Night fell like a blade.
The sky, once veiled in soot and stormlight, cleared just enough to reveal the stars — but not the ones Kael remembered. These were different. Dimmer. Hung lower, as if the heavens themselves sagged beneath some cosmic weight.
They traveled in silence, Seraya leading with her spear glowing faint blue, Kael trailing behind, Veylaith whispering warnings only he could hear. The path they walked was no ordinary trail — it was the Dead Star Road, a forgotten artery carved through the world's magic like a scar.
Once, it had ferried the armies of the Skyborne Empress.
Now, it led only to memory and ruin.
"Do you remember this place?" Seraya asked without turning.
Kael didn't answer at first. The wind stirred the ashes of time.
"Yes," he said at last. "We made our last stand here. Before everything fell."
Seraya stopped. Her breath caught, just slightly — like something delicate being cracked.
"I lost twenty-two soldiers on this road. My cousin. My scribe. My griffin." She turned to face him, her voice taut. "And you."
Kael said nothing. He couldn't.
The ground beneath them shimmered, and then sang — faintly, like distant chimes. Seraya's eyes went wide. "The road still remembers."
Light bloomed at their feet — runes revealing themselves in lines of silver fire, forming ancient glyphs in the shape of wings and suns.
"It's not just memory," Veylaith whispered. "It's a lock."
Kael knelt, pressing his palm to the stone. The runes pulsed. Images flickered: A child running through a field of gold. A gate of flame. A dragon swallowing the moon.
Then the ground shook again — not from beneath, but ahead.
In the distance, at the road's end, something moved — something vast, its silhouette barely visible in the starlight. Dozens of legs. Towering height. A body stitched from mist and armor.
Kael rose slowly, drawing his blade.
"What is that?" Seraya asked, already lifting her spear.
Kael's eyes narrowed. "A Memory-Titan. Guardian of the Road."
"Why's it waking?"
He looked at the runes. At the fire beginning to burn in their lines.
"Because it remembers me."
And the Titan roared.
The Memory-Titan moved like a storm given form.
Its body shimmered with translucent plates, each one engraved with runes from civilizations long turned to dust. Its head bore no face, only a crown of shattered time — shifting fragments of memories, moments, and names lost to history. With each step, the air warped, bending sound and light like heat over desert sand.
Kael and Seraya stood still.
The Dead Star Road beneath them flared with life, as if the Titan's approach woke not just the magic, but the grief buried in the stones.
"Can we outrun it?" Seraya asked, not out of fear — but calculation.
"No," Kael said, stepping forward. "We don't run."
He drew Veylaith. The blade sang — not in metal, but in memory.
The Titan stopped.
Then it knelt.
A sound passed through the air — like a thousand voices gasping all at once.
The giant lowered its head to Kael's level, and from the shimmer of its core, a voice formed. No mouth, no breath — just pure thought projected into the night.
"Emberborn… you carry the grief of the world."
Kael blinked. "You know me?"
"I remember all who bled on this road. You bled most."
Seraya watched, tense. Her grip tightened on her spear.
The Titan shifted, and from its chest emerged a piece of glowing crystal — cracked, black at the edges, pulsing with violet light.
"This is the Tear of Theros," the Titan said. "A shard of a star. Once it lit the skies above this road. Now it burns with the Wyrm's rot."
Kael stepped forward. The shard pulsed.
"Take it. Cleanse it. Or let it break you. But choose quickly."
Kael reached out, fingers brushing the shard.
Agony.
Visions flooded him — war, fire, betrayal. He saw the world not as it was, but as it could have been. A child on a throne of peace. A world without blades. Seraya beside him, not as rival, but as queen.
Then… it shattered.
Kael dropped to one knee, breath stolen. The shard had fused into Veylaith, embedding itself like a second heart.
The Titan stood.
"Now you carry both light and rot. Fire, and its shadow. You are not ready. But you are chosen."
And without another word, it stepped backward into mist, its form unraveling like a dream at dawn.
Seraya helped him up. "What did it give you?"
Kael looked at his blade — now flickering with violet flame.
"An answer," he said. "And a question I'm afraid to ask."
Above them, the stars shifted again.
And somewhere deep below, the Wyrm smiled in its sleep.
Kael hadn't spoken in hours.
Not since the shard embedded itself in Veylaith — not since it burned through his arm like wildfire chasing bone. Seraya kept a wary distance, watching him with the same caution one gives a lit fuse. The road ahead was silent, but the tension between them hung thicker than smoke.
"Say something," she said at last, her breath curling in the cold.
Kael stopped walking. His eyes, once ember-red, now shimmered faintly with violet — a ghost of the Tear's power glinting behind his pupils. He flexed his fingers, watching trails of dark flame dance across his knuckles.
"I feel everything," he whispered.
Seraya tilted her head. "Explain."
"Not just now — everything. This road, the memories, the pain still clinging to the stones." He knelt and placed a hand on the ground. "It's like the shard unsealed a door. And on the other side... is everything I've ever tried to bury."
A beat passed. Then Seraya, quietly: "Do you regret it?"
Kael looked up. "Do you?"
She hesitated. "Every day."
And for a moment, they were not warriors or legends — just two people standing in the wreckage of a war they hadn't finished fighting.
Suddenly, the wind shifted.
Kael stood. Fast.
Seraya had already drawn Isenrael, her eyes scanning the trees flanking the road.
The sound came again — low, metallic, and rhythmic.
Footsteps.
But not human.
From the mist emerged ironclad shapes — six, maybe seven. Cloaked in cloaking devices that shimmered like heatwaves, they moved with mechanical precision. Armor of obsidian and mirrored steel. Eyes glowing blue. And at their center stood a figure draped in scarlet metal, his helmet shaped like a hawk's skull.
