They left just before dawn.
Mira packed food and supplies while Orin scribbled a final set of star patterns on the wall of their house. His hands trembled, not from fear—but from the strange warmth pulsing in his veins ever since he touched the Skyglass.
Kaelen led them northeast, away from the main roads. "The Scorchers ride smoke," he explained. "They'll come from the west, always with the wind."
Mira didn't ask how he knew. She didn't want to know.
They reached the edge of the Withered Grove by midday. Once a vast, living forest, it was now a graveyard of pale trees. No birds sang. No insects hummed. The silence here pressed against the skin like cold mist.
"What happened here?" Orin whispered.
Kaelen paused. "This is where the last sky-anchor fell."
Mira frowned. "What's a sky-anchor?"
Kaelen touched a petrified trunk. "Before the Severing, the sky was... tethered to the world. Anchored. When they shattered the sky, the anchors failed. The world is still unraveling. Slowly."
Orin knelt beside a tree root. A mark, like a sigil burned into wood, caught his eye—a spiral inside a crescent moon.
He reached for it.
"Don't—!" Kaelen warned.
Too late.
Orin's fingers brushed the mark. A jolt raced through his arm, and in an instant, he wasn't there.
Not in body. Not in time.
He stood on a battlefield of stars. Above him, a colossal chain stretched into the sky, glowing with runes that flickered like dying stars. Below, shadowed figures—ten stories tall—fought with weapons made of light and void.
And then, a voice—ancient, female, sorrowful:
> "You are the Third Flame. The Unseen Thread. When the last star forgets its name, you must choose: to bind, or to burn."
He gasped—and came back to himself. Mira held him by the shoulders, eyes wide with panic.
"What did you see?" she asked.
Orin looked at Kaelen. "What am I?"
Kaelen's face was pale.
"Marked."