The night bled slowly over the ruins of Vareth.
A crimson moon hung low above the shattered towers, casting veins of light through drifting smoke. The air was thick with iron and regret — the scent of battle that refused to fade.
Kael stood among the corpses of his pursuers. His blade, once a relic of purity, now dripped with shadows that hissed as they touched the ground. The mark on his palm pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat not his own.
Each throb carried a whisper — words that didn't belong to any tongue of man.
He looked down at his reflection in a puddle of blood.
Two eyes stared back at him, not gray, not human — golden, burning with the echo of something divine… or infernal.
The same light he had seen in the temple's depths.
The same that had consumed his mentor's soul.
"You cannot outrun what you carry," said a voice behind him.
He turned slowly.
From the mist emerged Seren, the woman with the silver veil, her steps silent upon the stone. The veil shimmered faintly in the moonlight, though beneath it, Kael could almost see the faint outline of her face — a face both alive and dead.
"Why do you follow me?" Kael asked, his voice hoarse, tired of prophecy and ghosts.
Seren tilted her head, her tone like the echo of rain on glass.
"Because the flame you bear is not a curse… it's a key. And you've already begun to turn it."
Kael's eyes narrowed. "A key to what?"
"To the door your gods sealed when they fled."
Silence fell — heavy, choking. The idea pressed against his mind like a blade. The gods… had not died. They had hidden. Behind walls of fire and memory.
And his curse — his brand — was their remnant.
"You were never meant to survive that night," Seren said softly.
"They burned you to erase what you are."
Kael's grip on his sword faltered. Memories surged — of flames devouring the citadel, of his brothers screaming, of his own hands reaching for the light that betrayed him.
"I am not your weapon," he spat.
Seren stepped closer. "No. You are their punishment."
Her words struck deeper than any blade.
Around them, the shadows stirred. The dead twitched. The blood at his feet rippled.
Kael took a step back, but his heel struck something soft — a rose.
It floated in the blood, its petals blackened at the edges yet unburned by the fire's reflection.
Seren's voice was a whisper now.
"The rose blooms only where the world ends."
And then the ground trembled. A sound — low and resonant — echoed through the ruins, like the beating of a colossal heart beneath the earth. From the darkness beyond the arches, golden eyes opened.
Not two.
Dozens.
Hundreds.
Kael lifted his blade. The runes along its edge flared to life, answering the gaze of what watched him.
The night screamed.
The blood boiled.
And Kael — the man damned by fire — stepped forward into the light that once destroyed him.