light in them was obviously gone. Not extinguished. Removed. She didn’t blink. Yet something different peered out. She didn’t look around. The darkness had no meaning. She could see. Yet her gaze didn’t search—it held. She was no longer waiting for answers.

She had found one…

In future generations, cycles yet to turn, some will say that glyph still exists, burned into the stone of the hollow. Others say it exists only in her skin now, pulsing faintly beneath layers of blood and silence. No one will go to check. Those who speak of the stone of the hollow will gossip-gesture that the glyph would move when stared at. That it can commune back, not in words, but in weight.

But no one will go to the place it began.

This brief future is mirrored in rippling reflections. Throughout all the pools of Velun. A flicker of this yet to come memory. This foreign dream echo. And the Aevori notice it in confusion.

Chapter IV – Becoming Nahra-Valh

She Who Walks in the Hollow Light, A Dread to Come with Stalking Blight

Cycles after Virellen descended, the Aevori no longer spoke her name in full. They muttered fragments of it behind veils, fingers fidgeting with bone-chimes, as if the syllables might somehow wake her, or worse—remind her of who she had once been. “Nahra-Valh,” they whispered in the gaps between breath, the way one speaks of a wound that won’t clot, a prayer that curdles before reaching the spirits. Then, more cycles past without her return. They no longer referred to her as Virellen, not even in memory. That name had belonged to someone else entirely, someone soft-eyed and dream-bound, someone who had pressed her ear to tree bark and waited to be told a story by silence itself. That name had not survived what the storm had taken.

They said when a heart broke hard enough—not in sadness, but in true shattering—it could sever the soul-thread that anchored the glyphs to harmony. When that thread snapped, the blood ink rebelled. Some glyphs ignited into madness. Others froze mid-growth like a breath held too long.

You see, for Virellen, the change had not come all at once. It had crept, whispering comfort into the jagged edges of grief, whispering logic. That her pain was not singular. That the stillness was a lie. That something older than sorrow had simply… awakened in her. The truth was worse. Virellen had let it in. She had wanted something to speak back when nothing else would. Her stillness had not held. It had cracked. And something had answered through in the buried tunnels of ancient and forgotten abandon.

She emerged.

Finally returning from the Sunless Hollows under a sky drained of color, so far long after the storm had passed and the tribe had stopped whispering her name aloud. The night carried no mist, no moths. Even the Vehlune Spheres that once shimmered along the mountain’s ridge dimmed as if in a new mourning. And still, she walked, barefoot across the moss. With each step, the ground surface blackened, curled, and crisped into ash. The trees did not greet her. They recoiled.

She had not aged a single cycle, but she had changed. Her body moved with a new dread-quiet that was no longer sacred. Her skin had turned cold white, threaded with glyphs that glowed not with resonance, but with fracture—lines of molten glass forced beneath the surface, convulsing, erratic. There was no rhythm. No intention. Just pressure. Just need. And beneath that need, a silent scream.

She paused once, in the place where she and Aureli had traced clouds from the high ridge. Her hand touched the stone they’d once sat on, and for a moment—one single breath—she whispered, “Stop.” But her voice didn’t leave her throat. It collapsed inward, swallowed by the new form that wore her skin.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Then why do I know how?”

“Because something broke.”

“That’s not it. It’s Because something answered.”

Her inner voice had grown smaller, more desperate. She clawed at her own thighs with cracked fingernails, carving lines that didn’t bleed, whispering the names of her dead to the roots beneath her feet. Her skin quickly and grossly healed. She bit the inside of her mouth until blood filled her teeth, trying to silence the rhythm of her own breath. Her blood turned to bitter clear nectar. Dribbling down her chin. She slammed her palms into the bark of a sacred tree until the flesh split open across both hands. Then sealed back in defiance.

None of this stopped her. A fruitless internal conflict.

