The world beyond stole his breath.
They stepped out from the shadowed pass and onto a road that did not belong to the Asirios they knew. It was an avenue, broad enough for ten men to walk abreast, paved with vast, dark stone blocks cut so precisely that Dellos could not find the seam between them. The surface shimmered faintly, as if each slab had soaked in centuries of starlight and now bled it back in bruised hues—violet, indigo, and the deep, secret blue of a night just before dawn.
The Gauntlet on Dellos's arm was awake now, alive in a way it had never been. Not just heat, but a soft, blue flame-mist curling over the metal, shot through with faint arcs of lightning. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat, but there was no urgency in it. It was gentle. Curious. As if some vast mind on the other side of the connection were reaching out to learn the shape of him, to weigh him not as an enemy or servant, but as an equal.
Asyana walked closer to him, her gaze locked on the Gauntlet. For once, the usual mask of smirk and challenge was gone. Awe softened her features.
"It's... talking to you," she said quietly. "Not in words, but it's...Gods, Dellos, it knows you."
Reyland kept his distance, his spear tip just above the stones. "Or it's deciding how best to kill him. Flame always eats what it touches."
Dellos said nothing. He could feel the truth of both their words, but in the Gauntlet's slow, deliberate touch, he sensed no hunger for harm, only a patient weighing.
They walked on, the starlit stones beneath their boots giving way to rougher ground.
At first, it was subtle, gaps in the avenue where vines had crept up through hairline cracks, roots prying apart what had been flawless. The statues grew farther apart, their polished surfaces dulled, chipped, or strangled in climbing ivy. The road narrowed, the perfect geometry loosening into uneven slabs half-buried under centuries of drifted soil.
Soon, they were no longer on a road but a memory of one.
The living mountain loomed closer, but its flank was now hidden behind steep walls of stone rising on either side, canyon-tight and shadowed. Fallen trees lay where storms had toppled them, their trunks moss-swollen and slick. Rocks the size of wagons littered the path, some still embedded in the ground as if dropped from the heavens. The air thinned with each step. Dellos felt it first, a tightness in his chest, breath coming sharper, as if the sky itself were rationing what it would allow them. Reyland's jaw clenched against the effort, but Asyana's shoulders rose and fell in quick bursts, her lips parting as she gulped what air she could.
The Gauntlet's blue mist curled faster around Dellos's arm now, not in warning, but in something like anticipation.
The canyon walls broke suddenly into open air.
And there it was.
A bridge.
Not stone. Not Sovreg craft. But ropes, sun-bleached and frayed, strung between two cliff faces. The planks were warped, some missing entirely, their gaps like open mouths over the abyss. It moved with the wind, each sway groaning in protest, the ropes creaking in slow, aching rhythm.
The drop beneath it was not just a fall; it was a swallowing. The mist there was thicker, darker, shot through with faint blue veins of light that pulsed like something alive far, far below.
Asyana stopped at the edge, her eyes narrowing. "That's not a bridge. That's a warning."
Reyland tested the first plank with the butt of his spear. It groaned, but held. Barely. "It's also the only way forward."
Dellos stood between them, the Gauntlet's glow reflecting in the chasm's mist. He didn't say it aloud, but he could feel the mountain's intent like a thought pressed into his skull:
Cross.
Dellos put his weight onto the first plank.
It groaned like something ancient remembering pain.
Then the Gauntlet stirred.
Blue light, faint at first, seeped through the mist curling below. The glow coiled around Dellos's arm, then spilled over the edge of the bridge in drifting tendrils, brushing the fog like a hand parting curtains.
The abyss breathed. Mist thinned.
And there, far below, was no endless drop, but a vast, flat platform carved from the same midnight stone as the road. Its surface was etched with markings so immense they could only be read from this height: concentric circles, one within another, smaller and smaller until they vanished at the center.
The outermost ring was worn, its lines broken by time, dust, and the slow grinding wind. But the light from the Gauntlet traced what remained, shapes emerging like ghosts from shadow.
Animals, their forms stylised but unmistakable: the leap of a horned stag, the coil of a serpent. Trees rising in fractal spirals, rivers bending into silver arcs, mountains bristling like teeth.
