The silence was the first warning.
Not the hush of wind or the stillness before a storm. This was deeper—like the earth itself was holding its breath.
Torian felt it in his ribs.
The Spiral in his chest pulsed—not in danger, not in warmth, but in resistance. Like a warning without words. Like something ancient stirring just behind the sky.
He stood at the mouth of the pass, one hand resting on Skarn's fur as they stared across a stretch of jagged rock leading toward the next range of distant peaks. The passage to the next bearer was close—days, maybe less. They had come far since the chasm, and now the air felt… thin. Strange.
Wrong.
Skarn shifted, muscles tense. His fur stood slightly on end. The beast's wings curled close to his back, his shoulders lowering—not in rest, but in readiness. His ears twitched once.
Then again.
Torian squinted into the dull horizon. "You feel it too?"
Skarn growled low.
That was enough.
Torian stepped back.
And the sky exploded.
⸻
A streak of green light—twisting, loudless, devastating—tore open the clouds above. Wind bent sideways. The air didn't just shift—it buckled, as if trying to escape what was coming.
Then he arrived.
Kaelgor.
He didn't fall.
He didn't descend.
He appeared, tearing down from the heavens like judgment itself, trailing a long cloak of venom-green flame that didn't flicker, didn't waver—it simply devoured light.
His feet touched the stone without a sound.
The mountain shattered beneath him.
Cracks burst outward in perfect spirals. Trees bent away. Dust erupted into the sky like volcanic ash.
Torian stumbled back—
Skarn leapt forward with a roar that shattered the silence—
Kaelgor's arm lashed out.
It didn't even look like he moved.
The god's forearm slammed into Skarn's chest, and the beast was launched into the air, body twisting violently as he was thrown through the rocks like paper.
Stone exploded.
Pillars collapsed.
A spray of dirt and shattered cliffside followed the arc of Skarn's body as he vanished over the ridge, crashing into something far beyond sight.
Torian screamed.
"SKARN!"
He turned, Spiral surging instinctively, fists clenching—
Too late.
Kaelgor's hand closed around his throat.
⸻
It was like being seized by the world's end.
Torian's boots left the ground instantly.
He thrashed, struggling, trying to pull in air, trying to channel his Spiral—
Nothing.
Kaelgor didn't squeeze.
Not yet.
He didn't even look at Torian.
He simply launched.
The ground beneath them broke open as they tore skyward, pressure splitting the air in a cone of force that left a wake of shattered cloud behind them. Trees bent. Mountains swayed. The sky folded around them in thunderous silence as Kaelgor carried him upward—faster, faster—through layers of cloud and cold until the stars began to fade into view.
Torian clawed at his wrist.
The Spiral flared once, but no fire came.
Kaelgor's grip didn't loosen.
His voice came slowly, with no effort, every word shaped by something ancient and dead.
"You. Are not. Him."
Torian's legs kicked.
His lungs convulsed.
"You chase pieces of a prison built by those too weak to face me.
You carry their shame. Their mistakes."
Kaelgor looked at him now.
His eyes were deep green. Infinite. Like looking into the spaces between stars.
"You think you will finish what they began.
You will not.
You will die—knowing I remembered you."
Torian gasped, trying to speak—
Kaelgor's hand tightened.
Pain. White-hot. Sudden.
Like his bones were collapsing inside him.
The Spiral dimmed.
Torian's vision narrowed.
The last thing he saw was Kaelgor's expression:
Indifference.
Then—
Darkness.
Torian dangled in Kaelgor's grip, high above the world.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't speak.
The stars bled around the god's shoulders like embers trailing from a dying sun. The clouds below had long disappeared. The curvature of the planet stretched far beneath them, endless and uncaring.
Kaelgor's hand tightened once more.
Torian's body jerked—then slackened.
His arms fell to his sides.
His head tipped forward.
The Spiral across his chest pulsed once—then flickered.
Then dimmed.
Kaelgor stared at him for several seconds. Not with hatred. Not even satisfaction.
With silence.
"There is no fire in you," Kaelgor said.
"There never was."
⸻
Torian heard none of it.
Not with his ears.
But something deeper—the Spiral, buried beneath the bone, still throbbed like a coal in ash. Faint. Flickering. Unyielding.
And then—
He remembered.
Not Vesryn's storm.
Not Rovas's solemn warning.
Not Vael's despair.
He remembered the crater.
The smell of ash and blood.
His father's outstretched hand through the smoke—
—and the fire that never reached it.
"I'm not nothing."
His hand twitched.
Kaelgor didn't notice.
