The Citadel of Hollow Flame
The threshold swallowed him.
Stone yawned open and the world beyond it forgot the rules Kael had known. Air thickened. Sound dulled. Gravity buckled—then returned heavier, deliberate, as if each step he took was being judged before allowed to land.
The citadel wasn't built.
It had grown.
Walls rose like fossilized arteries, black and veined with pulsing ember-light. The scent of something ancient drifted on stagnant air—like rusted incense, or the memory of a battlefield left to rot in silence. Statues lined the corridor, faces buried beneath hoods of hammered bone, each figure clutching something different: a chain. A key. A flame trapped in glass.
None looked at him.
But Kael felt watched.
He moved slowly, one hand always near the hilt at his hip, breath shallow. The citadel felt less like a fortress and more like a wound—a hollow place where something had once been ripped free, and its echo still whispered against the walls.
Every corridor bled into another. Some stretched impossibly wide, their ceilings lost to a sky swirling with stormless clouds. Others narrowed to slits barely wide enough to pass through, their stone slick with condensation that smelled faintly of blood.
Time blurred. Hunger didn't come. Sleep didn't threaten.
The Shard in his chest had gone still.
But the fang on his vambrace burned hotter with every step forward, guiding him deeper through the bones of this place.
He descended.
The chamber waited at the base of a spiral stair that creaked underfoot like ribs groaning under weight.
Circular. Silent.
The domed ceiling above was smooth and starless, a perfect sphere with no light source, yet everything glowed with a dull, trembling certainty.
At the center stood the monolith.
It towered above him—seamless and black, darker than shadow, darker than thought. Its surface shimmered with lines not etched, but moving, like script bleeding across wet stone. Every mark writhed faintly, reacting to Kael's presence.
The fang in his vambrace pulsed in rhythm with it.
He stepped forward.
At once, the monolith lit—not bright, not harsh. Revealing. And Kael's mind was no longer his own.
He saw.
Not memory. Not prophecy.
Recognition.
A battlefield spread across a glass plain, with corpses of giants stacked like siege towers. Their faces were human. Or had been. Each one wore a mask. Each one was cracked.
Above it all, a sun wept blood into a violet sky.
Another vision bled in—jagged, uncontrollable.
A city inverted, suspended by golden chains that pulsed with heartbeats. Its towers were made of prayer. Its windows wept fire. Below it, a sea of stars churned backward, screaming without mouths.
And then—the thrones.
Twelve.
Eleven filled.
Each figure robed in bone-draped vestments, their faces hidden behind blank masks carved with jagged lines—like lightning trapped in stillness. The eleventh raised a hand.
The twelfth was empty.
Kael knelt before them.
Not this Kael. But one made of frost and ruin, his chest carved with a glowing seal—circular, twelve-pointed, bleeding light. He raised his gaze.
His mouth moved.
And though no sound came, Kael understood:
You turned your back before time had a name.
The vision cracked like a plate struck too hard.
And all twelve thrones shattered.
Kael fell backward with a gasp, hand pressed to his chest.
The monolith stood unchanged, except for the seal now glowing on its face—twelve jagged points, arranged in a ring. One burned blue. The rest remained dark.
The fang was gone.
Absorbed.
And the Shard inside him had begun to stir once more—not whispering, not pulsing—
But waiting.
He stood slowly. Shoulders aching. Knees stiff. The chamber felt smaller now.
He did not linger.
As Kael turned to leave, he understood:
This place was not a sanctuary.
It was a forge.
And it had recognized the shape of the blade it meant to craft.
Far above the citadel, where air turned thin and light moved strangely…
A shape stood on the edge of a jagged ridge, shrouded by a canopy of dead trees with bark like split bone and antlers instead of limbs. No leaves. No birds. Only silence.
And a presence.
It didn't breathe.
Not truly.
The wind recoiled from its silhouette—hunched, broad-shouldered, wrapped in layers of stitched parchment and flesh. Bronze armor, rusted and cratered, clung to its form like regret. Across its chestplate, sigils bled slowly, black and tar-like, dripping down into the earth where they hissed on contact.
Where its face should've been, there was only cloth—scripted and nailed to skin beneath, woven from verses in languages older than death. Thin slits marked the eyes. No pupils. Only smoke swirling behind glass.
The thing moved—barely—its hands shifting in silent prayer.
Twelve fingers.
Twelve rings.
Each carved from bone.
Each etched with a name that no longer existed.
It turned its head westward, toward the citadel far below. Toward the monolith Kael had awakened.
No snarl. No oath.
Just silence.
And then, it knelt.
Pressed one open palm into the stone beneath its feet. The earth did not quake.
But it trembled.
A symbol burned into the bark of the dead tree behind it.
Twelve broken points around a single, lidless eye.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘴.
And in the distance, something began to follow.