The next ring inward held people—some alone, some in groups, their hands raised not in prayer, but as if offering or receiving.
The innermost circles were stranger still. Glyphs Dellos could not name, symbols that seemed to shift if he looked too long, curling into new forms just beyond understanding.
Reyland's voice was hushed. "It's a map... or a story."
Asyana leaned over the ropes, her eyes wide in a rare moment of reverence. "Or a warning."
The Gauntlet pulsed brighter, each flash pulling more detail from the stone tapestry. The wind, which had battered them since the canyon mouth, faded into silence. Even the bridge stilled, hanging motionless in the air, as if the mountain itself were holding its breath.
Dellos couldn't look away. The Gauntlet's heat sank deeper into his bones, not burning, but urging. The platform below felt alive, as though the markings were not carved at all, but sleeping, waiting for something to wake them.
And in the glow, Dellos thought he saw movement, not in the mist, but within the stone itself.
The last plank met stone, and the moment their boots touched solid ground, the world shifted.
It wasn't subtle.
One breath ago, the air had been thin and bruised with mist; now it was sharp, clean, almost sweet, filling their lungs like the first gasp after surfacing from deep water.
The sky was no longer a pale smear between cliffs—it was vast and unbroken, a blue so pure it hurt to look at. Sunlight streamed without distortion, gilding every surface, making the very air shimmer.
Everywhere, there was water. Not rushing torrents, but a thousand slender falls, each one descending in silver ribbons from heights unseen, their music weaving into a soft, endless hymn. The sound seemed to sink into the skin, slow the heartbeat, and still the mind.
In front of them rose the stairs.
Not a simple flight, but a colossal ascent, each step broad enough to hold a feast table, carved from pale stone that caught the light and sent it scattering into prisms. They climbed upward in a slow, steady rhythm, vanishing into the brilliance above.
On both sides of the stairs, water spilled in perfect symmetry. It wasn't crashing, but flowing with a strange, deliberate grace. The falls did not break into mist; instead, they poured downward in seamless sheets, vanishing into a bottomless gulf.
And that gulf...
It was not shadow beneath them, but light—an endless well of gold and white, as if the world's heart lay open below, pouring radiance instead of heat. The light pulsed faintly, like a sleeping giant's breath.
Asyana stood transfixed, her hand drifting to the hilt at her hip as though some instinct told her to be ready.
Reyland shifted his weight, uneasy. "I don't like it," he murmured. "Places this beautiful are never just beautiful."
Dellos didn't answer. The Gauntlet was warm against his skin, its blue mist curling lazily now, almost content. But he could feel it—an unspoken pull upward. The stairs were not an option. They were a summons.
"These steps..." Dellos finally broke the silence, his voice low but carrying in the vast air. "They were meant for giants—or something big enough to take them without effort. Just... look at them."
He stood with one boot on the first rise, its surface higher than his knee, the pale stone veined with faint blue light that pulsed in slow rhythm.
Reyland crouched, pressing his palm to the step. His brow furrowed. "It's... warm. And it's humming."
Asyana leaned in, fingertips brushing the stone. Her eyes narrowed. "Yes, that's not unsettling at all. Why do I feel like we're being watched?"
The Gauntlet answered with a soft flare of light, its mist curling toward the stairs like smoke drawn by an unseen wind.
Dellos' gaze swept the waterfall flanks, the golden gulf below, the bright emptiness above. "Because we are," he said, not as a guess, but as a certainty.
Somewhere far above, something moved, too slow to be wind, too deliberate to be a trick of the eye.
"I think it's guiding us," Reyland murmured, eyes fixed on the Gauntlet's slow, hypnotic shimmer. "Toward the next shard... or flame, as the Kite called it."
Asyana's frown deepened. "That doesn't mean the road there is without danger. Keep your eyes peeled."
Dellos glanced at them both, then down at the Gauntlet curling its mist around his forearm like a living thing. "Whatever awaits—friend or foe—I can feel it in my blood now. The Gauntlet. It... whispers to me."
Reyland blinked. "What?"
"You're not alone," Dellos said, the words escaping with a weary exhale. His gaze turned inward, as if listening to something neither of them could hear.
The waterfalls roared on, but to Dellos, another voice spoke beneath it—low, patient, and unyielding.
