The Mirror Spire sang.
It was not a pleasant sound. It started as a low, distant note — a vibration through the bones that you felt before you heard it — and then it rose, a thin keening that crawled across the sky. Windows in half a dozen towns shattered. Dogs howled. Children stopped in the streets and pressed their palms to their ears as if trying to hold the world together.
From the Spire, a column of ash and light shot upward like a spear. At its top, a bloom of color opened — not a normal flame, not the neat gold of Evara's light nor the raw black of Sid's daemonfire. It was both and neither: a living, hungry flare that tasted of iron and memory. The air above the Spire shimmered, and for a terrible second the skies of Hal'Zirath and the human world folded together like two pages being forced into one book.
Velgrin stood on a high platform of black stone near the Spire, the Ashen Architect at his side like a patient surgeon. Around them, demon lords and hollow commanders watched with cold delight. Velgrin's hands were steady. His voice carried, smooth as silk.
"Begin," he said.
It was as simple as that. He only needed to speak. The Spire obeyed.
Down in the city of Eldhame, morning became a memory. Markets filled with traders and children, husbands and wives clutching baskets and bundles, paused. Someone cried out at the strange light; someone else laughed, thinking it a new festival. No one had time to run.
The first wave hit like weather. A column of cold light struck one rooftop, froze the air, and detonated into red-hot rain. The bricks cooked and burst. Wood inhaled flame and exhaled smoke. A bakery exploded; loaves became ash. A mother grabbing for a child was pushed back by an invisible pressure and thrown against a stone wall. Her scream was small, then lost.
Lucien was first to see it on the horizon, a smear of orange and violet that should not have been. He did not hesitate. His hand found his blade. "Move! Get people out!" he yelled, but the city was already a chaos of running shapes and falling sky.
Reinhardt did not wait for orders. He threw himself forward, slamming into burning debris to reach a child pinned beneath a beam. Kael, wherever he had vanished to, was not there. His absence was a black space in all of them — a missing voice when they needed answers most.
Sid came up the hill with Nox and Varas, the scar on his arm flaring with a hungry light. He had trained, burned, anchored. He had meant to be ready. Nothing had prepared him for the sight of a whole city turning into a furnace in minutes.
"Velgrin!" Nox hissed, eyes narrowed to almost slits. "He's cut the anchor. He started the First Flame."
Varas grinned, not the warm grin of camaraderie but the sharp grin of a man watching an experiment go right. "Perfect burn," he said softly. "Perfect terror."
Sid's throat thickened. He could taste ash, like iron filings in his mouth. He could also taste something else — the memory-flavor that had been grafted into him through Ravh'Zereth's visions: the burn of cities under godlight, the hush after a godstroke. He did not want to taste it.
They ran.
Eldhame was a city of narrow alleys and close-built homes. That layout, once cozy, turned the fire into a blade. Plumes raced down lanes, jumped from rooftop to rooftop. Where doorways opened, flames licked and found tinder. A whole quarter vanished in a breath.
"Help me!" an old man screamed from beneath fallen timbers. His beard was singed; his eyes were pure panic.
Reinhardt tore the wood free, muscles straining. "Get up!" he barked. The old man moved like a puppet finally cut free of string, stumbling out into the ash. Reinhardt shoved him away into a crowd that melted like frost.
A large building, the Temple of Evara, took the light first. People ran to it as if seeking shelter — and the flame kissed its spire, and the spire crumpled inward. The stone melted into molten fragments and rolled like living things. Those who had rushed to sanctuary were torn apart by the collapse.
Sid stopped in a street where smoke made a sky as black as coal and the heat pushed at him like an actual hand. He saw a woman clinging to two children, eyes fixed on the Spire where the first bloom still burned like a wound in the sky. He wanted to help, to do something clean and sharp and human — to carry them to safety. He moved.
Before he could reach them, something moved above — a shape cutting through falling embers like a shadow through light. It was not natural: huge, armored in slag-black plates that drank light, a crown of smoldering metal set on its head. When it touched the ground, the cobbles crumbled. It carried a two-handed spear of molten godlight, but the light was corrupt, veined with black like frost across water. The creature looked down at the woman and children as if observing curious insects.
Nox made a sound like a curse. "A bearer," he said. "The First Flame's champion — a Hollow Titan."
