The Keep stood like a wound.
Emberlight, once a place of knowledge and refuge, had been carved from obsidian cliffs and lit by an eternal flame that never waned — a flame that, in the old days, was said to sing.
Now, the song was gone.
The flame still burned. But it howled.
They entered at dusk.
Lira led them through the ruined gates, past blackened statues of Firstborn kings and torch-holders long since melted into slag.
The central arch bore new markings — seared in ashscript, the forbidden sigil of the Kindled Crown.
Ansha paused to trace them with a gloved hand.
"This place remembers pain," she whispered. "But it has learned how to wear it like armor."
Trellen said nothing. Davin's jaw was stone.
They crossed the Hall of Cinders — once the heart of the Keep, now fractured by a collapsed ceiling and a vaultline split through the center.
It led to a throne.
Or what had been one.
Ashrel stood beside it now, not seated — as though the throne no longer deserved to hold him.
He was dressed in ashesilk and warsteel, his hair unbound, his left eye ringed with an ember sigil that pulsed faintly with each heartbeat.
"You came," he said, voice even.
Lira stepped forward alone.
"You summoned me."
He tilted his head, like a curious flame watching its own smoke.
"I remembered you," he said. "That's different."
The others stayed back as she approached the cracked dais.
Ashrel did not reach for a weapon. Neither did she.
They were past swords.
"You opened the Second Vault," he said. "You saw what it wants."
"I saw what it hides," Lira replied.
"Then you know what we're fighting for."
She shook her head.
"No, Ashrel. I know what you're fighting for. I just don't believe it's still us."
He took a step down from the dais, flamelight casting wild shadows across the broken hall.
"What is us, Lira?" he asked. "Children of a god that burned itself out? Or embers waiting to be stoked again?"
She looked into his ember-marked eye.
"We're the lie that learned to feel guilt," she said. "And now we have to choose what to burn next."
Silence stretched between them.
Then Ashrel reached into his cloak and produced a small, jagged shard of mirror-glass — the kind used in the Vaults to store and distort memory.
He held it out.
"One last chance," he said. "Come with me. We end the war together. We forge the final Vault, and burn away the rot of this world."
Lira did not take the shard.
"No," she said. "I'll find the Third Vault. But I'll do it without becoming what it was made to protect."
Ashrel closed his hand.
"Then I'll see you on the other side."
He turned.
"You have until the next moonrise. After that… Emberlight belongs to the flame."
As Lira rejoined her companions, a wind swept through the Hall.
But it was not cold.
It smelled of ashes, oil… and something far older.
"He's changed," Davin muttered. "He's not the boy we lost. He's the god someone found."
Lira didn't speak.
Her hand brushed her belt, where the burning sigil from the Vault still pulsed.
And in the black mirror of the obsidian floor, her reflection whispered a name she hadn't heard in weeks.
Kaelen.