The Song of the Shattered Flame
In the northern expanse beyond the realm's reach, past the Crystal Vale and over the Weeping Stones, lay a place none remembered by name.
No path led there.
No map marked it.
And yet, Lywen's dreams were filled with its call.
She stood in the Circle of Ash, the new sacred chamber beneath the Flame-Seed Grove, where echoes of the Ember Archive whispered even without wind.
The voice she heard had returned, again and again.
> "The First Flame… lies shattered… beneath the glass sky…"
The last known record of the First Flameworld—Vaelwyn's original dominion before she came to this plane—had vanished long ago.
Saerya believed the Star-Eaters had broken it.
But something remained. A song, trapped within the fractures.
Lywen placed her hand on the Archive. "Then I'll go where fire first wept."
The journey was impossible by land. Only song-bound flameflight could take her there.
So Saerya forged a path—an arc of starfire extending from the Grove's canopy to the high auroras. Riding it was perilous, even for a Starborn.
Lywen went alone.
Elaira remained behind, now pregnant with her first litter—six pups bound by fire and memory. One of them bore a birthmark shaped like the Starbrand, glowing even in the womb.
"Sing to them," Elaira whispered to Lywen. "So they'll know you if you do not return."
Lywen smiled, held the Ember Flute to her lips, and stepped into the flamepath.
She vanished in a blaze of starlight.
She landed amid silence.
The sky was a dome of broken crystal—fractured like frozen lightning—hovering far above the ground. Shards floated, unmoving, casting slivers of rainbow light.
The land was vast and still. Not dead. But dormant.
Ash blanketed everything in a thin silver layer.
And yet, beneath her feet, she felt… song. Weak, distant, like the final echo of a harp string.
She followed it.
Winding through the ruins of cities made of molten stone and mirrored walls.
She passed statues of beings with twin flames in their hands and crowns of leaffire—Guardians long forgotten.
At the heart of the ruin stood a single column.
Broken.
But singing.
Lywen climbed the column.
Wind did not blow here, but memory did. She could hear voices trapped within the structure—flickering, barely audible:
> "I was fire that bloomed.
I was flame that spoke.
I was Vaelwyn's vow…"
And then—a crack.
The air shivered.
A rift opened in the crystal sky above her.
Something ancient pushed through—a shadow that did not belong to the Star-Eaters. It was older. Colder.
And it sang back.
> "You… do not… belong."
Lywen gritted her teeth. "I come with flame. I come with name."
The entity descended—not as beast or god—but as a shard of forgetting. A creature made entirely of the moment before memory.
The voice of Unbirth.
Lywen took her stand on the shattered column.
She could not fight with blade.
She could not call Elaira.
She could only sing.
She pressed the Ember Flute to her lips and blew a single note.
The memory of Vaelwyn rose behind her.
Golden flames lifted from the dust. The city began to remember itself.
She played on.
Each note summoned a story, each story gave the land shape, and with each verse, the Unbirth trembled.
> "You will forget," it hissed.
"I will remind," she roared.
And with her final breath, she sang the First Song—the melody Vaelwyn sang to light the first pyre.
The world blazed.
The dome cracked.
And the Shattered Flameworld breathed again.
Elaira felt it first—the howling wind through the Grove whispering Lywen's name.
Then the Archive pulsed, and from its core, a beam of golden flame soared into the sky.
Lywen returned within it—burned, broken, but alive.
And she carried something in her hands:
A living coal.
The heart of the First Flame.
She placed it in the center of the Circle of Ash.
And the Grove bloomed again—faster, brighter, deeper.
The Star-Eaters did not return.
The Unbirth had been named—and naming it had bound it.
And Lywen—once a songwright—became the first Flameweaver.
Now, every child learns the First Song before they learn to speak.
The pups of Elaira run beneath trees whose leaves hum in harmony.
Saerya has begun building a bridge to other memory-realms—connecting surviving Flameworlds into a constellation of hope.
The Ember Archive now has a sister:
The Flameweaver's Harp—crafted from the bones of the ruined column, strung with threads of starlight, and able to summon stories from silence.
It plays only for those who remember.
Or those who choose to.
And in the sky above, the glass dome glows no longer broken—but mended.
Each crack is filled with storylight.
Because nothing broken stays lost forever.
Epilogue: Beyond the Flame
Far beyond the constellations, on a world forgotten even by the stars, something stirs.
It watches the rising harmony of the Flameworlds.
And for the first time in eons, it feels… curious.
It does not devour. It does not erase.
It is something older than flame, older than forgetting.
It is the First Listener.
And it waits.
Because the song of the flamebearers has reached its edge.
And it wants to know.
Not to end.
But to begin.