CHAPTER 159: CHAPTER 159: THE DAY YOU CHOSE TO FORGET

The deeper they went into the temple, the more the air began to change.

They moved through corridors etched with symbols no tongue remembered how to pronounce. Every wall whispered the history of the demon realm.

But just as they reached the carved archway that marked the threshold into the temple’s heart, a small figure stepped into their path.

It was the same demon child from before, her hood slightly askew now, revealing one glowing eye and the delicate, budding horns atop her head. She raised a single hand, not in threat but in solemn command.

"Only the soul-bound may pass beyond this point," she said softly, her voice like ripples over still water.

Veyce frowned, visibly confused. "What do you mean? I came with him."

The child shook her head gently, stepping between him and the priestess’s path. "The path is his alone. Not yours."

Veyce opened his mouth to protest, but the words caught in his throat. Not because he was silenced—but because he knew offending the temple was never good when they had such a high ranking in the demon realm.

He glanced at Cassian with a sad expression; he also wished to go inside, a place where very few people had gone in the entire realm.

Still, he said nothing harsh.

His expression twisted only briefly, lips curling into a pout that he quickly masked with feigned disinterest. He stepped back, folding his arms with exaggerated casualness, though his eyes remained fixed on the chamber beyond.

"I didn’t want to go into your spooky temple anyway," he muttered, mostly to himself.

Cassian nodded at him gently, even though he was also sad that Veyce could not go inside with him, when he was the one who brought him here in the first place.

But as Cassian goes further inside the temple, his heart starts beating faster. Something was pulling him like a string long buried beneath his skin had suddenly been tugged. The feeling was so unfamiliar it made his hands tremble.

He had always hated temples—hated fate, gods, priests, and priestesses who claimed to see destinies written in the stars. His entire childhood had been ruined by such superstitions, by the belief that branded him a curse who brought calamity upon his parents and relatives.

It hadn’t mattered that he was just a child with hands that had never harmed and a heart that only longed to be held. The night he was born, many strange things happened in the village.

And that was all it took for the village to decide he was an omen, a star-touched shadow sent to punish the bloodline for sins no one knew.

They stopped calling him by his name after that.

He became that boy, that thing, the cursed one. They said his cries made crops fail, that his laughter summoned storms. His parents had loved him, but when they died saving him, it only confirmed the beliefs of villagers.

Because of this, his entire village had turned against him.

But now...

Now something inside this strange temple, when he hated everything about this place, he suddenly felt calmness and a strange lingering ache like he had forgotten something very dear to his life.

And when his gaze fell upon the priestess again—who had spoken with riddles to him and yet whose presence felt like something his bones remembered—he realized he wasn’t scared or disgusted by her presence at all.

He was curious.

So, when Cassian turned to him as if to protest, Veyce simply shook his head and forced a crooked grin.

"Go," he said. "I’ll wait here. But don’t take too long, you know."

Cassian gave a nod, then turned and crossed the final threshold, Lyra curling tighter around his wrist, her tiny heart thudding against his pulse as if she, too, had sensed something.

The air changed the moment he entered.

It was warmer here—thick with the scent of sandalwood and something more elusive, like storm-drenched parchment or a long-extinguished flame. The fire in the center of the room glowed gently, contained in a shallow basin carved from obsidian, its blue-violet glow illuminating nothing and yet everything all at once.

The priestess stood beside it, her hands now outstretched, palms open as though she were holding something invisible between them.

Cassian approached slowly, unsure why his breath had caught or why his chest felt so tight, as though someone had placed a memory there he wasn’t ready to carry.

The priestess turned toward him without turning her head, as though her very soul had shifted to face him.

"You gave me something once," she said, her voice softer now, almost maternal, but with an edge sharp as moonlight on glass.

Cassian stopped a few feet from her, frowning. "I’ve never met you before, so how could my thing be with you?"

Her smile was sad, like she was seeing something he could not.

"No," she agreed. "Not in this life. But the soul remembers what the mind forgets."

She extended her hand.

Resting in her palm was a small object—delicate, strange, and glowing with energy. It was shaped like a locket, but it bore no chain. Its surface was inscribed with symbols that shimmered faintly beneath the firelight, as if the flame recognized it too.

Cassian hesitated, then asked, "What is it?"

The priestess said only this:

"It is the last piece of who you were."

He stepped forward, hand trembling as he reached out.

"But... I don’t remember giving you this. How could I have given you anything?"

Her voice was barely a whisper now, but it seemed to echo in every corner of the chamber.

"You gave it to me the day you chose to forget."

Cassian’s breath hitched.

He took the locket from her hand.

And the moment his skin made contact, the flame roared—rising high into the air, twisting and coiling like a serpent awakened from centuries of slumber. The sigils on the walls burned with light. And in the center of that fire, for the briefest of moments, Cassian saw something.

A boy. A temple. Blood on stone. A voice screaming his name through time.

He staggered.

The priestess caught him—not with her hands, but with her presence, a quiet strength that held him steady even as the world swayed.

"Do I... really have a past life?" he whispered.

The priestess only smiled.

"How could I, a mere mortal, claim to speak for fate? The answer is already inside you—you must be brave enough to hear it."

Cassian clutched the locket to his chest.

He did not understand it.

But deep inside... He knew he had a past, and now the locket is the key to open that...