The wound had closed.

  But it had not healed.

  Three days since the fall of the echoes, the palace stood hollow. Its banners still hung, but the wind did not move them. The walls stood upright, but they no longer cast shadows. And beneath the marble floors, the stone remembered things that never happened.

  Not just memories.

  Possibilities.

  And one by one, those began to bleed through.

  The ash that once hung in the air began to fall not like snow, but like ink. It smeared the glass, soaked into letters, erased words from ledgers, scrolls, even gravestones. People woke forgetting their names, their children, their faces.

  In the stillness of the western hall, where royal portraits once hung, Ithan found Madeline sitting with a piece of parchment in her lap.

  It was blank.

  She looked at him, her eyes bloodshot and distant.

  

  “My mother’s name is gone. From every record. Every history. I’m the only one who remembers it.”

  He knelt beside her.

  “I believe you.”

  She let the parchment go. It drifted like ash.

  “No. You don’t. Not really. But you’re still here. That’s what matters.”

  They traveled that night to the southern edge of the city, past the silent bells and broken spires, to where the Library of Scars leaned like a dying man.

  Long ago, it had been a cathedral of ink — but after the Schism of the Seventh Crown, it was ransacked and renamed. Its books now bound in chains. Its scribes bound by oaths of silence.

  And in the lowest vault, beneath the drowned scriptorium, waited the Echo-Seer.

  The guards at the gate did not speak. They simply opened the door and turned their backs.

  The chamber stank of salt and old candle smoke.

  The Seer sat in a chair made of bone and rope, blindfolded and smiling.

  “You smell like truth,” she said as they entered. “You’ve worn it too long. It’s begun to rot.”

  Madeline stepped forward. “Tell me what the Crown is.”

  The Seer laughed — gently. “The Crown is not an object. It is a memory so large no mind could bear it. So we made a vessel for it. And locked it away.”

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  “But someone opened it.”

  “No. Someone became it.”

  Madeline’s grip tightened on the Mirror Blade.

  “How do I seal it again?”

  The Seer leaned forward and whispered:

  

  “You must wear it. Speak the name that is no longer written. Become the last memory. And then forget yourself.”

  Before Madeline could speak again, the Seer’s head lolled back.

  Her body cracked.

  And turned to dust.

  They returned to the palace, to the throne room scorched black and hollow.

  Madeline paced the mosaic floor, counting steps.

  “Eleven paces west. Four north. Two down,” she murmured.

  She drove the pommel of her blade into the marble.

  It cracked.

  Beneath it lay a seal of iron — rusted, ancient, engraved with a sigil long erased.

  Ithan crouched beside her.

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Together, they pried the seal open.

  A stair spiraled down into a blackness deeper than earth.

  And colder than death.

  The light was strange here.

  It flickered with scenes — not shadows, but memories that played across the walls.

  Madeline saw her own birth.

  Her father’s fall.

  The first time she held the Mirror Blade.

  She saw herself laughing in a field she’d never visited.

  And dying on a battlefield that had never existed.

  At the center of the chamber stood the Crown.

  It pulsed like a heart.

  Made of bone? No.

  Of faces. Millions of them. Layered and layered until they formed a perfect ring — ever-shifting, ever-humming.

  When she approached, they turned to look at her.

  

  “Do you remember?” they asked in one voice.

  She nodded.

  “I remember everything.”

  Ithan stepped beside her.

  “You don’t have to wear it.”

  Madeline turned to him.

  “If I don’t, it will find someone else. Someone weaker. Someone it can use.”

  “Then we destroy it.”

  “You can’t destroy memory. Not when it’s been suffered. Not when it’s been loved.”

  Her hand hovered above the Crown.

  It was warm.

  She saw her mother’s smile.

  Her friends’ laughter.

  And the face of every person who’d ever looked at her with hope.

  The cost became clear.

  

  “To seal it, I must carry it. But I cannot carry it and remain.”

  She spoke the name.

  Her mother’s name.

  The name of the First Binder.

  The name no one else remembered.

  It rang through the chamber like a bell.

  And the Crown lifted itself.

  Hovered.

  Then lowered onto her brow.

  And burned.

  Her skin split with light.

  Her eyes turned to glass.

  And for a moment, she was the Bone King — and every victim he ever unmade.

  She screamed.

  And then—

  Silence.

  When Ithan blinked, Madeline was gone.

  In her place lay a ring of ash.

  And the Mirror Blade, shattered.

  No echoes remained.

  No whispers.

  Only a crown of shadow, glinting with faint light — silent.

  Waiting.

  And behind it, a stone wall etched with a single line in her own hand:

  

  “I chose to remember so you could forget. But if you ever wear the Crown—Remember me.”