The fires had stopped, but the weight of them lingered.
After the skirmish near the Hollowguard border nearly reduced friend and foe alike to ash, Kai Orin retreated into the Verdant Realm under Faela's protection. His body had healed quickly — unnaturally so — but the scars left behind were not visible. His fire was changing. Growing.
And worse… whispering.
The flame spoke in forgotten voices — murmurs he didn't recognize, yet felt in his bones. Commands. Regrets. Names. Each time he tried to call on it, it flared with violence, like a blade eager for war. It didn't feel like a part of him anymore. It felt… ancient. Hungry. Alive.
Faela had seen enough. With grief in her eyes, she told him that the Verdant Pact could no longer help him — not with this. There was only one person left who might hold the answers.
Mistress Seven.
They traveled through a sealed, root-locked path beneath the Verdant Library, an ancient, sentient archive that rearranged its halls with every visitor. Books flew like birds. Lanterns blinked like eyes. Knowledge here had weight — and a cost.
Kai was led to a vault deeper than anything he'd felt before. It pulsed with Rift energy. Time ticked strangely. Sounds echoed too long. And at its center sat a woman who was not entirely a woman — her limbs wrapped in woven data-thread and bark, her face veiled in shifting glass. One eye gleamed like a machine, the other like obsidian. Her voice came not from her lips, but from the air around her.
She was Mistress Seven, the Archivist of Forgotten Realms. The last living bridge between Earth and Amaranth.
She greeted Kai without fear. "Ashborn," she said. "The flame wakes."
Kai was instantly on edge. "You knew I was coming."
"I dreamed you a thousand times before your first birth," she replied. "Now the pattern repeats."
Kai wanted answers. About the flame. About the voices. About himself. But Mistress Seven did not give answers easily. She gave truths. Heavy, tangled, and sharp.
The RevelationShe told him that the Tyrant King he kept seeing — the version of himself crowned in flame — was not simply a past life. Not just a ruler.
He was a convergence.
A construct of memory, magic, and Rift-force. A soul forged between two worlds, designed to keep the Rift from expanding. His birth had been orchestrated by both realms, a weapon and a seal. But when he went rogue — when peace proved fleeting and betrayal unending — he became unstable.
So they tore him apart.
His soul was split and scattered, anchored in dimensional pockets. The largest piece had been buried in St. Kareth's Academy — explaining why Earth had always monitored Kai closely, why the scanners glitched, and why dreams from another world bled into his waking mind.
Now, Kai's presence in Amaranth was not a reincarnation. It was a reconstruction.
Every time he used the flame… another piece returned.
And with each fragment, so too did the Tyrant — not as a memory, but as a presence. Watching. Waiting. Smiling through reflections.
The WarningMistress Seven told him that his fire was both a gift and a curse. It responded not just to will, but to conviction. To desire. The more Kai wanted to protect, the more violent it became. That was the paradox.
"If you do not master the flame, it will master you," she said. "But if you master it too well, you will become what you were meant to be — not a king… but a god of ruin."
Kai, rattled, pressed the question no one wanted to answer.
"Why did I become a tyrant in the first place?"
Mistress Seven grew still. Her voice softened.
"Because peace was never enough," she said. "Not for them. And not for you."
The line echoed through Kai's mind long after he left the library. He walked the length of the Verdant walls in silence, each torch he passed flaring in response to his conflicted aura. He was not just remembering his past life anymore — he was reliving it.
His allies noticed the change. Faela saw the shadows behind his eyes, the cold fire in his veins. The soldiers watched the way flame coiled around him even when he slept.
The world still called him Kai Orin.
But the flame… whispered a different name now.
Days later, word came from the eastern blight — Riftborn had begun pouring from a new, active gate near the Bone Marches. These gates weren't naturally forming anymore — they were being drawn. Magnetized. Pulsing in sync with something — or someone.
Kai knew what Mistress Seven hadn't told him aloud: he was the beacon.
He made the choice to lead the defense, to gather the fractured forces under one banner. The Pact. The Pyre Monks. Even some Hollowguard defectors. All eyes looked to him now — not because they trusted him, but because they had no other hope.
And deep down, Kai understood what this meant.
The next battle wouldn't just be for survival.
It would be for control — not over the Rift, but over himself.
And if he lost that battle…
the flame would rise again.
And this time, it would leave nothing behind