The name Ashborn had not been uttered in the lands of Amaranth for centuries—until now. Whispers traveled faster than banners. In crumbling taverns, weathered bards told tales of a boy wrapped in fire, eyes glowing like a dying sun. In the Verdant forests, druids turned from the trees in quiet dread. Even the skies shifted, storms lingering longer than they should, as if the world itself had begun to remember. The Ashborn had returned—and with him, an old wound began to bleed.
Far across the scorched wastes of Amaranth, where the sun never pierced the blackened sky, the Bone Marches stirred. A cursed land of eternal ash and restless dead, the Marches had once been the final battleground between the Tyrant King and the world that rose to destroy him. The land there was sick—silent and choked with dust, where time moved in echoes and memory refused to die. Deep beneath a shattered cathedral, entombed in obsidian and warded by sigils older than empires, something ancient awoke. Veyne Sol, former general of the Ashborn's own elite guard, pulled himself from his grave—reborn not as a man, but a revenant. His armor fused with bone and rusted steel, his eyes dim with fire long extinguished, he rose with the hollow sound of stone splitting. Veyne had once pledged eternal loyalty to the Tyrant King… and had been the one to drive a dagger through his heart.
But death had never been enough to sever the bond between them. The fire had returned to the world, and Veyne felt it the way a ghost might feel warmth again. He did not rise to reclaim his throne. He rose to end what had begun. With a silent call, he summoned the Hollowguard, soldiers reanimated by necrotic war-magic, skeletal warriors whose memories still burned with hatred and loyalty twisted beyond death. They rallied at his side like iron filings to a magnet, waiting for his command. Veyne did not speak. He did not need to. The Ashborn lived again—and Veyne would kill him before the boy remembered everything.
Meanwhile, Kai Orin was beginning to feel the weight of the power growing inside him. In the deep glades of the Verdant Realm, Faela guided him beneath the boughs of ancient trees. There, far from cities and politics, she taught him what little could be taught. The fire, she said, was not merely a weapon. It was memory. It was desire. Fire, in the hands of the Ashborn, had never been about destruction—it was will made visible. To wield it, one had to know their heart intimately. But Kai's heart was not whole. His memories came in flashes—swords raised in war councils, blood spilled in his name, a crown seared into a throne of flame. And with every memory, the fire inside him surged more violently. The line between power and rage grew thinner with each lesson.
Faela watched him struggle, her expression unreadable. In Kai she saw not only the boy, but the man he once was—the king she had once fought beside, and the tyrant she helped destroy. Her teachings became harsher. Meditation turned into dueling. Fire turned into pain. But no matter how much control Kai learned, there remained a piece of him he could not grasp. A shard buried deep. A name on the tip of his tongue. The flame would not obey when his emotions surged—it lashed out, untethered and hungry.
That lack of control became fatal during a skirmish near the eastern borderlands, where a squad of Faela's scouts had gone missing near Hollowguard territory. Kai led a rescue team into the blighted outskirts of the Bone Marches. The air was thick with decay, the sky rusted and low. They encountered Hollowguard soldiers not as legends, but as real, shambling horrors—skeletal warriors animated by necrotic flame, bearing the old crest of the Tyrant King's broken sigil. A battle erupted. Kai fought on instinct, his fire slicing through the undead, the blaze radiant and wild. But the moment one of the scouts was struck down—when Kai saw blood spill beside him—something inside him snapped.
He lost control.
The fire exploded outward, not in a wave—but in a detonation. Screams drowned in flame. The Hollowguard burned—but so did his own. Allies who had stood beside him moments before were turned to ash in the blink of an eye. Time seemed to stretch. Smoke filled the sky. When the blaze died, Kai stood alone in the center of a scorched crater, breathing heavily, his eyes no longer gold—but white-hot, like the sun at high noon. Faela arrived moments later, finding nothing left but cinders.
Kai fell to his knees. He did not cry. He did not speak. All he could hear was the sound of flames whispering, "More."
Faela placed a hand on his shoulder, but even she did not speak words of comfort. There were none to give.
That night, Kai stared at his reflection in a pool of melted glass. Not a boy. Not a hero. In the rippling surface, he saw the Tyrant King — cloaked in fire, a crown of burning bone above his head, smiling like a secret kept too long. The thought bled into Kai's mind, colder than any wound.
What if I really am a monster