There is a place in Kadven where sound does not belong.
Where breath freezes midair.
Where even echoes fear to return.
This place is not marked on any map, nor named in any tongue still spoken.
But all who walk the halls of the academy… dream of it eventually.
And in the dream, they hear the same thing.
A scream.
Endless. Ancient. Hollow.
A scream from behind a door that was never meant to open.
After the Chorus awakened, I began to dream of that scream.
Not once. Not twice.
But every night.
Until I knew I had to find it—not in sleep, but in stone.
I followed the cracks.
Not in walls, but in time.
There are moments in Kadven that don't fit—hallways longer than they should be, doors that vanish, clocks that stutter.
I chased those moments, stringing them together like a melody remembered backwards.
Until I found the place.
Deep beneath the Library of Ash—a forbidden archive that smokes with burned books, where pages flutter though no wind blows, and voices whisper names no one should speak.
At the back of its lowest chamber, behind a wall that no architect claimed to build, I felt it:
A cold that did not touch my skin, but scraped at my soul.
The Gate That Screams was real.
It was not a door, not truly.
It was a wound.
Carved into the air itself—jagged, pulsing, weeping thin threads of silver mist.
Veins of memory ran across it, like cracks in glass, filled with flickers of lives unlived.
At its center, a symbol hovered.
The Fourteenth Rune.
Mine.
Unwritten and unspoken.
Until now.
I didn't come alone.
Raen and Alia—my adopted siblings—followed me, uninvited.
Raen had his twin blades strapped to his back. He didn't trust magic. Never had.
Alia carried no weapon. But her eyes glowed faintly with second-sight—she had begun to see what I saw, feel what I felt.
We stood before the Gate together.
"It's alive," Alia whispered.
Raen didn't speak. His hand gripped a blade that shimmered red, though no light touched it.
When I stepped closer, the air cracked.
A cry bled from the Gate—not loud, but deep. A scream not heard with ears, but with memory.
It shook my bones.
Raen dropped to a knee. Alia cried out, covering her ears though there was no sound.
But I stood still.
Because the scream was mine.
The Gate spoke in fragments.
Words not in language, but in image.
Flashes.
Futures.
A city of gold devoured by time.
A child crowned in fire.
A throne of mirrors where no reflection ever stayed the same.
And behind it all… something watching.
Not Azraleth.
Worse.
Older.
A thing born not from magic, but from regret.
The First One Forgotten.
To open the Gate was madness.
To leave it closed was surrender.
But I remembered what the Chorus showed me.
This wasn't just a passage.
It was a test.
The Gate would scream… until someone answered.
I turned to my siblings.
"I have to enter," I said.
Raen looked like he might stop me. He didn't.
Instead, he stepped back.
Alia took my hand. "Don't forget us."
"I never could," I said.
Then I stepped into the wound.
The scream became silence.
All light vanished.
All gravity, direction, self.
I was nowhere.
And then, I was within.
Not within the Gate—
Within myself.
This place was made of my broken pieces.
A world of shattered memories—floating cities, people I loved who never existed, wars I lost but never fought.
Time flowed wrong.
I saw myself at six, crying beneath the royal garden's twisted tree.
I saw myself at fifteen, bleeding on the floor of the academy, alone.
I saw myself… not as Cid.
But as something else.
The Forgotten King.
He stood before me—tall, robed in flickering shadows, crown of ash and fire upon his head.
He had my face.
But older.
Colder.
"You called the scream," he said.
"I answered it," I replied.
"You think this makes you ready?"
"I think it makes me responsible."
He stepped forward.
And handed me a blade.
Black.
Humming with pain.
Alive.
"Then wield it. For what comes next cannot be met with memory alone."
I took the blade.
It burned me.
Carved a new rune into my palm.
Not of power.
But of remembrance.
When I returned from the Gate, the chamber had changed.
Raen and Alia were gone.
Or not gone—frozen. Suspended in time, locked between seconds.
Because the world outside the Gate had stopped moving.
The scream had stopped too.
But the silence… was louder.
Because now, something had heard us back.
And it was coming.