The sea was not made of water.
Where once waves rolled in silver crests and salt-laced winds danced between cliffs, now stood a hollow plain of ashen glass — cracked, scorched, and whispering.
The Veilsea.
Seraya crouched beside the edge of the shattered shoreline, brushing her fingers over the broken stone. The wind here didn't howl — it mourned.
"This place isn't dead," she murmured. "It's waiting."
Kael stood a few paces behind, holding the map of echoes beneath the starlight. The symbols glowed faintly — like veins on an ancient beast — and pulsed louder the deeper they walked.
"It used to be an ocean," he said quietly. "Until the Sigil burned the sky to stop the Wyrm's return. They said it was a sacrifice."
Seraya met his gaze. "It was a massacre."
Recovered Document: Fragment of Ashsent Guard Journal, Year 1174 After Sundering
Found in the ruins of Virehall, bound in leather stitched with phoenix hide.
They told us the fire was holy.
That the Red Sigil watched over us not from thrones, but from pyres — eternal and bright.
They said Cindergate could never fall.
But then came the boy with the ember eyes.
The sword that remembered.
And the Wyrm's breath behind him.
We didn't lose Cindergate.
We buried it — with ourselves still inside.
The page trembled in Kael's hands.
He hadn't told Seraya the whole truth — not yet.
He had been there the day Cindergate was sealed. Not in body, but in mind — a vision granted by the shard, or perhaps a buried memory from a life long extinguished. He saw flames swallowing walls, saw a woman in red weeping over a broken sigil, saw a blade — Veylaith — plunged into the heart of the Keep.
And now, somehow, he was carrying that memory forward.
As they crossed the Veilsea's cracked bed, the runes beneath them flickered — once, twice — and then vanished. The world dimmed. A sudden pressure wrapped around them, and the air bent sideways, as if reality itself had turned its head to look.
Kael froze.
"Seraya," he said, voice low. "Do you feel that?"
She nodded. Her breath steamed in the air, though there was no cold. "We're being watched."
A sound rose from beneath the surface.
Not footsteps.
Chains.
Then a shape — vast and buried — began to move beneath the glass. A dome, etched in unfamiliar glyphs, began to glow deep crimson. Lines traced themselves outward, revealing the outline of a buried citadel, shaped like a flame frozen in collapse.
Cindergate.
Kael stepped forward.
And the world fractured.
Now.
The Veilsea cracked.
Kael stumbled as the earth beneath him trembled — not with violence, but memory. The buried citadel pulsed beneath the ash-glass like a second heart, ancient and waiting. The shard in Veylaith vibrated against his spine.
A voice — not Seraya's — whispered through the shifting wind.
"Come home, ember-child."
The sky above them dimmed. Stars blinked out one by one.
And then the world twisted — not broken, not shattered, but turned inward like a page folding upon itself.
Then.
Cindergate, 1187 A.S.
Last day of the Flame Accord.
Captain Vael of the Ashsent Guard stood at the balcony of the Sky Hall, watching the fire bloom across the sea.
"The Wyrm reaches," said a voice beside him. High Magister Auren, clad in robes woven with starlight and coal-ink. "We must strike now. Before the next moon rises."
Vael turned. "You would burn the Veilsea? That's where half our people fled when the Accord shattered."
"They are traitors," Auren hissed. "Emberborn, frost-cursed, shade-sworn — all of them. The Sigil must remain pure."
Vael said nothing.
His hand rested on the pommel of his blade, Ashvein, forged from the marrow of a phoenix slain by his own father. Duty ran deep in his veins — deeper than doubt.
But tonight…
Tonight the stars cried.
And from the inner halls, a boy of no more than seventeen emerged — glowing with emberlight, his eyes ember-red, his body crackling with uncontrolled power.
He fell to his knees before them.
"I didn't mean to burn them," he whispered. "I couldn't stop it."
Behind him, guards lay smoldering.
Auren raised his hand. "Another curse-born. Execute him."
Vael didn't move.
He looked into the boy's eyes — and saw not a monster.
But a mirror.
And then everything happened at once.