At the Grove of Naming, she appeared without sound. No footfalls. No warning. The sacred owl-spirits didn’t cry. The wind did not move. She found Kaelen there, alone in her practice, drawing memory glyphs onto her archive stones. Virellen stepped into the clearing, tilting her head in witness, and something inside her pleaded—not this one, not Kaelen, she always brought warmth to the silence. But her body moved without permission. Kaelen never even had time to run. By dawn, her lifeless form was laid across her own glyphwork, eyes open, mouth slack, her tattoos peeled away in careful, deliberate lines. Not burned. Not scarred. Extracted. As though meaning itself had been harvested.

“Stop this. Please. She had so many names left to give.”

“It’s too late now. The glyphs are already learning you. We… me? Us… no, I. I am new.”

The next night, Thirel, Song-Watcher of the Third Vein, was pulled from her dreaming. They found her hanging upside down from the same spirit tree she’d once blessed with sacred oils. Her skin was smooth, untouched. Her tattoos gone. Erased not with force or blade, but consumed. The glyphs dissolved from her like breath leaving lungs. Leaving wilt caverns in flesh. On the bark beside her, written in blood, a glyph-sequence had been carved by Virellen’s own talon hands. It was short. Incomplete. And yet it pulsed.

Sanctum lost. Chaos becomes earth-storm.

She wept after that one. That steadfast defiance  shoved aside for a moment. Alone in the surface roots beside a collapsed shelter, she punched stone until the bones in her hand shifted and split. She tore out pieces of her own hair. Scraped her forearm against bark until the skin sloughed off in ribbons. But the storm inside her didn’t care. She healed immeadietly. Her suffering was not resistance. It was fuel. Her flesh began to shiver with an inner heat she couldn’t explain, and her eyes—once gentle, once filled with dreamlight—now gleamed with a haloed, inhuman fire. Defiance returned.

“Aureli, forgive me.”

“You were my reason to stay soft. But now I am becoming something that cannot bend.”

The Matriarchs convened in secret beneath Veu-Nahra. They had witnessed the dream memories provided by the Vastland. A ceremony ritual that spoke in visions and silent observation. A telling dream whisper of events far from the heart of their mountain domicile. They searched for the glyph she had carved into herself after the hollows, the cursed sigil they feared had rewritten her soul. The closest they found came from the forbidden songs—ruins of the Pre-Glow Era, a time before even memory. The translation was tentative, under-toned with dread.

She who dances with endings.

The mother of broken names.

The eye beneath the world.

The undoing with blame.

But even this felt too clean. Too contained. Virellen hadn’t just taken on something ancient. She had become the process itself—unbeing wrapped in memory. And worse, she still remembered. She still felt.

Each time she killed, it tore her into reforming pieces. Not with guilt, but with a desperate ache. She didn’t want to stop because it was wrong. She wanted to stop because it still hurt. Every act etched her deeper into something final, and every scream she stifled inside herself made the next easier.

“You’ll forget soon”, the darkness whispered through her skin. “That’s the gift. No more burden. Only function. No more love. Only design.”

And when she walked again, it was without internal hesitation. She carried no blade. She wore no cloak. Her steps were slow, measured, ritual. Each kill became an offering. Each death, a punctuation in a language no Aevori could ever have spoken. And somewhere, deep in the furrows where her blood had once fed the roots, that second heartbeat had begun to echo a stronger wave. It was learning.

By the time the tribe began to call her Nahra-Valh, the transformation was no longer theoretical. It was complete in all but name. But a small, flickering part of her still watched from within the wreckage. It screamed when she slept, scratched at the walls of her mind, begged for release.

It would not win.

Not anymore.

Chapter V – The Rampage of the Hollow Gleam

It Was Grief That Took a Body and Learned to Walk

She continued through Velun like a fever dream clawing itself into reality. Not with vengeance, but with purpose sharpened by the long, slow agony of love undone. The sacred wilds that once knew her breath as song now bowed and withered in her presence, not out of deference, but fear. She had passed not as one returned from mourning, but as something forged within it—a creature that had stared too long into stillness and found it a torrent of violence. Her feet, once bare in ritual dances, now blackened the downward-reaching rich soil with every step. Each grove she crossed—each sacred stand of elder trees or glade once used for blessing—curled inward as if trying to vanish before her shadow reached it. The glyph-bearing stones, passed down from generation to generation, shattered not with force, but from the impossibility of her presence. Pools where new life once stirred in glowing cradle-light were left rippling with something sour and deep, a tremble that hinted at mourning agony, warped into something unrecognizable.