* * *
They climbed until the roar of the waterfalls thinned to a faraway whisper, swallowed by height and stone. Then...There it was.
A gate. Not born of metal or wood, but of living fire. Molten light poured downward in slow, deliberate ribbons, each stream etched with glyphs that shifted even as they watched. Stars became beasts, beasts became rivers, rivers dissolved into shapes no tongue had ever named. The glow was not harsh but deep, like staring into the first breath of the world.
A colossal stone frame held the burning veil in place, its surface scarred with spirals and fractures, as if the mountain itself had been broken and forced into service. The path toward it was perfect and straight, carved with intent, an invitation or a judgment.
But it was not the gate that made Dellos halt.
On either side of the path stood the sentinels. They were tall, too tall for human blood, and draped in robes the color of beaten gold. Their faces were not shadowed so much as unreal, skin like chalk polished to a cold sheen, smooth yet webbed with translucent veins through which a living blue flame flowed. The fire from the gate, red-gold and searing, sank into their open palms and bled upward through their bodies, cooling, shifting, becoming sapphire. It moved beneath their skin like rivers under ice.
They stood motionless, arms extended toward the flowing fire, their stillness absolute, yet their chests rose and fell in a slow rhythm, breathing in something far older than air. The heat here was heavy, metallic, touched with ozone, like rain striking an anvil.
"They're... alive," Asyana whispered, her voice shrinking against the silence.
"Feeding," Reyland murmured. "Or... being fed."
The Gauntlet on Dellos' arm pulsed once, long, slow, certain. The blue mist rose higher, curling toward his shoulder, yearning toward the fire.
The beings were still, too still, as if their existence had been carved into the air long before Dellos and the others had arrived. Not a twitch, not a breath betrayed that they had seen them.
Dellos stepped forward, the first to break the unspoken boundary. The heat from the gate pressed harder against his skin with every pace, a living weight that tried to push him back.
Reyland hesitated, his voice raw.
"Are we... going straight to it? Are you sure?"
Asyana pulled her scarf over her face, her eyes narrowing against the molten glare. The air scorched with each breath, tasting of ash and metal. But Dellos only raised his gauntleted arm—and in answer, a shield of pale blue mist bloomed outward, wrapping them all. The heat dulled, the sting in their lungs faded. It was like stepping inside a fragment of cool night.
They advanced.
One by one, the golden-robed beings turned their heads. The movement was slow, deliberate, each tilt of the skull gliding like a clock hand reaching its mark. Their eyes were not eyes at all, but deep wells of blue fire, their gazes heavy and exacting.
No judgment.
No welcome.
Only a question.
It wasn't spoken aloud, but Dellos felt it coil in his mind, vast and cold:
What are you doing? Why are you here?
The words left no echo, yet they lingered, pressing at the edges of thought like fingers on glass.
The Gauntlet flared. A pulse of light rippled through Dellos' arm, and a cool mist poured outward—curling around each of them until it clung like a second skin. It wasn't just a shimmer in the air; it moved with them, an unseen armor that breathed, shifting with every step. Reyland flexed his fingers, staring as the pale vapor coiled around his knuckles, and Asyana turned her hands this way and that, watching the ghostly weave settle over her limbs.
Asyana grinned, a soft laugh slipping out.
"Aww... you do care."
Reyland shot her a look that could cut granite.
"Child."
* * *
But Dellos did not hear Reyland's question, nor Asyana's teasing; his gaze was locked on the gate. The molten glyphs writhed like living constellations, and against their blinding fire, a silhouette began to take shape. At first, it was no more than a shimmer in the light, a distortion where the flame bent around her. Then she stepped forward, and the fire bowed aside as if it feared to touch her.
She was not like the towering guardians that lined the path—those silent monoliths of gold and blue flame. She was smaller, yet every inch of her presence made them seem like mere sentinels in her court. Her skin shimmered like liquid starlight poured over marble; beneath it, veins of living blue fire pulsed in quiet rhythm. A gown of white flowed from her shoulders, moving as though it remembered winds from another world. Jewels of frozen light traced her throat and waist, not as ornament, but as insignia. Her hair, long as a river, caught the glow of the gate and fractured it into shards of silver. Her eyes were the pure, searing blue of the gauntlet's flame, and when they fell upon Dellos, he felt the same wordless question as from the guardians—Why are you here?—but this time, it was sharper, personal, as though the answer would determine whether he would be allowed to exist in the next breath.
