Rukvair

Long ago, beyond the last mountains and the edge of all known maps, lay a land veiled in mist and silence. It had no name on any chart, no path that led to it—only whispers of it passed among travelers and dreamers.

They called it Rukvair.

To most, it was just a story told around fires—a kingdom swallowed by time, where clocks stopped ticking and stars hovered endlessly in place. But to seventeen-year-old Kaelen, Rukvair was real.

Because he had seen it.

The first time it came to him was in a dream. A tall gate of stone carved with strange sigils. A tree whose silver leaves chimed like bells. And a voice—low and distant—calling his name:

"Kaelen... return."

He woke with the taste of metal on his tongue and an ache in his chest that he couldn’t explain.

His village elders dismissed it as fantasy. But Kaelen's grandmother, ancient and nearly blind, gripped his hand when he told her.

“You’re a child of the Veil,” she whispered. “And Rukvair never forgets its own.”

She gave him a pendant—an old thing shaped like a crescent moon with a glowing stone in its center. “This will guide you when the mists rise.”

Kaelen left at dawn, slipping into the forest beyond the village where no one dared go. Birds stopped singing the moment he crossed the river. Fog coiled at his feet, and the trees seemed to lean closer with every step. Still, he walked forward—driven by something older than memory.

By nightfall, the world changed.

The forest thinned, the ground sloped, and he found himself on a path made of glass—reflecting the sky above and stars below. In the distance, between two obsidian peaks, a tower pulsed with blue light.

He had entered Rukvair.

The land was silent but alive. Trees whispered his name. The wind shaped itself into forgotten lullabies. Every step Kaelen took awakened something: statues blinked, mossy lanterns flickered, rivers resumed their flow.

It was as if the land had waited for him.

At the heart of Rukvair stood a great palace, vines woven into its crystal walls. In its courtyard stood the silver tree from his dream, still and humming softly. At its roots, a woman waited.

She was tall, robed in pale gold, and her eyes were endless pools of sky.

“You’ve come,” she said.

Kaelen stepped closer. “Who are you?”

“I am the Echo of the Queen who ruled Rukvair. And you, Kaelen, are the last heir.”

She told him the truth—what the world had forgotten.

Rukvair was once a kingdom beyond time, its people gifted with the ability to shape memory and dream. But they grew arrogant, seeking to freeze time itself to escape death, pain, and change. In doing so, they shattered the balance. The land fell into stillness, and its people into sleep.

All except the royal bloodline—cursed to remember, to wander the waking world until one returned to restore the flow of time.

Kaelen, through his grandmother’s line, was that final remnant.

To awaken Rukvair, he had to do more than return.

He had to choose to leave again—but with memory intact.

“You must go back,” the Echo said. “Back to the world, but take us with you. Speak our name. Remember our sky. Carry Rukvair within your breath.”

“But why can’t I stay?” Kaelen asked. “This is where I belong.”

“You belong to both worlds now,” she said gently. “And Rukvair lives only if it is remembered.”

She led him to a pool beneath the silver tree. Its surface shimmered with reflections not his own—moments from the lives of the sleeping, frozen citizens of Rukvair. A child paused mid-laugh. A woman watering flowers that never wilted. A man reaching for a letter that never arrived.

They were not dead, only paused.

“You can free them,” she said. “But not from here.”

Kaelen stared into the water. “Will I forget you?”

“Only if you stop believing.”

He stepped into the pool.

The world collapsed into white.

Kaelen awoke in his bed, the pendant still around his neck, pulsing with faint light. He gasped, sat up, and ran to his grandmother’s room.

She was waiting.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” she whispered.

He nodded.

“Then speak its name. Say it loud.”

Kaelen did.

“Rukvair.”

And something shifted.

A soft wind stirred the leaves outside—though the air had been still. A melody drifted through the windows. Across the village, people paused, feeling something deep and unspoken stir within them: a forgotten dream, a name on the tip of their tongue, a place they’d once longed for but never known.

And far away, beyond the mountains, the mists of Rukvair began to thin.

In the years that followed, Kaelen became a storyteller. Not just a man who told tales—but one who remembered. He spoke of a kingdom lost to time, of a silver tree, of stars that listened and clocks that breathed. He told people to dream again, to imagine the impossible.

And in doing so, Rukvair lived.

For a land is only lost when no one remembers it.

And Kaelen remembered everything.