The vision vanished as quickly as it had come, snatched away before Liora could fix any detail of the sixth figure's face or form into her memory. She staggered back from the tree, breathless, her mind struggling to hold onto anything solid from what she had just witnessed.
Only one phrase remained, echoing faintly in the space behind her thoughts, as though it had been left there deliberately, a single surviving thread from an otherwise vanished tapestry.
*The One Who Named Stories.*
She repeated it aloud, testing the shape of the words, and the Keeper's ghostly form shuddered visibly at the sound of it.
"I have never heard that title before," he said. "And yet something in me recoils from it, as though I have been taught, somewhere beneath conscious memory, to fear its return."
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