Torian's fingers curled.
The Spiral pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then—
Ignited.
⸻
The burn wasn't like before.
It wasn't clean. It wasn't beautiful.
It was rage.
Defiance.
Survival.
Golden flame burst from Torian's chest like a spear of light driven through the sky. The Spiral didn't flicker—it roared, heat and force exploding from his core in every direction. The power surged through his veins, into his hands, into his spine.
His eyes snapped open—blazing.
He screamed.
And his fist drove upward.
⸻
CRACK.
Torian's punch hit Kaelgor full in the face.
Not a strike.
A detonation.
Flame burst around the impact point in a spherical wave, hurling them apart.
Kaelgor's head jerked back—not in pain, but in surprise.
Torian didn't stop.
He twisted midair, both fists now ignited with coiling fire, and smashed his second blow into Kaelgor's chest.
The god's body bent backward as energy spiraled out in twin arcs.
"I'M NOT NOTHING!"
⸻
Kaelgor released him.
Torian dropped.
The god did not chase.
He hovered there in the upper sky, green embers leaking from his helm. His arms slowly lowered to his sides.
He watched the boy fall.
And said nothing.
Torian fell.
The Spiral did not dim.
It grew.
Fire streamed from his limbs, uncontrollable, wild. His body tumbled through the sky like a spinning star — golden light bursting from every inch of him in chaotic blasts, spiraling flares that cracked the cloudbank and sent pressure ripples rippling down through the air like thunder made visible.
This wasn't a descent.
It was a supernova.
The fire wasn't focused — it screamed in all directions. His skin didn't burn, but the atmosphere did. Oxygen bent around him. Wind peeled back from his path. The Spiral flared so hard it left golden glyphs briefly burned into the sky, tracing constellations no one had seen in a thousand years.
And still he fell.
From the upper sky.
From the hands of a god.
⸻
Kaelgor hovered far above, his cloak of green fire slowly coiling back around him. His helm cracked faintly from the blow Torian had delivered.
He did not chase.
He did not roar.
He watched.
His arms slowly lowered.
His head tilted ever so slightly — not in fury.
In horrified awe.
How?
How is he still burning?
⸻
On the surface, Skarn stirred.
He was bleeding.
Bones in his wings bent the wrong direction. Blood soaked into the soil beneath him where he had crashed after Kaelgor's blow — a hit that would've flattened war-beasts twice his size.
He groaned, then lifted his massive head.
Eyes locked on the falling star overhead.
The flame was unmistakable.
Torian.
Skarn rose with slow, staggering steps.
He leapt into a limp, broken run — wings dragging behind him.
But he was too far.
He wasn't going to make it.
⸻
Torian smashed into the world like a god returning home.
The impact split the ridge apart.
Stone shot into the air in massive spirals. Trees ripped from their roots. A crater opened with a scream of light and fury, earth folding inward on itself in a blast of white-gold Spiral fire.
Then—
Silence.
The fire pulled inward.
Smoke drifted.
The Spiral dimmed.
The crater cooled.
⸻
Minutes passed.
Then Skarn arrived, limping, panting, flaring with exhaustion. He skidded to a halt at the edge of the destruction.
The crater was massive—deep enough to hide a tower, wide enough to swallow a battalion.
And in the center—
Torian.
Perfectly still.
Arms out.
Face calm.
Clothes half-burned, Spiral still faintly glowing beneath his chest like the heartbeat of something that refused to die.
Skarn stood frozen.
Impossible, his eyes seemed to say.
He looked at the crater again.
Then at Torian.
Then back again.
He huffed hard through his nose, almost like laughter.
This boy is insane.
⸻
Skarn leapt down into the crater.
Stone cracked beneath his weight as he landed near Torian, crouching low. He sniffed him. Snorted once.
Torian's eyes fluttered.
Then opened.
Just slightly.
"I hit him…" he whispered.
Skarn shook his head. Then carefully — almost gently — he opened his massive jaws, bit down around the back of Torian's clothes, and lifted him with one great pull.
Torian groaned but didn't resist.
He dangled like a ragdoll from Skarn's jaws.
The beast began to walk.
⸻
The mountains were darker now.
The stars above looked a little farther away.
Skarn didn't fly. He couldn't.
But he walked.
For hours.
Until they reached a dark, low mountain with a natural cleft near its base. A wide cave mouth opened like a sleeping god's mouth in the stone.
He stepped inside.
Laid Torian down.
Curled around him.
And finally, for the first time since the sky exploded—
They rested.
Together.
In the dark.
With fire still breathing quietly between them.