"What the Celestials buried, man would one day worship."
For an age, the world slept in the breath of its own fire.
Mountains rose from cooling flame; rivers carved the bones of the Archons.
The Codex of Ashes — their wound, their confession — sank beneath layers of stone and silence.
The Celestials were gone. But their echoes lingered.
The first humans came like shadows crawling from the light.
They were fragile, hungry, and blind to the ancient wars buried beneath their feet.
They did not know what fire was.
Only that it watched them.
first fire was born.
They gathered around it, trembling.
It burned warm, not cruel, but something inside them remembered the Celestials' fear.
The memory of Serathen — the hunger that creates — slept in every spark.
Generations passed. They learned to speak, to forge, to name.
And in naming, they began to remember.
They named the sun Aurelion. The ocean, Nerath.
The wind, Elyra's breath.
And when they first saw death, they named it the silence of Ceryn.
But none named the fire.
They only bowed to it.
Because sometimes, it whispered back.
From their fear grew faith.
From faith, law.
And from law — empire.
The Empire of Solmere rose in the name of Aurelion, the radiant Celestial who struck down the heretic flame.
Temples burned with holy light. In every city, a torch was kept lit — never to be extinguished, for it symbolized divine order.
They called it The Eternal Fire.
But in the deepest cellars, in the wild outskirts where law did not reach, whispers told another story — that the Eternal Fire was not a gift from Aurelion, but a prison to keep Serathen's soul from waking.
The priests called it blasphemy.
The scholars called it myth.
The Inquisition called it heresy punishable by death.
Yet every few centuries, when the stars turned red and the wind smelled of ash, someone — always someone — would hear the fire speak again.
And those who listened were marked.
Their flesh bore the sign of the Archon.
They burned with memory, and the world called them cursed.
Those marked by flame were hunted, erased, forgotten.
But history has a cruel sense of humor.
For the one who would someday wake Serathen again —
the boy who would carry both the curse and the memory of fire —
would be born not in a Temple, nor in an empire,
but in the ashes of a forgotten mountain village called Ravaryn.
And his name… would be Kael.