The Wyrm's cry echoed from the north.
The Keep began to fracture.
And flames — blue, not red — roared from the foundation stones of Cindergate itself.
Now.
Kael gasped as the memory released him.
He stood at the center of a spiral rune, etched across the Veilsea's core. Below the ash-glass, Cindergate's spire shone like a dying star.
Seraya steadied him. "What did you see?"
He looked at her — eyes wide, breathing hard.
"My name," he said. "They knew it — before I was born. I think… I think I was there."
"Impossible," she said.
"Is it?"
Because the shard — the Tear of Theros — didn't just give him power. It gave him memory.
And memory, in this world, was a form of time.
He knelt and pressed Veylaith to the rune.
The glass cracked.
Light spilled upward — not fire, not magic, but remembrance.
A spiral staircase began to rise from the Veilsea's floor, formed from emberstone and bone.
At the bottom: the entrance to Cindergate.
Seraya exhaled. "We go in?"
Kael's voice was steady now. He rose, and his shadow flickered with flame.
"We finish what they buried."
The spiral stair groaned as Kael stepped onto it — not from age, but memory.
Each tread was carved from emberstone, a mineral that remembered fire. As he descended, the ash-glass above sealed shut, turning the sky into a prison of fading light. The air changed too — thick with the scent of old blood and melted gold.
Seraya followed a pace behind, spear drawn. "It feels wrong," she said softly.
"It is," Kael replied.
And he was right.
Cindergate had not been built to be entered again. It had been built to bury something no kingdom dared admit existed — not a weapon, not a beast…
A choice.
Interlude: From the Ashes of a Boy
I was born with fire on my tongue.
My mother said I cried ember-tears before I could speak. That the wind changed when I laughed. That mirrors shattered when I slept too long.
They named me Rohen, after the last Phoenix Star. But to the Sigil, I was never a boy.
I was a warning.
When they came for me — hoods drawn, blades ready — I did not run.
I remember standing still in the Sky Hall as High Magister Auren pronounced my fate. I remember the guard who raised his sword.
And I remember the moment I stopped being afraid.
The fire wasn't mine anymore. It was the world's.
And it came roaring back.
I didn't want to kill them.
But fire is a cruel listener. It hears not your wishes, but your wounds.
Cindergate fell that night.
And so did I.
The stair ended in silence.
Kael and Seraya stepped into a cathedral of stone and ruin, half-buried in cooling obsidian. Statues of forgotten saints leaned broken against molten walls. The air pulsed, warm and steady, like breath.
Cindergate still lived.
Its heart still beat.
Kael stepped forward toward the central dais — and there, encased in a glass coffin of burnt crystal, lay a boy. Hair ash-white. Veins glowing faintly. Skin untouched by time.
Seraya whispered, stunned: "He's not dead."
Kael nodded slowly. "He's waiting."
As if summoned, the boy's eyes opened.
And the flames in Kael's soul surged in recognition.
"Rohen," Kael whispered.
The boy sat up slowly. His voice, when it came, was quiet — cracked by centuries but full of power.
"You brought the shard."
"Then the stars were right."
Kael stepped closer. "I don't know what I am."
"You're what I couldn't be," Rohen said. "The fire that chose… to remember."
Rohen's eyes glowed like dying embers—dimmed but never extinguished.
Kael could hardly breathe.
This boy, frozen in myth and legend, had not only survived the fall of Cindergate… he had become its anchor. The very pulse that kept the buried citadel alive.
"How long have you been down here?" Seraya asked, her voice no louder than the hush of the flame-lit chamber.
Rohen tilted his head. "Time doesn't move here. Not the same. I dream of fire and stars and names that no longer exist."
He looked at Kael. "But I know yours. You carry it like a second skin."
Kael stepped closer. "Why me?"
"You're not the first the shard has chosen," Rohen said. "But you may be the first to choose it back."
Recovered Fragment: Vault of Threnes, Lower Cindergate
Transcribed from a scorched stone slab. Date unknown. Author anonymous.
The Fire that Remembers
They lit the stars with trembling hands
And bound the wind with thread.