She stopped before the threshold of the gate, her hands folded loosely before her, and the firelight around her bent in obeisance.
Royal. Eternal. Dangerous.
And Dellos knew without knowing how, this was not merely a guardian. This was the keeper.
The Gauntlet reacted before Dellos could draw breath.
Its mist flared bright, the hue deepening into that purest, searing blue that lived in the heart of stars. Thin, living filaments unspooled from it, not drifting vapors, but precise, searching tendrils, stretching across the air toward her as if they had been waiting for this moment since the world began.
And she... welcomed them.
Her hands unfolded, palms upturned, and the tendrils wound gently around her fingers, her wrists, coiling up her arms in threads of light. Where they touched, her own veins of blue fire flared in answer, pulsing in perfect time with the Gauntlet's glow. The air between them was no longer gate-heat or waterfall-hum; it was a silence so deep Dellos felt it in his teeth, a wordless communion that did not belong to him.
She lifted her gaze to him then, the threads still binding her to the Gauntlet like strands of some ancient bloodline. And Dellos knew—without logic, without proof—that the Gauntlet recognized her. Not as foe. Not even as an ally.
As kin.
His breath caught. Every muscle locked. The heat of the gate, the weight of the mountain, Reyland's presence, Asyana's watching eyes, all fell away until there was only that bond, glowing between them in the air like the memory of a vow.
The glow deepened, pulsing in time with her breath. Dellos felt the tether between them tighten, not just Gauntlet to Keeper, but Keeper to him.
A voice bloomed inside his skull, warm as embers, clear as mountain air.
"Kyanos Liekki."
The syllables hummed like the sound of stone drinking water. She spoke again, and this time it was for all of them, her lips shaping the words.
"Children of the First Flame."
Her gaze held Dellos's.
"You brought it to me... one last time." Her voice was neither mournful nor joyous, but threaded with something rarer: finality. "You do not know the weight of what you carry, nor the price of returning it. But you will."
Reyland's grip tightened on his spear. "You know who we are?"
"I know what you are," she corrected, stepping closer. "You are threads pulled from far cloth—wanderers, breakers, menders. The Gauntlet knows you because it has always known me. Once, I wore it. Once, I bore its burden as you do now."
Asyana tilted her head, suspicion and curiosity tangled in her voice. "And now what? You just hand it back like a lost trinket?"
Fiamma's smile was slow, but it did not reach her eyes. "If it were so small a thing, I would not thank you. But I do. And I welcome you."
Her gaze drifted past them, toward the molten gate.
"The Kite's message came with the Gauntlet's touch. Find the flames. It was not for me to hear, but I did. And I tell you this: through that gate lies the path you seek. The mountain you saw from afar... the one whose skin glows with veins of fire? That is your next flame."
She paused, the blue fire in her veins flickering.
"But the way there is not the way you came. You must pass through the Darkside."
Reyland frowned. "Darkside?"
"The place where the sky has no breath," she said, voice softening. "Where light cannot live without fire, and fire itself twists into hunger. The Void will test your mind, the Flame will test your body. Between them move the things that neither serve nor rest—the Hollow. They do not burn. They do not freeze. They unmake."
Asyana gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "Sounds welcoming."
Fiamma looked at her without mirth. "It is not meant to be. The path is for those who would carry the First Flame forward. Once, we," she gestured to the silent golden-robed sentinels, "were its first bearers. We tamed it. We gave it to the world in measured breath, so Asirios could live in balance. But we were not of this sky alone. We walked other worlds. We brought balance there, too. Now..." Her eyes flicked to the Gauntlet. "...the burden passes again."
The Gauntlet's tendrils coiled tighter around Dellos's arm, as if reluctant to let her go. For a heartbeat, Dellos thought it might leap from him entirely and join her.
Instead, she placed her cool, ember-lit hand over the metal, pressing it gently. "It will guide you. Protect you, if you listen. But it will not save you from the choice that waits at the mountain's heart."