The Titan's foot struck the earth, and the ground heaved. It moved toward the people as if walking across a shallow pool of water. Its arm raised, and the spear burned a clean, bright path. Where the spear's light fell, people did not scream for long. They went quiet, as if put to sleep and then unmade.
Sid lunged. He threw himself between the Titan and the family. Blackbind Flame surged around his arms, and godlight braided into it because the golden filaments in his veins had learned to weave with his darkness — but the combination felt unstable, like oil on glass. It applied force but no satisfaction, like a bridge that trembled with every step.
He met the Titan's spear. The impact rolled through him: heat, cold, a parity of pain. He drove the Blackbind into the weapon and screamed as energy fed back up his arm. For a moment he thought the spear would snap. It did not. It shuddered, then swung, and the movement threw him headlong into a heap of rubble.
"You idiot!" Reinhardt roared, rushing forward. He crashed into the Titan's leg and a bone-splitting ring of force shoved him back. Even he could not dent its armor. Lucien circled, searching for an opening, his blade a flash of silver and time. He struck at the joints of the Titan's armor, and grit exploded like sparks, but the Titan barely paused.
"This is not normal Hollow," Lucien shouted as he pulled back. "That godlight — it's poisoned. It's Velgrin's signature."
The Titan turned its head, and Sid saw, beneath the helm's slit, a face that was wrong — not human, not demon: a face like a statue left in a kiln for too long. For a second, Sid thought he recognized it. Then it spoke, a voice rough as gravel.
"Vessel," it said. "Burn the false. Feed the flame."
The words stabbed him.
Sid tried to anchor his flame, to use the Soul Anchor he'd burned into himself, to hold the Titan's essence in place and prevent it from leaving through the Hollow rifts it might open. He slammed his palm to the ground and pushed his will outward, a crown of black chains latching into the Titan, into its soul-thread.
For a wild heartbeat, it worked.
The Titan staggered. Its spear trembled. The world stretched on that second like a drum skin. Everyone breathed like they had been underwater. Sid felt hope like sudden light.
And then the Titan roared — a sound that cracked windows two streets away — and it tore part of the Anchor free. The chains he had driven inside it ripped and burned, and a hot feedback shot into Sid's chest. He doubled over, nausea and pain folding into one. The scar along his arm flared white-hot. The godlight in his veins tried to heal and the daemonfire wanted to consume; both reached in, fought each other, and both pulled him apart at the same time.
"Sid!" Lucien cried. He launched himself, using Chrono Collapse in a blur of snapped seconds to freeze the Titan's next move for an instant. The group took advantage but could not finish it. The Titan's corrupted godflame glowed like a wound opening wider; its armor began to peel away in places, revealing ribbons of black flame that hissed into the air.
People screamed. Soldiers formed a thin line, spears and shields raised, but the Titan's footfall was a gale that knocked many aside. Towers burned like matchsticks. The sky filled with ash and the city's chorus of alarms.
Nox flew in a tight arc overhead, his voice thin with fury and sorrow. "Sid — you must fall back! Don't give it a connection!" He flapped his wings like a dark banner, calling Hollow back and keeping some Hollows occupied with sharp talons and arcane jabs.
Varas took a running leap from a collapsed roof and slammed his staff into the Titan's knee, but his blow did little more than scatter sparks. "This thing's fed on godlight," he spat. "It's not meant to be stopped by blunt force alone."
Sid pushed himself up, pain lancing, breathing ragged. He tasted iron and burning cloth. He saw a flash of movement beyond the line of falling smoke — a group of townsfolk dragging out others, a family cradling a child wrapped in a torn blanket, a woman shoving sand into a lunging Hollow's mouth to slow it.
He thought of Nox's words, Varas's cruel lessons, Seraphiel's golden command. He thought of Kael missing. He thought of the Anchor he had burned and the piece of soul he'd let go.
He made a decision that felt like stepping off a cliff but not from fear — from purpose.
Sid focused. He had learned to weave the godlight and daemonfire together like threads that did not want to be friends. He pushed them deeper into one another: black flame braided with gold, chains of obsidian threaded with shafts of pure light. He did not try to temper them. He did not try to keep them apart. He forced them to crash into one another on purpose, to explode and rebuild in the same breath.
The effect was dangerous. It was exquisite.