The Ashsent Guard.
Kael's jaw tightened. "I thought they were all dead."
Seraya cursed under her breath. "Clearly not."
The leader stepped forward, voice modulated and cold.
"By command of the Red Sigil, Kael Draven — you are to surrender the blade and the shard. By fire's law, you are claimed."
Kael raised Veylaith. "Fire doesn't answer to law anymore."
Without hesitation, the guards charged.
The battle was instant.
Seraya spun, her spear weaving frost into walls. Kael moved like a tide of flame, his blade cleaving air and metal alike. One Guard fell — then another. But these weren't like before. They adapted fast. Too fast.
Kael struck the leader — but the blow was caught.
The Ashsent Captain gripped the blade's edge with gauntlets laced in anti-magic runes.
"You carry a cursed star," the captain hissed. "We are the hands that extinguish such flames."
Kael shoved him back. "Then you'd better grow more hands."
He slammed Veylaith into the earth.
A pulse erupted — violet fire swallowing the road, the trees, the very mist.
When the flames died, the Ashsent Guard were gone.
Seraya stared, breathless. "You've changed."
Kael looked at the smoking crater. His hands trembled.
"No," he said. "The world has. I'm just catching up."
Above them, the stars dimmed again — not with clouds.
With something larger.
Something watching.
Kael hadn't spoken in hours.
Not since the shard — the Tear of Theros — fused itself into Veylaith's hilt, branding him with the pulse of something far older than fire. His every step crackled with power now. Every breath brought back a memory that didn't belong to him.
Beside him, Seraya kept pace with the quiet grace of a predator. Her spear hummed faintly, reacting to his presence — or perhaps warning her of it.
"You're bleeding flame," she finally said. Not a question. A quiet observation, like you might make about the color of the sky before a storm.
Kael flexed his hand. Veins along his wrist glowed faint violet, a corrupted light threading through the warmth of his emberblood.
"I feel the world," he whispered. "Like I've torn open its heart and it's bleeding into mine."
"Side effect of touching a dead star," Seraya muttered.
He shot her a glance. "You knew what it was?"
"Not until the Titan said its name."
The Tear of Theros — not just any relic.
A shard of the First Star, the one that birthed flame itself before falling from the sky during the Wyrm Wars.
It was said to carry the potential to reignite dead magic — or extinguish the living soul.
Few believed it still existed. Fewer lived after seeking it.
Kael slowed his steps, pressing his hand to the ground.
"The road is changing."
The Dead Star Road shimmered again beneath them, its ancient runes glowing brighter — not guiding, but warning.
And then, the wind turned cold.
Metal struck stone.
Figures emerged from the fog, faceless behind helms forged from mirror-steel and volcanic glass.
The Ashsent Guard.
Seven in number — silent, surgical, armored in blood-oaths and sigil-bound iron. Their leader wore crimson plating etched with the triple spiral of the Red Sigil — the ancient order that once served as executioners for the lost Pyre Kings.
Kael drew Veylaith without hesitation.
"They shouldn't exist," Seraya breathed. "The Ashsent were disbanded when the Sigil fell."
"Apparently," Kael said, "they missed the memo."
The captain stepped forward, voice filtered through centuries of code and command:
Kael Draven. Flamebound. Shard-Bearer. In the name of the Red Sigil, you are claimed
Smoke clung to the Dead Star Road like a second sky.
Kael stood at the edge of the crater he had made. The fire had receded, but its echo pulsed beneath his skin — the shard's magic alive and hungry. He could feel it in his teeth, his fingertips, behind his eyes.
"You were always reckless," Seraya said, stepping beside him. "But this… this is something else."
He didn't reply.
He was listening.
Not with his ears — but with the fire in his blood.
Because something was whispering through the shard.
A name.
Red Sigil.
Seraya turned toward the charred remains of one Ashsent Guard — armor melted, bones blackened to dust. "The Red Sigil hasn't moved in years. Last we heard, they collapsed after the Siege of Virehall."
"They didn't collapse," Kael said darkly. "They vanished. Like a torch hidden under the sea."
Seraya narrowed her eyes. "You think they've returned?"
"No," Kael said, sheathing Veylaith. "I think they never left."
The Legend of the Red Sigil
Long before the Emberborn were hunted, before the Wyrm's name returned to living tongues, there was a kingdom built on balance — Atheron, where flame and frost sat at the same table. Magic was not power there; it was responsibility.
And then came the Sigil.
Forged by seven war-saints in the mountain-temples of Rauk's Spine, the Red Sigil was never meant to rule. It was meant to watch. A secret order bound by oaths older than time, they were the hand behind thrones, the silence behind peace.
But silence turns sour.
The Sigil grew paranoid. Magic, they decided, was a plague. The Emberborn were the first to burn — marked as aberrations, as echoes of a lost fire that once threatened to consume the sky.
They created the Ashsent Guard, an elite corps of soulbound soldiers with blades forged from the bones of fallen phoenixes. Trained not to question. Trained to erase.
In time, the Red Sigil became myth. Their fortress, Cindergate Keep, was said to have sunk beneath the Veilsea during the Sundering.
But not all myths stay buried.
"They're testing us," Kael muttered, eyes on the darkening horizon. "They know about the shard. They know it's awakening."
Seraya looked at him. "So what do we do?"
He turned to her.
"We find Cindergate."
She blinked. "That place doesn't exist anymore."
"No," Kael said. "It does. It's just not on the maps written by the living."
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a tattered, half-burned page — a map of echoes. Drawn in ink that only shimmered in starlight. He traced a single mark along the western edge of a sunken continent.
"There," he whispered. "That's where we go."
Seraya stared. "To find a myth."
Kael smiled — tired, dark, and honest.
"To burn it to ash."