The wind reversed out of the rift, carrying a rancid sweetness on its breath. Allen stood at the lip of the cliff. Gray mist boiled under his boots, swallowing most of the valley below. Even so, a few thin threads of smoke pierced the fog, stubborn proof of life down there.
"Someone's below." Shadow's voice was dry. After days of marching, her wound had begun to weep yellow; she needed clean salt, and soon.
Allen studied the descent in silence. The path was too regular. The steps had been chiseled by hand, edges worn but scrubbed bare of weeds. On the rock face, ancient flame sigils, scarred by salt, still held their lines. The farther they went, the wetter the air became. Beads of clear salt frost bled from the stone, as if the whole valley were slowly sweating crystals.
Stranger still, green crept where it shouldn't. Not honest grass, but moss with a dim, cold phosphor; shrubs with twisted branches and pale leaves.
Figures seeped from the rock's shadow like ghosts. They wore gray robes the color of the cliff and carried bone staves capped with faceted salt. The elder at their head had hair and beard gone to snow, his face pleated with a lifetime of lines. What set Allen's teeth on edge were the elder's bare throat and hands—beneath the skin ran bright molten seams, lava beneath thin ice, the scarring of fire speech sunk deep. Yet his eyes were very clear, like two old wells without a bottom.
"Stop there, outsiders," the elder rasped, his tone brooking nothing. "This is the last sanctum of the Returners. We welcome no profane guests."
Allen's fingers found his hilt. At his chest, the fire pouch went strangely quiet, that restless heat laying down like a tamed bird come home to roost. The obedience was wrong—it alarmed him more than any surge.
The elder's gaze fixed, unerring, on the slight swell of cloth at Allen's breast. The clouded eyes sparked with a terrible light. He leaned forward, listening with his bones; then he shoved aside the hands supporting him, tottered down, and pressed his brow to the cold ground.
"Bearer of the Sacred Flame!" His voice shook with rapture. "The old prophecy is true—the one who guides the holy fire returns to the Furnace!"
Behind him, the gray-robed folk folded like wheat under a scythe, kneeling as one, heads bent in absolute devotion.
"You have the wrong man," Allen said, voice like iron. He eased one foot back, angling his stance for power.
"Impossible," the elder breathed, eyes alight with near-mad certainty. "The holy fire does not lie to its servants. Only the true heir can bring such peace—such joy—to the raging flame."
They were escorted—half invitation, half threat—into the valley's heart. A great gray furnace dominated the basin, not dead but breathing a steady, gentle heat. Its walls weren't scabbed with ash. Coral-like tiers of glowing salt crystal grew there instead. Children chased each other laughing around the base. Women braided small salt shards into charm cords. The scene was… disturbingly serene.
"We have served the holy fire for three generations," the elder said. He named himself Rock, chieftain of the Returners. "At the end of each chieftain's life, he gives himself to it—binds with the fire forever—to guard the tribe without sleep." He loosened his worn robe. His chest was hollow and thin; lodged between the sternum plates lay a crystal the size of a fist, clear as water, and inside it a liquid fire pulsed and beat. "It is the highest honor," he said softly, "and… a curse without end."
Night came quietly. Rock invited Allen to the night rite. The altar was the furnace itself, staid and warm. As Allen drew near on a tide of eager bodies, the calm flame woke like something hearing its name. It surged. Red tongues climbed like serpents gone wild, then braided into a single pillar that speared the sky and rooted the earth. For a moment the valley burned bright as day.
"The holy fire! It has chosen!" Rock sobbed, arms thrown wide, shouting up into the blaze.
The pouch at Allen's breast hammered—not with old panic, but with a deep, answering resonance. The pull came from the furnace heart, strong as a tide tugging him out. Words—old and indistinct—spoke directly inside his skull.
—Return… my fragment… return and be whole…
Shadow crushed his arm, nails biting through cloth and skin, her voice warping with fear. "Allen! Look in the furnace!"
Through the frantic, leaping light, he saw it clearly. In the core, no fuel, no ash—only three cross-legged skeletons held forever in flame. Each had a crystal burning in its breastbone, like three lamps that refused to die.
"They were the last three chieftains," Rock said, reverent and wild. "They found another form of life within the holy fire. They are with us always."
That night, Allen turned restless on a stone cot, sleep a stranger. In his dream he stood naked in the furnace heart; flame ran over him like gentle water, washing and washing. A voice—seductive, patient—whispered in the hollows of his soul:
—Stay… this is your fate… you and I were never separate…
He snapped awake. His back was soaked. The pouch burned against his sternum, hotter than it ever had. Worse—by the window's meager light he saw new salt crystals blooming along the skin around Shadow's side wound, hard, cold, and faintly luminous, growing by the heartbeat.
