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Chapter 17 – Ashes Beneath the Skin
They didn't stop running until the wind howled over black ice and the stars vanished behind storm clouds.
Kael ducked into the narrow crevice first, slipping between slabs of broken stone. Lys followed close, breath ragged, boots crunching through crusted frost. Inside, the air was still. Quiet. Only the faint crack of melting icicles echoed in the dark.
Safe — for now.
Kael slumped against the cold wall, the pulsing warmth in his chest dimming. "They didn't follow."
"They will," Lys muttered, crouching nearby. She ran a hand through her silver-blonde hair, streaked with blood and ice. "Cultists never retreat. Not unless they've marked something."
He didn't answer.
Didn't need to.
The glow beneath his shirt had already said too much.
---
Silence lingered.
Minutes passed.
Finally, Lys looked up. "Back there… you knew what they were."
Kael stared into the shadows. "I've seen them before."
"Where?"
"…Home."
Lys blinked, confused. "I thought your home was Emberreach."
"It was. But it wasn't always."
Kael shifted, drawing his knees up, the wall behind him damp with melting frost. "I was born in the Ashfolds. Small village, no name worth remembering. We didn't have Sects or Spirit Roots. We had fire — wild, angry fire in the ground. The kind that melted metal into rivers. The land was cracked, cursed. People said dragons died there."
Lys watched him closely.
"When I was six, something rose from the lava fields. A shape. Not a beast, not a man. Just… burning bones in a walking cage. It spoke in a voice that filled the sky, and everything around it caught fire. My mother died trying to shield me. My father burned holding her."
He swallowed hard. "Then it looked at me."
He clenched his jaw. "And didn't kill me."
Instead, it marked him. That was when the dreams began.
The fire.
The dragon eyes behind glass.
The whispers of names too old to say aloud.
Lys sat beside him now, listening without a word.
Kael continued, voice lower. "I was taken in by a passing cultivator — old man named Jorin. Brought me to Emberreach. Raised me. Trained me. But I never stopped burning. The other students felt it — like I was… wrong. Cursed."
"Is that what you think?" Lys asked quietly.
He didn't answer.
Because sometimes, yes. He did.
---
Outside, the wind had softened.
Inside, the cave glowed faintly with heat radiating from Kael's skin.
Lys shifted, leaning in. "You said it spared you. That it marked you. You think that was the first Wyrm?"
"I don't know. But I felt something inside me unlock when I touched that first Seal."
"And the second?"
Kael opened his palm. A flicker of flame danced across it, shaped like an ancient rune — one that hadn't existed in centuries. "The more I gather, the more I remember. Not just in dreams. In flashes. Heat, wings, war, betrayal. And pain. Endless pain."
Lys met his eyes. "Then we find them all."
"You sure?" he asked, voice low.
"I was marked too," she said. "By frost. By fate. And now by you."
She hesitated.
Then added, "Whatever you are… you're not alone anymore."
---
They didn't speak again for a long while.
When they finally slept, Kael dreamed not of fire…
…but of chains.
And far away, something vast opened a single molten eye beneath the earth.
It was awake.
And it remembered him.