The world around him blurred; pain became a steady hum beneath his teeth. He threw both arms forward and unleashed the conflation. A column of twisted fire shot from his hands and struck the Titan's chest. For a breath, the Titan screamed as its armor boiled and its inner light faltered. The corrupted godflame recoiled as if burned by its own kin.
It worked. The Titan staggered, and a rain of small stones fell from its armor. People cheered for the first time in the morning — a short, savage sound that rose above the wildfire.
Then the Titan's head turned slowly, and the dark eye sockets focused on Sid. It did not roar. It whispered.
"Good," it said. "Now break."
The whisper wrapped around his mind like silk laced with acid. Sid's knees gave out. For a terrible moment he felt the pull of Velgrin's plan inside that whisper, a hand at the small of his back that encouraged, praised, offered the promise of completing what had begun in the Mirror Spire.
"No," Sid breathed. He pushed back through the pain and the whisper, and he found a ragged thing — not strength, not a god's will — but stubbornness. Memory of a boy who'd once refused to bow to bullies. Memory of hands that had held a small, frightened kid. Memory that belonged to Sid.
He rose, fighting.
"Hold him!" Lucien shouted, the strain obvious in his voice. He had used Chrono Collapse over and over, bending time in short bursts to steal slivers of advantage. The technique taxed him every time. He looked pale but unbroken.
Reinhardt, bleeding from a cut across his chest, roared like a beast and threw himself at the Titan's foot. This time he hit something that gave. One ring of the Titan's armor cracked and a deep seam opened, and dark steam whined out like a wounded beast.
The Titan convulsed, then bellowed — not victory or defeat, but war.
From the mirrored light above, more columns opened. Across the city, in half a dozen other places, smaller bearers — killers shaped like the first — began to appear. Velgrin's signal had been global. Eldhame was only the first page of the book opening.
Nox looked at Sid, eyes fierce and damp. "You held it back… but can you do it again?" he shouted.
Sid could not answer. He could only stand and smell the burning of things and hear the cries of the wounded. He had pushed himself to a raw edge. The Anchor in his chest still glowed faint white from the burn he'd inflicted on himself. The pain made him feel alive and empty at once.
He felt his bones hum with a nameless ache. He felt fragments of memory — not his — brush the edges of his mind. He held them off. For now.
"Pull back," Lucien barked, and for once Sid obeyed. They retreated in a ragged line, dragging civilians and fallen fighters with them. Behind them, black columns of smoke rose where entire streets had vanished.
The cost was already counting itself in bodies. The shout-count of survivors became smaller and smaller. Eldhame's proud market would be a ruin. Thousands were dead. Thousands more had fled. Villages on the roads into the hinterland would find charred ruins when they returned.
On the hill where they gathered, sweating and black with ash, Sid finally collapsed to his knees. Nox knelt beside him and levied a hand over Sid's flames — no healing, only a cautious touch to cool the worst of it.
"You did well," Nox said. It sounded like the smallest possible compliment; it sounded like a lie only the dying tell the brave.
Sid wanted to be anything but brave. He wanted to vomit and cry. He wanted to sleep and never wake. Instead he looked up at the sky, where the Spire pulsed and more flame-bearers were waking.
Velgrin's laugh drifted across the distance like smoke. "Ascension quickens," he called. "Burn now, while the world still remembers how to scream."
Sid's vision blurred. He saw a girl who had been standing by a stall, one arm missing and a look of shock in her face as she tried to count the price of nothing. He saw a priest kneel in the ruins of the temple and whisper a prayer that ended in ash. He saw Lucien with blood on his hands, eyes like someone who had learned a hard truth.
He thought of what Nox had told him when he first woke — that every broken Seal poured more of Ravh'Zereth into him. He tasted the truth now. He also tasted his own will. Both burned.
He closed his eyes and, for a sliver of time, was not sure if he hated Velgrin or pitied him for wanting it all so badly.
When he opened them, the Titan stood like a statue, a ruin within a ruin, and a new shadow moved behind it — something vast and slow, the outline of an even larger bearer rising in the distance, as if Velgrin had kept an even greater weapon in reserve.
Sid's breath caught.
He had not fallen — not yet. He had pushed back the edge. He had not saved Eldhame. He had bought no more than a moment.
But in that moment he had felt the full weight of being the battlefield.
And the world, bleeding ash and song, would not forget the day the First Flame burned.