"This place… something is speaking," Shadow said through clenched teeth. She tapped her ear, then her chest. "Not here—here."
Allen bent to the wound. The instant his fingertips touched the newborn crystals, a chill arrowed up his spine.
"We leave at first light." His voice left no room.
At dawn, Rock led the whole tribe—men, women, children—to kneel in silence outside the hut. The sun washed them gold and could not lift the weight of death from the air. The elder held a crystal high—white fire caged inside—like an offering held up to a god.
"Bearer," Rock's voice rolled across the valley with eerie calm, "complete the final rite. Merge wholly with the holy fire. Lead the returning souls into the light the prophecy promised."
The thing in Allen's chest beat with a strength it had never shown. A raw, simple hunger moved through him—hunger for the burning crystal, for the furnace itself.
He stepped back until the cold wall found his spine. "What rite?"
"To become the fourth eternal guardian," Rock said, lifting his head. The last shard of clarity in his eyes was eaten by zeal. His voice sharpened to a blade. "Or become the offering for today's fire. Feed the furnace with your soul."
"They feed it with the living?" Shadow's snarl tore the quiet. She forced herself upright through pain, blade out, point leveled at Rock. "You're no guardians. You're jailors—and butchers."
The mask split cleanly. Those kneeling "tribesfolk" lifted their heads. Their eyes went glassy and dead in a blink, empty as the crystals in their chests. A dry, inhuman rasp rose from their throats. They dropped to all fours and came fast. Their movements were jerky, wrong—and quick. Skin cracked as they ran, and the gray-white of fully salted bone showed beneath. Returners, they called themselves; they were no longer alive by any honest measure.
Allen shouldered Shadow behind him. His long blade flashed and shattered a leaping salted body. No blood followed—only drifting salt and dry bone grit. In his chest, the fireseed thrilled, delighted—savoring the taste of the escaping, twisted soul-stuff.
"Clamp it down!" Shadow's back struck his, her short knife catching another lunge. Her voice went sharp with urgency. "It's pushing your mind!"
They fought and fell back, step by step toward the mouth of the vale. Rock had climbed unseen to the furnace crown. The crystal in his chest flared like a small sun. His thin frame bent and warped in the glare, a scarecrow wrapped in lightning.
"If you won't be fuel to carry the holy fire," his voice screeched like shards grinding, "then be ash to feed it!"
The furnace convulsed. The jeweled crystals on its wall went dull all at once. The fire inside sucked inward, then burst out like a tide breaking, shaping itself into a titanic hand of flame that blotted the sky and came down to crush Allen and Shadow.
Allen's pupils pinched tight. There was no time to run. A thought, bright and reckless, cut through him—not flight. Dominion.
He shoved Shadow aside and sprinted into it, straight at the falling hand. The fireseed in his chest answered his choice with exultation. Heat and light roared. Not a slave's panic—something else: a shout, a challenge.
"What are you doing?!" Shadow's cry vanished under the wave of heat.
At the instant the hand closed, Allen slammed his palm to the furnace wall and drove his will like a blade into the heart of his flame.
Show me you deserve this power.
Thunder.
The fireseed answered. A force burst through him—older than the furnace's blaze, purer, more absolute. It used his body as a door and strode out. Gold lines of fire raced up his arm and leapt to the stone. The great hand froze in midair—then, like a beaten beast, lowered its head, circled him, and unwound into threads of energy the fireseed drew down and drank.
Rock screamed from the crown. The crystal in his chest cracked with a neat, terrible sound and webbed with fractures; its light guttered. He toppled from the furnace, mumbling as he fell, "Impossible… the holy fire… why would it choose you…"
When the last shred of will inside the furnace broke and went dim, Allen stood alone before the quiet mouth. The fireseed beat steady, full and pleased—and hungry for more. The power humming in his blood was almost enough to make a man drunk.
Shadow limped to him and didn't look at the dead furnace. She watched him. "You've started to like it," she said, voice soft as a draft that could vanish any second. "Haven't you."
He didn't answer. His gaze slid past the ruined vale to the north, where the fog thickened and thickened. More furnaces slept there, great beasts waiting to wake. In his chest, the fireseed spoke with perfect clarity.
Hunger.
A new rule etched itself into him, cold as iron, tasting of rust and blood:
When the fireseed desires, you feed it—or you destroy it. There is no third road.