CHAPTER 5: THE SANCTUARY OF BINDING
The cliffs of the forgotten gods rose like fractured bones beneath a sky thick with unspoken memory. Storms circled overhead—not storms of weather, but of thought, of consequence, of what once was.
Eris climbed slowly.
Each step she took up the winding staircase peeled another phantom from her back. Memories fell like ash, fluttering into the void. A name here. A cry there. Laughter swallowed by silence.
She did not cry. There was no room left for tears.
At the summit stood the Sanctuary of Binding.
It was not made of stone, but of time made solid. Pillars stretched across reality, bent inward toward the center where The Witness hung—crucified between moments. Not alive. Not dead. Simply… remembering.
As she stepped into the sanctum, sound fled. Even thought dared not echo.
But her question had weight.
She had carried it across realms, through lies and lives and the collapse of names.
Now, she would ask.
The Witness stirred.
Chains clinked. A wind stirred from nowhere.
"Eris," it said. Its voice was the sound of a billion hearts breaking. "You have come."
"I seek what you guard," she said. "I seek what I've lost."
"You seek identity. Truth. Redemption."
She nodded. "All of them. None of them. I don't remember."
The Witness twisted. Its face was obscured—shifting between forms, never settling. A child. A mother. A lover. A stranger.
"Then you ask the wrong question."
Eris stepped closer. "Then what must I ask?"
The chains groaned. The sanctuary trembled.
"You must choose what to forget."
She staggered. "But I came to remember."
"Memories are a tide," the Witness said. "You do not recall them. You ride them. And tides drown as easily as they lift."
The air thickened. Shadows around her began to hiss.
They were her—versions cast off, fragments buried. A warrior who betrayed. A sister who abandoned. A mother who watched her child fade. They circled.
"You want to be whole," the Witness said. "But the price of wholeness… is loss."
"I'm not afraid."
"Then choose."
Eris reached out and touched the base of the pillar.
Instantly, pain stabbed through her skull. Images burst like fireworks.
A battlefield where she had held the dying.
A throne she had abandoned.
A god she had loved.
And a choice she had made to forget all of it.
One memory lingered longer than the others:
A child crying in the rain. Her child.
She fell to her knees.
"I can't let her go."
The Witness wept silently. "Then you will never know who you are."
Eris gritted her teeth.
"Then I'll carry both. The truth and the pain. I'll carry them to the end."
The Witness grew still.
"The Thread frays. The Rift echoes. You will be needed."
The chains snapped.
The Witness collapsed, gasping, reborn.
"You've unbound me."
Eris offered her hand. "Then walk with me. We'll find the Thread together."
As they turned to descend, the shadows scattered, and light filtered through cracks in the sanctuary's time-worn ceiling.
Far below, the world stirred.
Ashriel's wings beat toward the horizon.
Kael stepped into Room 13, where the mirror pulsed.
Lucien sharpened judgment beneath the twin moons.
And the echo, wearing Jiwoon's face, moved ever closer to the Thread of Judgment.