The Gauntlet's tendrils lingered, trembling in the space between them, before curling back into Dellos's arm like waves receding from shore. The blue light sank into the metal, and then into him.
The world fell away.
It wasn't darkness he sank into, but a vast, weightless fire—blue and gold and white, folding over itself in endless spirals. He could feel her there, not as a figure, but as a pulse, a living constellation. Fiamma's soul opened to him without walls.
It was peace—but not the shallow stillness of an untouched lake. It was the deep calm after storms that had broken mountains. Beneath it ran currents of terrible pain, of centuries carrying loss too great to name. He felt the ache of burning whole worlds to save them, of standing at the threshold of life and death and knowing she could never choose without sacrifice.
But braided through the sorrow was kinship—love that burned without consuming, and a balance so perfect it was almost alien. Her people were Flame-born, not forged but birthed in the heart of it. Across the vastness of the universe, they had walked—world to world—taming fire where it ran wild, gifting it where it was needed, feeding on it not as thieves but as gardeners harvesting their own creation. It was a communion older than the stars Dellos knew.
And then...
Luka.
Not a vision, not a memory, his son, whole and real, turning in a light that knew him. The sight of him cut through Dellos like air flooding a drowning man's lungs. He reached for him...
And the vision broke.
The fire was gone. The world rushed back: the molten gate, the watchers, the sound of water falling into light. His chest rose and fell too fast, his pulse a hammer in his ears.
Fiamma's eyes were locked on him. Not curious now, but piercing, sharpened.
Her voice was quiet, but it cut like a blade through silk.
"You... you raised... him?"
The sentinels around them did not stir, but Dellos felt the air grow heavier, as though every flame in sight leaned closer to hear the answer.
Dellos felt her gaze on him, heavy as quarried stone, impossible to turn away from.
"Yes," he said, his voice low but unshaken. "I found him in a cave, alone... small... afraid. I raised him like a son." His jaw tightened. "He is my son."
For a heartbeat, Fiamma didn't move. The fire within her veins dimmed, as though she were turning inward. Then the edges of her mouth curved—not into triumph, not into pity, but into something softer.
"He was not yours," she said gently, "and he is not yours." Her words were not a rebuke, but a truth spoken without malice. "Yet... you cared for him as though he were flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood. That... is rare."
The blue fire in her eyes deepened, shadows of memory passing through them. "He is the future; he's what we can never be. He will change everything." Her tone held both hope and warning.
She stepped closer, the molten gate at her back casting her in a crown of gold and blue. "But he will need help. Yours... and others you have not yet met."
Her gaze shifted, as if seeing beyond the stone and water, past the mountain and its hidden roads. "He still learns. And the lessons ahead..." She let the thought trail off, her lips tightening ever so slightly. "...will break him if he faces them alone."
Dellos said nothing, but his eyes held the weight of unspoken oaths—love, defiance, and a promise that could not be broken. Fiamma heard it all. The corners of her mouth softened, but her gaze did not waver.
She lifted one slender hand.
At once, the sentinels stirred. Their faces turned in unison, the movement slow as moons in orbit. Arms rose toward the gate, not to take, but to give.
From their palms, the blue fire returned, pouring back into the molten veil they had drawn from for so long. The red-gold blaze dimmed, cooled, and shifted—becoming a deep, shimmering azure. The glyphs within it no longer writhed in heat but flowed like water over glass, soft and luminous.
"You may pass, Children of the Sky," Fiamma said, her voice both a command and a blessing. "Trust the flame... and always stay together."
Her smile was not radiant like the gate, but warmer—human, almost motherly. It settled in their chests like a hearth's glow on a winter night. The sentinels bowed their heads in perfect synchronicity, and from their stillness a low hum rose, vibrating through the stone underfoot, through the air in their lungs, through the very marrow of their bones.
The gate waited.
Dellos glanced once at Reyland, once at Asyana. No words passed between them—none were needed. Together, they stepped forward.
The blue light wrapped around them like a living mantle, and as they crossed the threshold, the hum deepened until it was no longer sound but sensation—like falling into the heartbeat of something vast and ancient.
Then they were through, and the world on the other side unfolded before them.
The unknown had begun.