The flames of the sanctuary dimmed to embers, and Ravon fell into them.
Not his body — his spirit.
He drifted through layers of smoke and memory, pulled downward, downward…
Past time. Past blood.
Into the place he had buried everything.
A forge of no fire, only silence.
The sky was black iron. The ground — scorched bone.
He stood as he once had — not as a man, but as a weapon unfinished.
> "Do you remember me, Broken Star?"
A voice like cracking metal echoed.
From the shadows emerged a figure robed in void — faceless, tall, humming with unnatural stillness.
It was the Forger.
The one who had built him from void, war, and prophecy.
---
The Truth of His Creation
> "You were born without a soul," the Forger said.
"Made to mimic love, loyalty, pain. All tools. All lies."
Ravon's throat tightened. He remembered—
The cold altar.
The brands on his back.
The children he trained beside — all of them gone now, all of them burned when he refused to carry out the final command.
> "I was meant to kill the Cradle Child," Ravon murmured.
"That was my only reason to exist."
> "Yes," said the Forger. "But you were weak. You fell for the vessel."
The vessel.
Seraphina.
But was she ever just a vessel?
---
Memory of Rebellion
He saw it again—
The moment he was sent to kill her in the early days, before names, before flame.
But something stopped him.
Not a feeling.
A heartbeat.
The first sign of the child-to-come.
> "You chose ruin," the Forger hissed.
"You chose love. That is your betrayal."
> "No," Ravon whispered.
"That was my beginning."
And the forge cracked beneath him.
---
🜂 Mark of the Sigil
His back burned.
The brand he bore — the one sealed with the key to the Abyss —
began to split.
Golden light bled from it — not dark power, but something new, something alive.
> "You were not born. You were made," the voice spat.
"But the flame has claimed you anyway."
And Ravon rose from the black ground, slowly, breathing hard—
> "I am no longer yours," he said.
---
✦ End of the Dream
The forge vanished in a blink of fire.
And he woke—
Back in the sanctuary, Seraphina at his side, her palm glowing softly on his chest.
She looked at him with tear-streaked eyes.
> "You were gone," she said.
> "I found where I was made," Ravon said.
"But I also found who I am."