Ilira held the parchment tightly, watching the living ink shift - not into words, but into absence.
The ruins were still fading, fragments of architecture crumbling inward as if trying to erase themselves faster. The Echo-Keepers stood at the edge of existence, their forms wavering, neither truly here nor gone.
The Hollow Star whispered, quieter than ever.
Vaedin turned toward her. "We have to decide. Do we restore Orelith - or let it vanish forever?"
Sivrin, staring at the blurred remnants, looked conflicted. "We don't even know why they erased themselves."
Then, the final revelation struck.
The ink solidified one last time - forming the last words of Orelith's lost history:
"We vanished so we would never be found."
A weight pressed against Ilira's chest.
This was never about destruction or conquest. Orelith had made a choice - a final, deliberate act to disappear.
But then Sivrin staggered.
His pulse hammered, and for the first time, he saw something not just in the ruins, but in himself. His stolen artifacts, the ones from erased civilizations - he had seen traces of Orelith before.
And now, his stolen minutes returned.
Not in time, but in memory.
He saw it - Orelith's last moment, its people standing before something vast, something unknowable, their voices steady in their final decision.
"We vanished so we would never be found," their whisper echoed.
And Sivrin was meant to disappear with them.
But somehow, he had been pulled free, carrying a fragment of time that should not exist.
Ilira watched as his five stolen minutes wove into the living ink, binding them together - not to restore Orelith, but to remember it.
She made her choice.
Instead of forcing Orelith back into existence, she preserved its truth within the ink - ensuring that its memory would never fade completely, even if its ruins did.
The Hollow Star sighed. The last echoes faded.
And yet - somewhere in the shifting ink, Orelith remained.
Waiting.