But none could tame the ancient flame
That wakes the sleeping dead.
One bore the shard, one broke the sky,
One spoke the Wyrm's true name.
And when the last light turned away,
The fire chose its flame.
Rohen stepped from the glass coffin, his bare feet stirring dust that hadn't moved in centuries. Every motion awakened the citadel — braziers flared, cracked stone sealed itself, murals flickered with life again.
Seraya's eyes narrowed. "If you're alive… if you've had all this time… why wait?"
Rohen's expression hardened. "Because if I leave this place… the Wyrm stirs."
The words dropped like stones into a silent lake.
Kael felt it again — the pulse of a deep, coiled hunger somewhere beneath them. The shard at his side throbbed as if in warning.
"You're its jailer," Kael whispered.
"I was," Rohen replied. "But now the shard has chosen you. That burden... is shifting."
Seraya stepped between them. "You want to pass it to Kael? After centuries?"
Rohen met her gaze. "Not pass it. Prepare him. The Wyrm doesn't sleep. It listens. Every fire that dies, every star that fades — it feeds on endings."
Kael's hands tightened around Veylaith's hilt.
"I've felt it," he said. "Every time I used the shard. It was looking through me."
"And now it knows your name," Rohen said. "Which means we have little time."
He turned toward the back wall of the chamber — a sealed archway, etched with seven rings of phoenix-feather runes.
"The Gate of Ashes," Rohen said. "It leads below. To the Hollow Flame."
Seraya frowned. "What's down there?"
Rohen's voice was quiet.
"The Wyrm's breath. And the first piece of its name."
The Gate of Ashes groaned open — not with the sound of stone, but of memory breaking.
Kael, Seraya, and Rohen stepped beyond the threshold into a descending passage cut from volcanic obsidian. The air grew hotter, heavier. The walls shimmered faintly with veins of light — like fire running through ancient wounds.
Kael held the shard in his palm.
It pulsed once, then stilled.
"Down there," Rohen said, "is not just fire. It's the part of the flame that remembers everything it ever touched."
Seraya narrowed her eyes. "And this… Hollow Flame? What is it?"
Rohen didn't answer.
Instead, he stopped beside a series of old carvings — seven symbols forming a circle. At the center, a single glyph glowed faintly.
Kael leaned closer.
It wasn't written in any language he knew, yet somehow, his mind translated it.
First Tongue. Wyrmscript. The Breath Before Names.
And suddenly, the shard grew hot in his hand.
(Year unknown. Source: Lost Chronicle of the Ember Monks, Vault of Threnes)
Before the Wyrm was the Wyrm,
it was only a Sound.
A whisper in the void, older than stars.
A syllable without end.
When the ancients learned it,
they did not speak it — they broke it.
Seven fragments. Seven Names.
Scattered across the Realms:
— One sealed in fire.
— One drowned in ice.
— One buried in song.
— One painted in the sky.
— One lost to sleep.
— One etched in bone.
— And one… forgotten.
To speak them together again
is to wake what sleeps beneath the world.
Back in the Hollow Flame corridor, Kael's vision blurred. The rune on the wall lit fully, and for a heartbeat, the world around him fell away.
He stood in a realm of black skies and bleeding stars. A voice — not human — circled him like smoke through lungs.
"You have found the First."
The voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
It understood him. And worse, it remembered him — even when Kael didn't remember himself.
He stumbled back as the vision vanished. Rohen steadied him.
"You saw it," Rohen said. "Didn't you?"
Kael nodded, chest tight. "The Wyrm."
"No," Rohen whispered. "That wasn't the Wyrm. That was its name… remembering you."
Kael looked down the passage.
The Hollow Flame waited — an ancient chamber glowing with a still, silent fire.
"I have to go in alone," he said.
Seraya started to protest, but the look on his face silenced her.
Kael stepped forward, and the gate closed behind him.
Inside, the fire whispered.
Not to burn.
Not to destroy.
But to show.
And in that fire, Kael saw a glimpse of the Wyrm's true form — and more terrifyingly, his own, twisted by choices he had yet to make.