He should have known.
The realization came too late, drifting through the hollows of his mind like smoke. The hunger that had gnawed at him since the branding—the yawning, insatiable absence—had never been his.
It had never been human.
It was the echo of something greater.
Something ancient.
Something caged, and waiting.
Now, suspended between moments, Ezra understood.
Time was a river he had stepped out of.
Reality was a skin he had shed.
And in its place: silence.
And in that silence: a throne in the sky.
Before him stretched a fortress suspended in a lightless void, its golden bridges arcing into infinity.
Each arch was fractured—cracks veining through their grandeur—where massive chains drove downward like spears of judgment, anchoring the impossible structure to a law older than gods.
The architecture defied scale. Vaulted halls stretched into eternity, their ceilings lost in clouds of ash. Stained glass windows glittered without saints or stories—only endless, depthless white. No iconography. No memory. Just the suggestion of meaning erased.
It was beautiful.
And it was hollow.
At the fortress's center rose the lightless spire—a tower wrapped in chains of living radiance, glowing with the steady pulse of a sleeping heart. It swallowed everything: color, warmth, shadow, even hope—leaving behind a perfect, aching stillness.
The air did not stir. The chains did not groan. They simply were, existing in that unbearable quiet as if they had endured since before the first breath of creation and would remain long after its last.
And at the spire's peak—above all silence, above all decay—stood a figure.
Motionless. Silent.
Draped in the brilliance of collapsed suns, its form stood tall and terrible. Its face was obscured, veiled in layers of cascading light like a waterfall made of memory. But Ezra saw… just enough.
A sliver.
A suggestion.
A face—beautiful in the way a star is beautiful before it dies.
Haunting. Hollow-eyed. Not quite male. Not quite female. Skin made of dusk.
Cheekbones carved like sacrament. Eyes not eyes but voids rimmed in gold. A mouth caught halfway between sorrow and warning. It was a face meant to be forgotten—and yet Ezra knew he would never forget it.
The figure did not move. It didn't need to.
Ezra already knew who it was.
This was the Ember's Keeper.
The Binder of Flame.
The one who had chosen him.
The one who had made him a vessel.
And then came the voice.
YOU CAME.
It was not the figure's.
It was the citadel.
It was the chains.
It was the hollow chambers inside his own soul, calling back.
Ezra raised his hand. His fingers were no longer flesh. They had unraveled into strands of golden smoke, strands of memory and marrow, bleeding into the light that seeped from the cracks in the chains.
The figure watched.
And the chains—
The chains screamed.
One link. Then another.
Fracturing.
Snapping.
Each break tore soundlessly through the air, and from those wounds poured light—not warmth, not glow, but truth. Raw. Unforgiving.
It blistered the citadel. It scorched the illusions.
And Ezra saw.
He saw the spire as it had once been. He saw the figure unbound, light pouring from its eyes. He saw war in the heavens, and nine monoliths crashing into the sea of stars. He saw a name written in ash. He saw fire wrapped in skin.
He knew then—
This was his soul.
And it had always been burning.
Alone atop the mountain peak, Ezra knelt in the circle of shattered glass. The nine monoliths around him stood ruined—obsidian faces cracked and leaking black ichor. The wind howled like a prophet denied. The sky split with streaks of silent lightning.
The celestial no longer watched from above.
It lived inside him.
He pressed a trembling hand to his chest. The brand there pulsed like a second heart. Beneath his ribs, the chains coiled tighter, then looser, shifting. He could feel them—metal, memory, and something more. A promise forged in flame.
He had carried them his whole life.
And never known.
"Come forth," he whispered.
The first chain screamed—not in sound, but in rupture.
Reality split open like soaked parchment. His vision fractured into fragments of memory and sensation .The branding ceremony—sigils carved in molten gold, the King's gaze masked and silent.The unbearable pressure pressing into his soul, like something ancient being forced into too small a cage.The hunger. The ache. The echo.
The chain snapped.
And through that breach came light—true light, furious and divine. It did not glow. It scourged.
Ezra's body arched, his spine a bow of gold. His veins lit with fire. Shadows poured off him like screaming smoke, coiling upward into the sky.
And the celestial stirred.
Not above.
Not within the stars.
But in the cradle of his ribs—where it had always been dreaming.
I REMEMBER.
The words were made of flame.
And he breathed them.
Far below, in the buried vaults of Blackspire Academy, a rusted chalice sealed in six locks trembled.
Cracked.
Shattered.
And far beneath the world, in a place deeper than death and older than faith—
Something stirred.
Blackspire Academy, Three Days After Ezra's Communion
It began with the birds.
Dawn broke in perfect silence. No morning chatter. No wings. No rustling leaves. Just a sky stretched too thin, too still—as if some vast presence were pressing its eye against the world's surface, holding its breath.
The sparrows nesting in the Academy's eaves sat motionless. Beaks open. Eyes wide. Not dead. But listening.
Then came the frost.
It bloomed across windowpanes like veins, jagged and unrelenting. The sun burned white-hot overhead, yet the frost crept across stone and wood like an omen. The air felt dry—parched and prickling. Every breath tasted of metal.
By midday, Arkanis had turned dreamlike.
The cobblestones shimmered with waves of false heat, but the air froze every breath. Barrels iced at their rims, even as sunlight blistered rooftops. The wind didn't move. The smoke didn't rise. The laws of nature… flickered.
Something had changed. Not outside.
But underneath.
The throne room was no longer what it had been.
No guards lined the obsidian walls. No servants stepped through the velvet-curtained arches. Only the nobles remained—six great houses called by a summons no one dared ignore.
The King sat at the far end of the chamber. Still. Masked. Silver and smooth. No expression showed on that hollow visage, but something in the room buzzed—like the air itself was on edge.
"You all felt it," the King said.
No greeting. No title. No preamble.
His voice was layered—human and not. Gentle, but too wide. Like something old was using his throat to speak.
"Three days ago, something woke."
Lord Eisenberg's jaw clenched. Only he noticed how the shadows refused the dais—how they curled away from the throne in a perfect circle, like animals refusing to approach fire.
"Ezra Valentine," Lady Orlan whispered. Her voice frosted in the air. Her skin glistened with sweat.
The King tilted his head, slow and measured.
Far below, something shattered.
The sound echoed through the walls like a whispered scream.
"A beginning," said the King.
And then—
He smiled.
He should have known.