There was no sky.
No earth beneath her feet.
Elanora floated.....or perhaps fell......through a realm stitched from fire and memory. The heat wasn't painful. It curled around her like a second skin, embracing rather than burning. She wasn't sure when the chamber disappeared or when the child of flame dissolved into her. All she remembered was light.
And now, silence.
But not the kind that comes with absence.
This silence breathed. Watched. Waited.
She looked down. There was no body. Only a shape made of fire and threadlight, pulsing gently with every thought she dared form. Her arms....if they could be called that...shimmered with spectral flames. Her pendant floated in place over her chest, anchored to her heart by invisible force.
"I'm not dead," she whispered.
Her voice did not echo. It unfolded into the air like vapor, then returned to her in a thousand whispers.
Not dead. Not alive.Between.Beyond.
The words weren't spoken aloud. They were imprinted on the realm itself. Every flicker of flame was a sentence, every ember a memory. She felt them pressing against her mind....glimpses of places she didn't recognize and yet had somehow known.
A village buried in snow.A palace consumed by war.A child's lullaby in a language long forgotten.A sword held in trembling hands.A farewell never spoken.
These weren't hallucinations. They were echoes of her. Past lives. Threads of the soul she'd tried so long to outrun.
"I remember," she said, voice cracking. "I remember now."
And the fire stirred.
The realm shifted.
The air shimmered like oil over water, and suddenly she was walking.....not floating. The ground beneath her became solid, formed of obsidian glass veined with ember-red light.
Her bare feet didn't burn; instead, each step sent ripples of memory outward, as if the very floor recorded every heartbeat.
Around her, fire climbed the sky in frozen spirals, like a forest made from flame. Trees without bark, but with flickering trunks and molten branches. Leaves drifted like embers on a wind that moved without sound.
She wasn't alone.
she was never alone.....
Figures moved in the periphery.....shapes made of fire and sorrow, indistinct but familiar. They didn't approach. They lingered, watching her with eyes that glowed golden like the child's.
"Who are you?" Elanora whispered.
One figure turned. The fire around it dimmed, revealing a face.
Her face.
But younger. Worn with dirt and blood, crowned in tangled hair, wearing armor scorched with battle.
The past-life version of her stepped forward.
"I was the first to leave her."
Another figure emerged. This one older, dressed in royal blue and mourning black. She wore a pendant, the same as Elanora's, but dulled with age. Her eyes were hollow.
"I promised to return. I never did."
Another.
A woman with a healer's hands, holding a burning infant. Her tears were ash.
"I could not bear the pain. I let the flame die."
Dozens of them.
Versions of Elanora from across lifetimes. Each with a wound carved into their soul. Each bearing the weight of betrayal...not to others, but to themselves.
"I didn't know," she said, clutching her pendant. "I didn't remember."
"But she did," said the first."The flame did," whispered another."You chose to forget."
The forest of fire breathed again. From its heart, the child emerged.
But not as she was before.
This child's form shimmered with complexity. She was no longer only sorrow. She was something new....part memory, part flame, part Elanora. Her molten eyes sparkled with understanding.
"Elanora," she said, her voice like bells buried in ash. "You remember me now."
"I do."
"You found me. You stayed."
"I did."
The child's small hands glowed as she lifted them, and the flames around her obeyed like obedient pets.
"Then why do you still doubt yourself?"
The question struck like lightning.
Elanora flinched. She wanted to argue, but something inside her....the flame she had taken in....knew the truth.
"Because I don't know what I've awakened," she whispered. "Because this power....it's ancient, older than I am. And I feel it shifting inside me. Growing."
The child nodded.
"You didn't just anchor the fire," she said. "You unlocked it."
The ground trembled beneath their feet.
A rumble echoed through the Ember Realm, low and distant, like a drum being struck beneath the skin of the world. Flames in the forest shuddered. The air thickened.
"What is that?" Elanora asked.
The child's face became solemn.
"You anchored me... but there were others. Ones left to burn. Ones who were not remembered. Forgotten flames fester. They become hunger. And that hunger became a name."
A shape began to rise in the distance.
Far beyond the forest, something vast loomed...draped in smoke, crowned in ruin. It towered like a god of ash, its form half-obscured by the haze. Its face was a shifting mass of eyes and cinders. It looked toward her.
She felt its gaze in her marrow.
The Collector.
Elanora staggered backward.
"No," she whispered. "That can't be real."
"It is," the child said, voice quiet. "You knew it once. You bargained with it, long ago, to forget the pain. You gave it your abandoned selves. Your castoff grief."
Elanora dropped to her knees. "I didn't know what I was doing."
"But it did," said the child, kneeling beside her. "And now it's coming. Because you've remembered. Because you chose to carry the fire again. And it wants everything you reclaimed."
The sky above the Collector cracked with thunder. Its massive form stepped forward.....each footfall causing the realm itself to ripple and distort.
"What can I do?" Elanora cried, choking on fear. "I'm not a god. I'm not....."
"You are the bearer of flame," the child said gently. "And flame is not destruction. It is transformation."
The child took Elanora's hand. Her grip was warm. Real.
"You can't fight the Collector with sword or spell. It feeds on what is forgotten. You must remember it. Speak its name. Drag it into truth. That is how you burn it."
"How do I remember something I buried across lifetimes?"
"You already are."
And suddenly.......Elanora wasn't in the Ember Realm.
She stood on a battlefield.
Ash rained from the sky. Soldiers lay in smoking heaps, their armor melting into the mud. Fires consumed the horizon.
She stood at the center of the ruin, sword drawn, hands shaking.
Before her knelt a child.
The same girl.
Wounded. Crying. Reaching.
Elanora turned away.
"I can't. I'm sorry."
The child screamed as the Collector rose behind her.....a shadow of ruin devouring her flame.
Back in the Ember Realm, Elanora screamed.
The memory faded.
Another appeared.
A throne room. Cold and high. Her crown was heavy with jewels and silence. Courtiers knelt. A war beyond the gates.
And in the corner.....the child.
"Come home," the child begged.
"I can't."
The gates closed.
The child disappeared.
Again and again.....memories surged like firestorms, dragging Elanora through lifetimes of choice and abandonment, until her body...her soul....shook with grief.
"I see now," she said, her voice broken. "I see it all."
And in the center of the Ember Realm, she stood. Whole. Terrified. But no longer fragmented.
"I left you. I abandoned myself. My light. My promise. My pain."
She looked toward the Collector, who now towered like a mountain of despair.
"But I won't run anymore."
She held out her hands.
The pendant pulsed once.
Then again.
And from within her chest, the flame rose.....not as fire, but as memory. Glowing threads emerged from her fingers and coiled into the air, forming symbols, names, truths. They wrapped around the Collector like chains of golden light.
The monster screamed.
Its voice was a thousand regrets.
But Elanora stood firm.
"You are not power. You are not fate. You are what I forgot. And now—I remember you. I name you."
She placed her hand over her heart.
"You are the Ashborne. You are the Cost. You are my shadow. And I choose to bear you."
The Collector twisted in on itself, howling.
The sky above shattered into light.
And everything went white.
She awoke on her knees in the stone chamber.
The flames were gone.
The child was gone.
But the pendant pulsed with steady warmth.
And Elanora....trembling, sweating, alive.....smiled through her tears.
"I chose... to remember."
A whisper, faint but clear, echoed through the chamber.
"And because you did... the seals have broken."
The key is ready to open it's all truths.....