“I remember these places.”

Virellen spoke as she stepped through a grove where the leaves had begun to drop prematurely, not from season, but sorrow.

“I remember every one. I prayed here. I laughed here.”

She had braided hair with her sisters in this very clearing, spoken vows beside these stones. Now they cracked apart like dry bark in the sun, their memory falling away with every passing breath. But still she walked. Not because she wanted to destroy—but because she believed, with some cruel part of her still capable of belief, that this was the only honest path left. What else was there, after the Spiral had made a wound of her? After the sky had spoken in lightning and taken the one thing that made the world more beautiful with every cycle turn.

There were two young lovers once. They were tucked beneath a tangle of river-thread ferns, faces brushed close, eyes shining with the kind of hope that made Virellen ache to look at. She watched them longer than she meant to. She remembered what it was like to lay beside someone and believe that the future would be shaped from shared breath. But then the shape of that memory curled into something sharp, and she stepped forward without a sound. One of the girls turned at the last second—just enough to see Virellen’s face before a blade talon found her throat. It was fast. She hadn’t meant it as cruelty. Just necessity. The second girl she let live, though “let” was a mercy unearned. Virellen marked her instead, burning a tangle of glyphs into her chest with her own palm, the sigils alive, raw, and wrong. The girl’s mouth gaped to scream, but Virellen pressed her hook spur fingers gently against it. Not shushing, exactly. Remembering. When the girl awoke later, she could no longer speak. Her lips had been sewn shut with silver root thread, her new name whispered among the tribe as Vaelir-Nir—She Who Sings Without Sound.

“Maybe she’ll understand one day.”

Virellen spoke this, though a deeper part of her, the part that still felt, recoiled at the lie. She did not do this because it would help. She did it because love, left unburied, decays. She had loved once. It had not saved her.

She remembered every face. Every laugh around the fires, every warmth shared in rain, every moment of trust offered in silence. And because she remembered, she chose. Her path curved only through what once had meaning to her. She did not destroy the wilds, nor the edges of the forest where spirits still moved in innocence. No—she targeted the weavings of her own past. The Vastland homes she’d been welcomed in. The spots where she had cried in secret. The names that had meant something. She erased them. Not out of hatred, but because they had failed her. Let her disappear. Watched her sink into silence and did nothing.

“If they had come after me, if they had noticed the storm did more than steal her body.”

She told herself, watching a flame consume a once-beloved weaving hut and its caretakers, its walls painted with symbols she had once helped create,

“I wouldn’t have had to become this.”

The thought almost caught in her throat. Almost. But it passed like so many others.

She carved flutes from bone. It was precise work, done with reverence, not rage. After giving death. She remembered their voices in life, and tuned each flute to match. When she played them under the moon, her fingers moved as if in prayer. For a time, it was a fake mourning. But soon, others began to gather, drawn by the notes that echoed with impossible familiarity. They came thinking the sound was love remembered, or spirit-echo. Virellen waited for them. Because if they still came to the song of loss, if they still believed that music meant safety, then they deserved to see what the world had become. What it had birthed.

Each death left a final glyph carved into her body—not painted or sung, but imprinted with coarse breath. Her arms grew darker, not from dye, not from blood, but from the memory of each name unmade. She wasn’t collecting them. She was recording. As if her skin had become the only archive of what truly mattered—not their lives, but the truth of their end.

“This is what love looks like after it fails,” she spoke, tracing the newest mark. “This is what memory does when it’s left to rot.”

When the Matriarchs gathered a final time, it was with shaking postures and bowed heads. They no longer met in the open. Velun was changing beneath them. The air no longer carried song but a low hum, like a held breath before rupture. Even the mountain felt thin beneath their knees.

