Ash fell like snow.
Kael stumbled through the ruins of the temple; bare feet slick with blood and dust. The sky outside had turned the color of dying embers, casting the mountain range in shades of rust and sorrow. Behind him, the Temple of Ashmoor burned—not with fire, but with something older, something wrong. The flames didn't consume. They whispered.
He didn't stop to listen.
His limbs felt like they didn't belong to him anymore. Each step was a negotiation between will and exhaustion. Something inside him was still humming, like a second heartbeat made of ice and iron. The power that had exploded from the altar still lingered in his bones. But Kael didn't understand it. And he didn't trust it.
He just knew one thing: they would come looking for him.
High Priest Malreck had survived.
Kael had seen it—one final glance back through the smoke and chaos. The priest's face, carved with horror and awe, staring as Kael stood unharmed. Blood had pooled at his feet. Priests had screamed. But Malreck had remained… and had whispered a single word before the shadows swallowed him:
"Herald."
Kael didn't know what it meant. But it made his skin crawl.
Now, he fled.
Down the mountain trail, across the bones of the old road that hadn't been walked in years. The air tasted like rust. The wind carried voices. Sometimes he thought he heard his mother's name in the echoes. Other times, he swore something called his.
Hours passed. Maybe days. Hunger gnawed at him, but the fear kept him upright. The mountain never ended. Every turn looked the same. Every tree a twisted shadow. Then—
He saw the watchtower.
Or what was left of it.
A jagged structure of collapsed stone and broken iron, half-sunk into the frozen earth like a gravestone. The black banners of the Empire still clung to the battlements, faded and torn. A dead outpost, abandoned since the last purge.
Kael crept inside, careful.
It smelled of rot and old metal. A few skeletons still slumped near the gate, their armor rusted into their bones. Whatever happened here hadn't been quick. He didn't dare imagine what killed them.
Inside, he found a fire pit. Dry wood. A spark stone. Supplies buried under the wreckage—old, yes, but still sealed.
He sat in silence as he ate.
Chewing felt foreign. Swallowing even stranger. But it reminded him he was alive. Not chosen. Not cursed.
Just alive.
For now.
Night came. Cold, brutal, biting.
Kael curled near the fire, wrapped in a moth-eaten cloak taken from one of the long-dead soldiers. He stared into the flames, searching for something—hope, maybe. Or an answer.
But all he found was memory.
He remembered the night the priests came. The sound of hooves. The way the sky had gone quiet. His mother's voice telling him to hide beneath the floorboards. Her last words—
"Whatever happens, don't let them take your name."
He hadn't understood then.
He did now.
Names had power. And someone, something, knew his.
A whisper brushed the back of his neck.
He spun, hand grabbing for a dagger he didn't have.
Nothing.
But the fire was dying fast. Too fast. The wood was untouched.
Kael stood, heart racing. The shadows deepened. Not from the night—but from something behind it. Shapes stirred beyond the broken walls. Not wolves. Not men. Watchers.
He felt them more than saw them—tall, wrong, draped in cloaks of silence. No eyes. No mouths. Just... presence.
They moved like smoke. And they were looking right at him.
Kael's breath caught.
Something inside him responded. That second heartbeat—louder now. Hot and cold all at once. Like the altar was waking up again. Like the power hadn't been spent, only sleeping.
He raised a hand without thinking.
The fire obeyed.
Flames shot up in a wave, searing through the stone, roaring out the broken window. The Watchers vanished with it—dissolving into ash as if they had never been real.
The silence returned.
Kael collapsed to his knees, gasping, shaking.
He didn't understand any of it.
But he knew this: the world had changed the moment he survived that altar. Something ancient had bled through the cracks. The gods were watching again. And something else was crawling back into the light.
He had no map. No allies. No name the world would recognize.
But he had lived.
And in a world that had already buried him, that made him dangerous.