Aldric came for them at dawn, his face shadowed, his eyes sharp, the carved stone tucked into his tunic like a second heart.
"There's something you need to see," he said. "Something I should have shown you last night, but I needed to be sure. To be certain that you were ready."
He led them out of the village, past the huts and the fires and the faces of the people who watched them with eyes that held more than curiosity. There was hope in those faces, Theron realized. Or the ghost of it. The memory of something that had been lost and might, perhaps, be found again.
They walked for an hour, climbing into the foothills of the Frostfangs, until they reached a place where the ground was bare of snow and the stone was black and smooth, worn flat by wind and rain and the passage of countless feet.
And there, carved into the stone, was a door.
It was like the door in the Sunken Dominion, but older, larger, its surface covered in symbols that moved and shifted, that seemed to change when Theron looked at them, that whispered in a language he could almost understand.
"This is what the Firstborn left behind," Aldric said. "This is what you burned, all those years ago. Not a city. Not a people. A door. A door to a place that the Skylords have been trying to reach since the beginning."
He stepped forward, and the symbols on the door flared, their light washing over him, touching his face, his hands, the stone that he carried in his tunic.
"The Firstborn knew what the Skylords were. What they would become. And they knew that one day, someone would need to stop them. So they built this door. And they left the key in the hands of those who would remember. Who would wait. Who would be ready when the time came."
He turned to face Kaelen, and his eyes were bright, almost feverish.
"You are the key, Kaelen. You and the Echo. The Firstborn knew, before you were born, before your parents were born, before the Skylords ever set foot in this world, that someone like you would come. Someone who had been broken by the gods. Someone who had been made into a weapon and then discarded. Someone who had the strength to choose something different."
Kaelen stared at the door, at the symbols that were pulsing now, matching the rhythm of the Echo in his pack.
"What's on the other side?" he asked.
Aldric smiled, and there was something in that smile that made Theron's skin crawl.
"The truth," he said. "The truth about the Skylords. About the Aethyr. About the world before the wars. About everything that was lost and everything that might yet be saved."
He stepped aside, and the door began to open.