Sayen of the Nightwater Line was the only one bold enough to approach. She found Virellen alone beneath the lightvine tree where the spirits were once said to rest between lives. Sayen struck quickly, burying a ceremonial fang-blade into Virellen’s ribs with all the force and precision of a lifetime’s training. The blade pierced true. Virellen did not scream. She looked down, surprised, as though startled to find she could still be wounded. Then she met Sayen’s gaze—not in anger, not even sadness. Only a slow, sinking sorrow. In a creeping out of pitch song-talk, she spoke,

“You still think I can be stopped? You still think this is madness?”

She reached out, touched Sayen’s cheek with a tenderness that made the warrior hesitate. Then she kissed her brow, the way the elders used to in forgiveness. And broke her. Sayen’s spine snapped backward like brittle cane, and she fell without sound. The kiss left a glyph burned into her skull. After she was left. It glowed for three days. On the fourth, it turned to ash along with Sayen’s body, and clean fang-blade.

Chapter VI – The Final Confrontation

Where Love Tries to Bind What Has Fallen

It was the third season in the eighth cycle of her unraveling, a season when no child was born, when birds nested but never sang, when even the insects seemed to fall still in the shadow of her steps. The light at the crown of Veu-Nahra dimmed daily. The mid circle mist that hovered below the plateau of Aureli’s death, was drained of color and carrying a floating gray ash. The sacred mountain’s pulse now slow and strained, as though mourning itself had hollowed its core. The Aevori, once bold and radiant in their glyphs, moved like murmurs through the trees, their bodies draped in caution and prayer. And in the sanctums beneath the Shard Moons, the Aspects—ancient, desperate, and trembling—prepared to do what had not been done in over four hundred cycles. They gathered strands of waiver root, sacred salts from the Refract Fissures, and fragments of shattered memory stones. They performed the rites of disconnection and aligned the carved bone circles with the movement of skyfire. And then they cast the Circle of Return, calling forth not the dead, but the ‘echo of a love lost’.

Aureli.

Her presence arrived like radiant warm mist before a storm, not with fire or wind, but with a hush so absolute that even the groves seemed to hold their dreams. A hiccup in anticipation. The Aspects, eyes closed, voices weaved into one harmonic line, summoned her from the glimmer of what remained—petals once placed on her burial bed, a single strand of ash-hued hair braided into moonroot, fragments of laughter caught in the broken memory stones. What came forth was not her ghost. It was something deeper, woven from memory, reverence, and the ache of unfinished vows. And it spoke—softly, steadily—its voice less a sound and more a resonance, something that passed through stone and marrow alike. Touren waves opening from every pore of Velun:

“Virellen… come home.”

Far away, in a clearing of cracked crystal trees where color no longer dared linger, Virellen froze. Her body twitched once, like a thin taught thread snapping beneath tension. Her shoulders hunched. Her lips parted—not in words, but in some near-mute gasp that rippled down her spine. Her hands quaked, and her form began to flicker—once, then again. The glyphs along her arms spasmed, collapsing inward on themselves and reforming, as if resisting the harmony that had found her. That forgotten internal conflict swelled a little. That part tamped down into a rugged corner and chained. She took a step forward, then lurched sideways, slamming her palm into a stone trunk so hard it splintered with a wailing crack. She staggered, her breathing erratic, her voice broken between sob and snarl. Then came the scream. A real one. Not of taint or deformity. Virellen’s true voice scream—not at the sky or the trees or the voices that beckoned her, but at herself. She screamed at the thing inside her, at the thing she was, the thing she had become, and her nails tore into her scalp and down the sides of her face, dragging lines of blood that smoked against her skin. And she didn’t heal. Not quickly. But hesitantly. Her foot caught on a root and she fell, but she did not land gently—she slammed her body down with purpose, shoulder dislocating with a wet pop, jaw cracking as her cheek struck stone. Her body healed. But it was slow. A true magic heal that comes from love. Not the deranged grief of cold precision.

But even through the ruin, she whispered back, thick with blood, barely audible:

“Aureli?…”

She clawed at her chest as if trying to tear something out. Her own ribs. Her glyphs. Her heart. She dug so deep her receding talon fingertips went numb. As she healed quicker from every laceration, light began to flicker in the air like sparks wanting to be remembered. Her body convulsed, arching in violent spasms, muscles seizing beneath skin as the air around her began to fracture. Color bled sideways. Shapes pulsed wrong. The very ground rippled beneath her, as if repulsed and enamored at once. Her voice, glitching now—low and high, echoing in mismatched pitches—said nothing sane. And then her breath gave out entirely, her body collapsing in a tangled heap of bone and glyphs and silence.

