The dusk bled red into the sky as Evelyn climbed over the broken remnants of what used to be a cobbled stairway. The ground trembled subtly beneath her boots, as if the earth itself remembered the sins committed in this place. Beside her, Orion walked in silence, his crossbow lowered but ready. The cathedral ahead was half-swallowed by ash and vines, its steeple leaning like a mourning figure hunched under the weight of sorrow.
"This is it," Evelyn whispered. "The Sanctuary of the Veiled Flame."
It was once a place of prayer, hope, and light. Now it stood defiled, its stained-glass windows shattered, the iconography inside scoured away by time and something darker. What remained was a hollow husk, haunted by echoes of desperation.
Inside, their steps echoed over blackened tiles. The walls bore claw marks—long, deep grooves like something massive had scraped against the stone in rage. Evelyn's heart pounded, not with fear, but with anticipation. Something waited here. She could feel it. A tug in her chest, faint, like the pulse of a half-remembered dream.
"Do you feel that?" she asked, her voice barely audible.
Orion nodded, eyes narrowed. "Something old... and awake."
At the heart of the cathedral lay an altar fractured down the middle. Strange runes pulsed faintly along the crack, and in its center rested a shard of obsidian, floating slightly above the stone as if gravity had no claim over it. Evelyn stepped closer, drawn by a compulsion she didn't fully understand.
The artifact whispered.
She heard no words—only impressions. Flames. Screams. A bell tolling endlessly in a city drowned in black water. She reached toward it.
"Wait!" Orion hissed, grabbing her arm.
But it was too late. Her fingers brushed the shard, and the world dissolved.
She stood in a throne room carved from bone. The air was thick with incense and rot. A figure sat upon the throne—a man with no eyes, his face wrapped in golden chains, yet somehow he looked directly at her.
"You came too soon, Herald," he said, his voice like wind over tombstones. "The Veiled Flame burns only for those ready to sacrifice."
"What is this place?" Evelyn demanded, her voice trembling.
He rose. The chains unraveled from his face, clinking softly as they slithered across the ground.
"A memory. A promise. A trial."
Evelyn backed away, heart pounding. The shard pulsed in her chest now, embedded beneath her skin, its heat burning through her veins.
"Why me?"
The man stepped down from the throne. The ground cracked beneath his feet.
"Because you were chosen by the flame not for who you are... but who you are meant to become."
He raised his hand, and with a flash of light, Evelyn was thrust backward—
—back into the cathedral, gasping, hand recoiling from the shard. Orion caught her before she fell.
"You're bleeding," he said, pointing to her palm. A tiny ember glowed beneath the skin where she'd touched the shard.
"I saw him," she said, chest heaving. "The King in Chains. He spoke of the flame... and sacrifice."
Orion paled. "That's a name from the Forbidden Histories. If he's returning..."
They both looked at the shard. It no longer floated. It had sunk into the altar and gone dark.
Suddenly, from the shattered entrance came a low growl.
They turned.
A hound, twice the size of a normal wolf, stepped into the cathedral. Its eyes were molten gold, and its fur was matted with soot and ash. It growled again, and from behind it emerged two more. Hellhounds.
"They're guarding the shard," Orion said, loading a bolt.
"No," Evelyn replied, her voice steady. "They're guarding me now."
Orion turned to her, confused. But then he saw it—the faint glow beneath her skin, the subtle shift in her stance. She wasn't just Evelyn anymore. Something else had awakened.
The hounds did not attack. They circled her slowly, then sat, heads bowed.
The Veiled Flame had chosen its Herald.
Far beneath the cathedral, something stirred.
Chains rattled.
Eyes blinked open in the dark.
And a voice whispered through the cracks of the world:
"The Firebearer has touched the flame. The first seal is broken."