The desert of the Crimson Divide was not made of sand.
It was made of ash — burned from a thousand years of uninterrupted flame, where fire-element Qi had permanently altered the land. The air shimmered constantly, and bones littered the surface like dust. Only the mad or the cursed walked this land freely.
Maeryn was both.
She stood atop a rusted watchtower from a forgotten sect, looking down over the cracked horizon. Heatwaves danced like mirages over the dunes. Somewhere beneath this endless expanse lay the Sanctum of Emberlight — the final resting place of the Seventh Core's origin.
She hadn't been here in years.
Not since the day she stopped being human.
— Eight Years Ago —
The Council took her in when she was only nine.
A war orphan. A refugee from a collapsed fire sect. She was brought before the Ninth Seat — Elder Soryan, the Mirror Flame — and asked a single question:
"What do you burn for?"
She answered with silence.
That was her test.
Not her talent. Not her martial potential.
But her capacity for restraint.
It was what made her worthy.
The training began immediately. She was given the Seventh Core, unsealed, and left in a sealed room to see if it would consume her.
It nearly did.
She screamed for days.
Then the screaming stopped.
Then the voices came.
Whispers of flame, names of old wielders, memories of past bearers who had all lost themselves. Maeryn did not speak for a full year. She simply trained. She bled. She learned to breathe in fire and exhale silence.
By sixteen, she had already killed three fellow disciples by accident.
By seventeen, the Council branded her the Crimson Disciple.
By eighteen, they sent her after Jinryu — not to kill him, but to ensure he stayed forgotten.
She remembered his face.
Even back then, unconscious and bleeding, there had been a strange calm to him.
A kind of… peace.
Now he was awake.
And worse — he was beginning to remember.
— Present —
Maeryn sat at the edge of a cliff, feet dangling over a molten ravine.
Below, the sealed entrance to the Emberlight Sanctum pulsed faintly — a heartbeat in stone, waiting to be disturbed.
Shinma lay beside her, the blade warm despite not being drawn.
The Core within her stirred.
"He is the other half."
"You are not whole without him."
"But neither of you will survive reunion."
She closed her eyes.
"I don't want to be whole," she whispered.
The wind stirred — hot, dry, metallic.
She sensed movement.
Three figures emerged from the ash, robes tattered, Qi flickering like dying stars.
Shadowbinders.
The Core Hunters of the Broken Moon Sect — outcasts who once tried to merge with Core fragments and failed, twisted into half-forms.
"Crimson Disciple," the first rasped, his face a mask of scorched leather. "He walks behind you now."
"I know."
"You intend to fight?"
"No."
"Then you intend to fall?"
Maeryn stood, Shinma in hand, though she didn't draw it.
"I intend to wait."
Behind her, the air shifted.
Far in the distance, across the Divide, a second Core pulsed faintly in the ash.
He had entered the region.
He was coming.
Meanwhile, beneath the earth, in a Council sanctum lit by a thousand runes, a scribe approached Elder Soryan.
He bowed low.
"My lord. She has reentered the Divide."
The elder raised one cracked hand, stopping the report.
"Let them walk their spiral," he said. "The Core remembers its own."
And in the corner of the chamber, locked inside a pillar of runes, another voice whispered:
"If they reunite… we die."