Whispers of the Past

The air in the ruins was thick with a silence that pressed in on my eardrums, a silence far more profound than the stillness of my ancestral crypt. Here, in this forgotten heart of the Dark Nymph realm, the stones themselves seemed to hum with a forgotten language, a song of creation and decay. Kael moved beside me, his presence a constant, unsettling warmth against the encroaching chill of the ancient place. We walked through crumbling archways, past statues worn smooth by eons of wind and rain, their features lost to time.

“These markings,” I murmured, tracing a spiraling glyph etched into a fallen column. It pulsed with a faint, internal light, a phantom heartbeat in the dead stone. “They feel… familiar, somehow.”

Kael’s fingers brushed mine as he reached out, his touch sending a tremor through me. “They are the Old Tongue,” he said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in my chest. “The language of the architects of this realm.”