She did not move. Not for minutes. Not until the stillness beneath her began to ripple with something remembered.

What rose from her was not the scream of pain, nor the low moan of madness. It was presence. A kind of energy so dense and ancient that the world around her warped under the strain. The grass nearest her turned translucent, then black, then gleamed in mirrored silver before melting away. The trees swayed toward her as if in reverence, then recoiled as if scorched. Light fractured across her form—not in beams, but in pulses, a strobing halo of violet, obsidian, and searing white. Her body, no longer broken from the fall, no longer torn apart from the digging, hovered a few feet off the ground as her glyphs ignited in contradictory motion—some blooming outward like stars, others folding in on themselves like devoured suns. She rose higher as if being lifted by hands of the Spiral itself. Her head tilting up to the heavens to witness. She was breathing again, but it was not natural. Her chest rose and fell with unabashed rhythm, each inhale an intake of more than air—something stolen from the wind, the soil, the silence itself.

She had become a fulcrum. A tear in balance.

And all of Velun felt it.

The Aspects had expected resistance. What they witnessed instead was awe, dread, and the slow uncoiling of something sacred and wrong. But they moved anyway, in formation, eyes wide but resolute. The Ceremony of Silver Rain had begun. In a ring carved from the bone of nine honored dead, their voices wove a song not heard in generations—a layered intonation of forgetting and mercy, of dissonance peeled from the soul. Each word was sung with tremble and cost, for each note cut away a memory, not just from Virellen, but from the world itself. Petal by petal, she was unwritten.

They finally found her and descended in silence. Glyph-blades raised. Their edges shimmered not with power but with permission. With consent granted by the laws of Velun to bind one of their own. One who had wandered too far from the Spiral. One who had loved too hard. And lost too much.

Virellen did not respond to meet them. Her body hovered still, arms limp, glyphs flickering, her eyes open but unfocused—staring through space as though watching a memory collapse. Her face twitched as if something still lived inside her, clawing at the walls, crying not for help, but for release. And then the singing grew stronger, brighter, piercing, and her body began to descend—slowly at first, then with fierce gravity. The glyphs around her chest pulsed, exploded in sparks, then went dark. She fell to her knees, then to her side. Her mouth opened in a final exhale.

The Aspects struck then—not to kill, but to bind. Glyph after glyph carved through the air, not into her chalk flesh, but into the space around her. Symbols spiraled in bone-light, locking her within a lattice of memory and silence. They sang her still. They carved her tomb from the roots of Veu-Nahra itself, bending the will of stone and time, making a cradle of petrified moss and singing marrow. They did not cry. They did not flinch. They simply laid her there, within the heart of the mountain that had once sung her name, and whispered the words that sealed the chamber:

“You are remembered. You are lost. You are still.”

But far beneath the surface of their chants, the stone hummed in contradiction. The roots that formed her cradle twitched with distant pulses. The walls of the tomb flickered, moment to moment, from bark to bone to glimmering light and back again. She had been bound—but not fully stilled.

Some say now that she sleeps. Others say she dreams. A few, the oldest among them, say that the glyphs are changing—slowly, like tides. That the stone does not rest. That the echoes of her breath still shift the air.

But one truth is certain:

The energy that rose from her body in that glade—the thing that shimmered like mourning and bled like joy—did not die when she was sealed. It lingers. It watches. It sings in tones that do not belong to the living or the dead.

And sometimes, when the wind curls just right through the corridors of Veu-Nahra, a voice can be heard—soft, calm, impossibly loving:

“Virellen… you came home.”

And the roots tremble still.

VII. Of Poems They Sing

So That She Might Remember Who She Was

When the moss hangs heavy with dew from the Syal moss tree and the storms churn low across the ridges of Veu-Nahra, the Aevori grow quiet. They do not speak. They do not sing. The forest still sways, but not from wind. It is the weight of memory that moves them—memory buried deep in stone, in root, in the marrow of the land itself. In these moments, when the air feels like a breath drawn but never released, the youngest of the tribe feel something they do not yet have words for. A longing. A warning. A grief that arrived before they were born and lingers still, dressed in quiet.

