He doesn't hide.
He steps into the smoldering battlefield like it belongs to him.
Blade sheathed.
Eyes calm.
And for the first time… Ashen smiles.
"You finally look like her," he says.
I don't speak.
Not because I'm stunned
But because now I understand why I could never see him clearly:
I wasn't supposed to.
Ashen was forged from silence.
Raised not by me but by my absence.
Back when I first descended into mortality, trying to taste the lives I thought I had saved.
I left Sanctuary.
I left them all.
And in that gap… he was shaped.
"Do you know what it's like to be born for someone who never looks at you?"
"To train under the weight of a god's shadow… and never once hear your name from her lips?"
"I didn't want to kill you, Lyraxis."
"I wanted to be written into you."
He holds up his palm.
A white flame dances there my flame.
But wrong.
Distorted.
A copy stolen from the ritual circle he guarded with his life.
The one he said protected my power.
"You trusted me to guard your name," he whispers.
"So I took it."
My knees almost give out.
Because he didn't steal my flame.
He rewrote my origin.
Twisted the divine script etched into my soul.
Not to destroy me.
But to make me dependent.
He's not my sword anymore.
He's the hand that holds the sheath.
"You'll never beat Aveline," he says.
"Not without me."
"Not without the parts of yourself I now own."
And worst of all?
He's right.
I could kill him.
End him with a whisper.
But that would destroy what I need most:
The part of myself he stole.
The fire that remembers my beginning.
So instead, I do something no one expects not even him.
I lower my flame.
And I kneel.
Not in surrender.
But in warning.
"You have my name, Ashen," I say.
"But I have my will."
"And fire that bends can still burn everything it touches."
His smile wavers.
Because now… I'm unpredictable again.