The branding iron glowed like a captured sunset in the dusk-lit courtyard. Thirteen-year-old Kaelis bit his tongue bloody as the Duskborn noble pressed the searing metal against his ribs, refusing to scream. Not after watching this same iron brand his mother's throat three days ago. The stench of his own burning flesh filled his nose, mixing with the coppery taste of blood in his mouth.
*Clink.* His chains rattled as he curled his fingers into fists, focusing on the pain to drown out the noble's sneering voice.
"Think you're special, Ashforged bastard?" The noble twisted the brand, making Kaelis's vision swim. "You're just another Chainbound dog now."
Across the courtyard, a boy in a silver-trimmed coat watched with impassive grey eyes. Kaelis recognized him immediately - Drachten, the High Inquisitor's son. The same boy who'd stood silent on the hill when the Duskborn burned Kaelis's village to the ground.
The brand lifted with a sickening sizzle. The guard holding Kaelis chuckled. "Now you're Crown prop-"
Kaelis moved before the man could finish.
A sound like shattering glass split the air. The guard's helmet cracked clean down the middle, though Kaelis's fists never touched it. Blood gushed from the man's nose as he collapsed to the cobblestones.
Then came the pain. White-hot agony tore up Kaelis's arms as his veins ignited with amber light, the glow visible beneath his skin. His vision swam with images of burning phoenixes and screaming shadows.
*Ghostfire.* The Ashforged Legacy he didn't know he possessed.
"Chain his soul!" someone shouted. "Before he-"
"Wait."
Drachten stepped forward, his voice cutting through the chaos like a knife through silk. At thirteen, he already carried himself like an unsheathed blade - all sharp edges and cold precision. His gaze flicked from Kaelis's smoldering hands to the terrified nobles.
"He's mine." The lie came effortlessly. "My father wants this one unbroken. For the Arena."
Kaelis spat at Drachten's polished boots. "I'd rather die."
Drachten leaned close enough that his whisper was for Kaelis alone. "You will. Seven thousand times." His palm pressed against Kaelis's branded ribs - and the pain vanished.
For a single, frozen heartbeat, Kaelis saw something flicker in Drachten's eyes. A reflection of fire and shattered steel. A memory that shouldn't exist.
Then the moment broke. The guards hauled Kaelis away, but not before he glimpsed the fresh scar now splitting Drachten's palm, mirroring his own brand in perfect reverse.
---
In a dim healer's hut at the city's edge, sixteen-year-old Nessa jerked as her needle slipped mid-stitch. The surgical steel quivered in her fingers before embedding itself in the wooden table, vibrating like a plucked harp string.
Her patient - a young Chainbound girl with whip lashes across her back - whimpered as the unstitched wound began knitting itself closed without thread, the flesh forming a perfect replica of Kaelis's brand.
"Already?" Nessa whispered, wiping blood from the needle's eye. Her own scars pulsed beneath her sleeves in time with the distant roar of the awakening Ghostfire. "They remember too soon this loop."
The door exploded inward.
"By order of the Iron Judge," boomed the Hush Guard captain, his voidspark rifle humming to life, "all healers are to be branded and entered into Crown service."
Nessa's fingers closed around her needle. The shadows in the room seemed to deepen, the candle flames guttering low. "You shouldn't have come here tonight."
The guards laughed until their own shadows moved. Dark shapes twisted from the walls, spectral hands yanking the men to their knees with sickening crunches of breaking bone. The captain screamed as his shadow forced his rifle against his own temple.
Nessa crouched beside the last surviving guard, her needle glinting in the low light. "Tell your judge something's awake under the Temple." She slid the cold steel through his pupil with clinical precision. "And it's hungry."
---
Kaelis woke in the dungeon to the sound of dripping water and his brand itching like a thousand ants crawling beneath his skin. The iron shackles around his wrists had gone cold - too cold, the metal frosting over despite the summer heat.
*"Liar's child."*
The voice slithered from the shadows between the stones, sounding like rustling parchment and breaking bones. Kaelis scrambled back as the wall opposite him cracked, ancient mortar crumbling to dust.
*"Oathbreaker's heir."*
With a final shudder, the wall split open. Something clattered to the damp stones - a dagger, its blade blacker than a starless night, its hilt wrapped in what looked like breathing human skin.
Kaelis reached for it before he could think better. The moment his fingers closed around the hilt, visions tore through his mind:
- Drachten, older and clad in Inquisitor's black, plunging this same dagger into Nessa's heart as she screamed his name
- Aric, the Oathbreaker, laughing as the world dissolved into fire and ash
- Six other weapons buried like corpses beneath the Temple's heart, each pulsing with malevolent light
**Echo of the First Betrayal**
*The initial dormant weapon*
- Cuts through lies (and liars)
- Shows the wielder their worst betrayal
- Hungers for voidspark and memories
Kaelis's scream echoed through the dungeon as the visions finally released him. The dagger had sunk halfway into his palm without drawing blood, the skin-wrapped hilt now fused to his flesh.
The cell door burst open. Drachten stood framed in the torchlight, his grey eyes wide with something like fear. The scar on his palm - the one that mirrored Kaelis's brand - pulsed with faint amber light.
"Give that to me," he breathed, hand outstretched, "before it remembers you."
Behind him, the dungeon walls began to bleed, crimson rivulets tracing the outline of a massive sword buried beneath the Arena's sands.