It begins with the wreaths. Carried not in procession, but individually, by hands that remember—or were taught to remember. Each is shaped from moss soaked in the sap of ashwood, woven with pale threads and bound with silence. No fire is lit. No chant is offered. The path to the Ash Grove is walked in stillness, each step a heartbeat too slow. These wreaths are not left as offerings. They are left as reminders. They are not placed, but laid—gently, deliberately, as if the earth beneath them might bruise from carelessness. And when they are set down, the Aevori women press their palms to the ground, bow not in reverence but in mourning, and whisper a name that does not echo.

Aureli.

They do not speak of her death. Only her warmth. Her laughter. The way she stirred the air with her steps. The way she made birds scatter just by breathing joy into the trees. And they speak of Virellen, —but carefully, with deep gentle love, as if her name itself is a fraying tether. They call her child of the dream-bound, Virellen —gleam of the still water, the lost Aevori of listening breath. They say her sorrow broke the sky, not out of rage, but out of love stretched too thin across the bones of grief.

Sometimes, a child will ask. “Why did she change?” And the older ones will pause, not to find an answer, but to decide if the child is ready for the truth—that sometimes, love does not protect us from becoming what we fear. Sometimes, it delivers us to it. They tell the story not in warnings, but in fragments. That Virellen was once dream-bound. That she loved Aureli as flame loves air. That the flame was taken, and the breath left behind was never whole again. That grief can sharpen into a kind of clarity so potent, so precise, it cuts not just the soul—but the world around it.

And still… as the cycles pass, they sing of her. Not in songs of joy, but of ache. Low-throated melodies passed down through generations, reshaped with each new voice but always circling the same center. A chorus of remembering.

“O child of gleam, once gentler than the dawn, your sorrow tore the skies apart, your love—then you—were gone. We do not hate your hollow steps, nor name you beast or blight. But mark the place where grief made war against the glyphs of light.”

Those who pass near the tomb beneath Veu-Nahra—the cradle of roots grown into stone—do not linger. But neither do they run. They stop. They press two fingers to their lips, then to the earth. Some say they feel a tremble then. A breath through the ground. Others hear nothing. But they all speak of the silence. A kind that listens. A kind that waits.

There are stories now. That when storms gather above the mountain, the roots themselves hum. That the stone bleeds, faint and silver, as if recalling the Ceremony of Silver Rain. That shadows sometimes move the wrong way. That when the Shard Moons rise together, their light bends, just slightly, around the Ash Grove.

And sometimes—rarely, every few generations—a young girl will be born with a glyph that moves against rhythm. Not chaotic. Not corrupted. Just… unfamiliar. Older than known forms. Quiet, but insistent. A slow curl beneath the skin that seems to pulse with something both beautiful and wrong. These girls are watched. Not with fear. With awe. With caution. With love.

Because perhaps Virellen did not fall into madness. Perhaps she cracked open the sky to show something beneath it. Something unbearable. Something sacred. Or perhaps she is still there, beneath the Vastland, not sleeping but listening. Not waiting to rise again, but to be remembered fully—both as the one who sang to stones and the one who unmade the sacred with trembling hands.

And perhaps, one day, she will answer. Not with rage. Not with forgiveness. But with a question only the wind will understand. Until then, her name is sung—not to summon, but to soften. Not to banish, but to remember. And in that remembering, a strange hope grows. That even the broken can become myth. That even the ones who unmake can be loved.

Because sometimes, in the deepest silence, where the moss hangs low and breath is held without knowing why, the young ones hear it. Faint. Almost imagined. A whisper, not in voice, but in feeling. A thought folded in memory. An echo.

“I still remember her hand near mine. Aureli—the wild, the laughing, the heat-struck spirit. She is my love. Wherever I go. She follows. Always.”

And then the leaves shift, though there is no breeze. And the trees lean inward. And the sky, for just a moment, forgets to move.