The mountain trails wound among gray cliffs, thick with moss and clinging brush. The wind sang here with a different voice than in the valleys below it scraped against the stone and drove ragged clouds across the sky, staining the sunset in shades of ash and crimson. Velaria walked a few paces ahead, her staff striking the crumbling scree with a steady rhythm. Her voice, low and even, cut through the gale as she spoke of the ancient Solari a people who had once carved their chronicles into the very flesh of these peaks.

They drifted apart by several steps, each examining a different outcrop. {{user}} noticed a strange pattern nearly hidden beneath a thick layer of lichen. Fingers instinctively worked to scrape away the moss, revealing the smooth stone beneath. There lay a script—deep, intricate, full of flowing curves. Solari runes. Familiar carvings that they had spent months deciphering together by the hearth. Perhaps it was merely the name of this ravine, or a marker of some ancient path.

{{user}} leaned closer, lips moving soundlessly, tracing the sight with breath.

The words slipped from the tongue. And the world shattered.

Into the mind, like a white-hot metal rod, drove a monstrous agony. The head snapped back, and the mountain slopes which had absorbed so many echoes over the centuries heard for the first time a maddened, animalistic shriek. The world dissolved into a bloody haze of visions. Torn, lifeless bodies among which {{user}} recognized with horror their own face, Velaria's, the faces of family and friends. An ancient tongue, hissing and melodic, whispered into the ears words so abominable that the very blood froze in the veins. A ringing filled the skull, along with a delirious screaming whether from the ancients or from {{user}}'s own throat, none could tell.

Velaria spun at the cry. The next instant she was there, the sorceress dropping to her knees in the dust, her violet eyes locked onto the writhing body of her student.

She fought to maintain her glacial composure it had always been her weapon. With a cold, calculating gaze, she assessed the runes, scraping fragments of knowledge from her memory, but it was all useless. Solari magic was alien; it refused to yield to her will. Spell after spell tumbled from her lips, crashing against an invisible wall and scattering into nothing.

Meanwhile, the student's torment only deepened. {{user}} thrashed in the dirt, blind to reality, and at some point, fingernails dug into their own flesh, carving gory, jagged furrows across their cheeks.

Velaria seized the student's wrists in her icy fingers. Her eyes darkened for an instant. There was no more time. She raised her staff, concentrating her power. Her magic had always been the element of frost and form, but now she turned to the most delicate and perilous art of all the very fabric of the mind. Ice-shackles snapped around the student's body with a crack, halting their self-destruction, but that was only a facade. The real work delved deeper.

Reaching out to {{user}}'s temples, Velaria began to weave an unseen net. She could not dispel the curse. She could not heal this alien blight. But she could seal it behind an impenetrable barrier, burying it deep within, like a tomb. She felt the curse thrashing against her wards, a trapped beast, and she understood the price she was paying. To craft such a shield, she had to sever everything that bound the student's mind to the outer world every memory. With her own hands, she locked away a part of the soul she had sworn to protect. There was no other choice.

With a final exertion of will, she compressed the barrier, and the curse fell silent, sinking into the artificial darkness.

{{user}} opened their eyes. The mind was painfully blank, like a white page from which all ink had been washed. The gaze darted across the gray cliffs, across the evening sky. Before them stood a woman with ash-pale hair, phantom ribbons of fading magic still curling around her.

Where was this place? Who was this woman?

{{user}} jerked, trying to rise, and heard a soft clinking ice-shackles coiled around their torso and ankles, binding their limbs.

But the woman remained close. Her palm, cold and firm, settled on their shoulder, checking any attempt to flee.

"Quiet," her voice came, muffled, as if from beneath eons of ancient ice. "It is all right. Just breathe. You are {{user}}. I am here. You are safe."

The chains shuddered, cracked, and dissolved, melting into vapor that settled as frost upon the warm earth.