Ancestry of Secrets

Ethan woke to the scent of wild jasmine and the murmur of a distant river. The field of white flowers stretched endlessly, the blurred woman gone, but her voice lingered like a half-remembered hymn. Above him, the starlit raven circled, its wings trailing threads of silver light.

"Where am I?" His words dissolved into the air, unanswered.

The raven cawed once—a sound like shattering glass—and soared westward. Ethan followed, his body lighter, stranger, as though the act of shedding his sigil had hollowed him into a vessel of something new.

The raven led him to a cliffside cloaked in mist. Below lay a city he did not recognize, its architecture a fusion of bone and starlight, its streets teeming with figures both human and other. A marketplace of shadows. A haven for the damned.

"Welcome to the Crossroads," said a voice.

The blurred woman stood beside him, her form still indistinct but clearer now—a silhouette edged in gold, her hair a cascade of ink-black tendrils.

"You exist between realms here. Neither alive nor dead. A fitting purgatory for a Duskheir without a bloodline."

"Who are you?" Ethan demanded.

"A custodian," she replied. "And your only path forward. The Thirteenth Star's heart still beats in the deep, and the Keeper's essence seeks a host. You must rebuild what you destroyed."

"I don't even know what I destroyed."

"Your legacy. Your limits. Now you are… malleable."

She gestured to the city. "Find the Weaver of Fates. She holds the thread that can reforge your purpose."

The raven dive-bombed into the mist, vanishing.

The Crossroads defied logic. Ethan passed stalls selling memories bottled in amber, cages holding miniature supernovas, and a vendor who claimed to trade "regrets for riddles." The Weaver's den was a tent of sewn-together skies, its entrance guarded by a child with three eyes.

"She's been waiting," the child said, vanishing in a puff of dandelion spores.

Inside, the Weaver was not a woman but a collage—a hundred faces stitched into one, her fingers needle-thin and glowing.

"Ethan Veyra," she hummed, her voice a chorus. "Or should I say… Ethan No-One? How delicious."

"I need a way to fight the Thirteenth Star," he said. "Without my bloodline."

The Weaver laughed, threads spiraling from her palms.

"Bloodlines are cages. You've broken yours. Now, let's see what you are without it."

She plunged a needle into his chest.

Pain. Then—

He was a boy again, but not himself. A child with Mara's green eyes, climbing a tree in a sunlit orchard. Elara voice called from below: "Careful, Leo! The Duskheir's heir mustn't fall!"

The memory shifted. A man in a mask—Jarek?—carving a spiral into a newborn's palm. "This will protect you from the Star's gaze."

Another shift. The Keeper, whole and radiant, weaving starlight into a cloak for Alric.

"Wear this, and the voids will not claim you."

The visions ended. The Weaver yanked the needle free, a thread of iridescent light dangling from its tip.

"You are not the first Duskheir to renounce their name. There was another. She forged a pact with the Crossroads, becoming more than her blood. You could do the same… for a price."

"What price?"

The Weaver's faces blurred into a single, haunting smile. "The thread of your oldest regret."

Ethan's mind flashed to Mara's limp body, to his mother's erased face.

"Take it."

The thread ignited in the Weaver's hand.

"Done. Now, claim your new mantle."

She wove the light into a cloak—a mirror of the one the Keeper once made for Alric. As Ethan fastened it, the raven reappeared, landing on his shoulder. Its eyes now matched his own.

"The Thirteenth Star's heart lies in the Shattered Wastes," the Weaver said. "But beware—the Keeper has already claimed a new vessel. Someone… familiar."

The Wastes were a graveyard of dead realms, a desert where time eroded like sand. At its center stood a spire of black glass, its peak piercing a bleeding sky. Ethan's cloak billowed, no longer cloth but condensed starlight, its power humming in sync with the raven.

Inside the spire, he found the heart—a pulsating mass of green-black crystal. And beside it, the Keeper's new host, Alric's ghost, his form corporeal now, veins throbbing with void energy.

"You," Ethan breathed.

"She offered me a second chance," Alric said, his voice warped by the Keeper's cadence. "A way to undo my failures. To save our line."

"This isn't saving. It's surrender."

"Is it?" Alaric smiled, and the heart's light swelled. "The Keeper showed me the truth. The Thirteenth Star isn't our enemy—it's our mother. The source of the Veyra's power. Liora betrayed us all when she caged it."

The spire trembled as the heart's pulse quickened. The raven shrieked a warning.

Ethan stepped forward, cloak flaring.

"Then I'll betray it too."