The wind over the Hollows shifted.
Ashra had returned to her resting form coiled flame and obsidian feathers tucked within the charred shell of the ruined sanctum. Caelum leaned against the fractured stone of the shrine, hand pressed to his chest. The sigil burned still, slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat tied to something ancient and boundless.
He could feel it now not just heat, but the pull.
A thread, invisible but taut, connecting him to something beyond sight. Something vast. Something calling.
"More are waking," Ashra said from within, her voice coiling like smoke in his mind. "Your flame is a beacon. The Ancestral Beasts buried beneath the silence… they stir because of you."
Caelum exhaled slowly, watching mist rise from his breath. "Then we're out of time."
By nightfall, he descended from the shrine's peak, traveling through the ancient Hollowpass toward the scattered remains of the forgotten city of Lirn'vaal once a resting place of the First Wielders, now a ghostland of moss and stone. Moonlight poured through broken arches. Vines crawled across the glyph-riddled bones of temples long dead.
Here, the air remembered magic.
Every step Caelum took echoed across buried memories visions that flickered in the corner of his eyes: wars fought on dragon-back, pyres that lit the heavens, and cloaked figures kneeling before beasts made of stars and storm.
The sigil on his chest pulsed harder as he stepped into the city's heart.
There, Ashra whispered, beneath the root-stone. Something lingers.
Beneath a collapsed statue of a horned beast-god, Caelum found a circular slab cold, though the earth around it steamed from buried flame. He pressed his hand against the runes. They responded to his mark, glowing faint gold.
The slab opened.
Inside was a chamber so old it reeked of world-death. A single object floated within: a shard of obsidian etched with runes of untranslatable tongues.
The moment his fingers brushed it
Pain.
Memory.
Power.
Flashes:
A beast of many heads tearing through armies of Sanctum riders.
A girl standing barefoot in snow, speaking with a blade made of light and weeping.
A name whispered in dozens of tongues "Thorne."
Caelum stumbled back, eyes wide. The sigil across his chest had flared violently new lines now spidered from its center like cracks in ancient glass.
Ashra's voice boomed in his skull, fire-laced and urgent:
"You've touched a cursed fragment. A sealed beast's remnant. The binding thread has begun."
Caelum fell to his knees, clutching his chest as an unseen force tugged at him from within the earth raw instinct and fury dragging him toward a bond not yet formed, not yet ready.
The ground split.
And from the crack… a roar.
Half a day's journey away, the Sanctum Citadel of Veyhelm burned with candlelight and conspiracy.
In the high tower of the Archon's Assembly, Lyana Serest, high-ranking Wielder and noble of blue fire, stood before an ethereal projection: the flame-bound memory of Caelum's confrontation in the Hollows.
The Council watched in silence as Ashra's form ignited the sky.
"This… this is impossible," murmured one elder, knuckles white around a binding staff. "That beast… she should have been lost to the Godsealing Era."
"She wasn't," Lyana replied coldly. "And she's bonded to a boy we marked unworthy."
A younger enforcer, eyes wide, asked the question no one dared voice:
"What if the prophecy was true?"
Lyana turned sharply. "Then we kill him before he awakens the others."
Back in the Hollowlands, Caelum gasped awake in a shallow pond, steam rising from his skin.
His eyes flicked open not their usual brown, but ringed in red-gold.
Beside him, in a coil of dark mist and flame, a shape emerged from the shattered earth.
Massive. Serpentine. Incomplete.
A skeletal dragon-like form with horns made of bone and glass. One wing was missing. Its body flickered between physical and phantasmal caught between planes.
It growled, not in rage, but in pain.
Caelum felt it through the bond forming unwillingly: fragmented. Betrayed. Left to rot.
This was not a new beast. This was one of the forgotten, a remnant of the ancient war the ones betrayed by both man and god.
He stepped forward, unsure, and the creature lunged.
Ashra appeared in flame, shielding Caelum. Their fire clashed hers radiant and golden, the beast's a black-red smoke that devoured light.
"You cannot bind it like the others," she warned. "This one was severed from itself. It is broken. Lost in rage. You must enter the bond realm and face it there or you will both burn."
Caelum closed his eyes.
The sigil flared. The world blurred.
And he fell into the Realm of Threads ,a place between thought and spirit.
He stood on a platform of burning chains, floating in a sea of shattered stars. Across from him, the beast loomed no longer monstrous, but now appearing as a tall, cloaked humanoid with glowing eyes and cracks across his skin, as if he were made of ash barely holding form.
"I was Thorne once," the figure said, voice like crumbling stone. "But I was abandoned… like you."
Caelum's voice trembled. "Then don't rage against me. Fight with me. They'll come for us both."
Silence.
Then
The threads of the bond realm snapped into place.
Chains shattered.
Ashra's voice returned, soft now: "He yields."
Caelum awoke, body soaked in sweat, steam rising from his shoulders. Before him, the beast knelt no longer hostile.
Thorne had taken his full form a chimera-like creature with a lion's frame, serpentine tail, and tattered wings of storm-ice. Glowing blue lines ran across his flank runic scars from the ancient bindings that failed to contain him.
"I am Thorne," he whispered into Caelum's mind. "And I shall serve none but you."
Caelum's sigil changed again now with two beasts etched into the mark.
One of flame.
One of storm.
As dawn broke, Caelum looked to the east, toward the mountains beyond Veyhelm.
Ashra stood beside him, wings curled protectively. Thorne coiled quietly on the rocks behind.
"I'm not alone anymore," Caelum murmured.
"No," Ashra said. "But you must be more than just a boy with power. The Sanctum will not relent. The gods will not sleep. You must become something they cannot control."
He turned toward the world.
Toward the war ahead.
And whispered to the wind:
"Then I will become the flame they cannot put out."
End of Chapter 3