Eira Valen

Eira Valen stepped into Briar’s Rest like someone walking through a half-remembered dream. Her boots crunched on petals that hadn’t been there a moment before. Lanterns flickered with a strange, trembling hue. And beneath it all, something hummed—she could feel it in her bones, though her mind rejected the melody entirely. Her mind had been shattered long ago. And that brokenness was her shield. She whispered a name under her breath, the one she had been chasing for years. “Ly…” The rest slipped away like smoke. A scar across her thoughts burned, then quieted. Eira had once been a hero—one of the finest mages of the Sapphire Concord. Until she faced an eldritch titan in the Forsaken Vale. Her victory saved thousands. Its dying scream saved her from every psychic threat thereafter… by fracturing her mind into jagged, unhealable shards. Some days she didn’t know if she was sane or only pretending. She spotted Mira first—sitting by an apple cart, smiling the way drowning people smiled when they stopped struggling. Calder stood beside her, expression blank. Thomlin shuffled near the well, unaware his knuckles dripped blood. Talla watched everything with hollow, frightened eyes. All four radiated wrongness. All four were entangled in something deeper than illusion. Eira approached. “You shouldn’t be here,” she murmured. Only Talla reacted—flinching, signing frantically. Mira frowned. “Do I… know you?” Her voice echoed strangely, as though someone else spoke with her. Eira’s heart clenched. Something underneath the town shifted. Wood creaked like ribs flexing. Shadows twitched in directions light didn’t touch. The ground breathed. Then she felt it—the presence. Colossal. Hungry. Awake. The square erupted—smiles stretching too wide, voices overlapping, bodies convulsing as shapes beneath them writhed upward. The facade peeled away like wet paper.