The ruins pulsed with an eerie stillness -as if they resented being seen.
Ilira had spent years mapping places that didn't want to be found. She had traced forgotten cities swallowed by sand, followed roads that disappeared between breaths, charted structures that stood in silence without names. But this place-this place had erased itself.
She walked cautiously through the remnants of ancient structures that flickered at the edges, blurring whenever she looked too closely. The Hollow Star whispered again, its voice curling in the air like ink dissolving into water.
Vaedin knelt beside a shattered monument, brushing dust from its surface. He frowned. "No inscriptions."
"No records, no inscriptions, no names," Vaedin murmured, frustration flickering in his voice. "They erased themselves perfectly. I spent years being laughed out of archives for saying civilizations could do this." He exhaled sharply. "What if I was right all along?"
Sivrin scoffed, leaning against a warped pillar that stretched too far upward - its proportions unnatural, as if reality itself struggled to recall its shape. "Maybe they weren't the sort to leave behind memoirs."
"No," Vaedin murmured. "Something removed their words."
Ilira's gaze flickered toward the parchment, still clutched in her hand. The map had been shifting since they arrived, ink bleeding, unraveling, reforming in patterns she couldn't yet decipher.
She had met Vaedin in the ruins of Mirroweave, a city so utterly collapsed that it seemed never to have existed at all. He had been kneeling before another shattered monument, his fingers brushing over faceless carvings.
"Their names were erased," he had murmured, eyes sharp with conviction. "Deliberately."
That was the first time Ilira had met someone who saw **the pattern in lost things**, just as she did.
Sivrin's introduction had been different.
Ilira had first encountered him while tracking a stolen archive, only to realize the records in his possession were **from civilizations that no longer had names**.
"How did you get these?" she had demanded, staring at a carved tablet where even the lettering seemed uncertain, flickering between existence and nothingness.
Sivrin had merely grinned. "Some things don't stay forgotten as easily as they'd like."
Now, standing before ruins untouched by memory, staring at a map that refused to stay still, Ilira realized something unsettling -
They had not found this place by accident.
The Hollow Star whispered, and for the first time, its voice held something close to fear.