Before the Seven Seals, before the Hollow had a name, Veyra stood beneath a sky crowded with unfamiliar stars. She held a child against her chest while seven figures waited across the valley. "The Seventh cannot awaken," one of them said. Veyra tightened her arms around the child. "You don't understand what he is." "We understand enough to fear him." "Then you understand nothing." The first seal closed. Then the second. Seven circles formed around the child, but the seventh never fully touched him. One of the Seven whispered, "The Seventh is not the child." Veyra looked down at Sol. "No." She turned toward the seals. "The Seventh is the choice." The memory ended. Jabril woke beneath the open sky. Six lights burned above him, and the seventh green light remained apart from them. Somewhere beyond the stars, something ancient had noticed the change. It did not attack. It waited.
She had expected the seals to hurt. What she had not expected was how gentle the forgetting would be — each circle closing like a door she herself had chosen to shut, until the only thing she could hold was the weight of him and the words the Seven had given her: The Seventh is not the child. She repeated it to herself as the green light pulled apart from the others, because it was the only true thing she had left, and because someday someone would need her to remember it.
And the child did not cry. That was the part none of the Seven understood, and the part that would haunt Veyra across every life she had left: he watched the seals close with ancient, patient eyes, and when the seventh circle faltered and would not touch him, he reached up one small hand — not to stop it, but the way a traveler touches a doorframe on the way out of a house, to remember it later.