The wind tasted like ash.
It wasn't just in Kael's lungs—it coated his tongue, buried in his clothes, settled into his bones like dust mourning the dead. Smoke curled from the ravine below where the monastery had once stood, now reduced to blackened stones and charred prayers.
Nothing living had survived.
Except him.
Kael stood at the cliff's edge, boots cracked and blood-soaked, eyes fixed on the ruin. The morning sun tried to rise, pale and uncertain behind a veil of smoke. It cast long shadows through what remained of the Ember Monastery. Once the last sanctuary of the flame, now just a grave.
He didn't remember escaping. He remembered the screams. The fire—wild, disobedient—refusing to answer the monks' chants. He remembered Master Daryn shouting his name, telling him to run. And then…
A flash of white. Cold.
So cold it burned.
Then nothing.
When he had awoken, the world had already ended.
He didn't know how many days had passed. His clothes hung loose, soaked in soot and blood. The flame inside him—a thing he had been taught to revere, to serve—was silent.
Not dead. But buried.
He had wandered aimlessly since. Surviving on stale rations and melted snow. Haunted by the memory of fire that had failed. Of gods that had abandoned their chosen.
And yet…
The night before, the flame had stirred.
A flicker. A whisper in his dreams.
You are not the end, Kael. You are the last beginning.
It had spoken in Ash-tongue—old fire, older than the gods.
He didn't tell himself it was real. Not yet. Because delusion was safer than hope.
He descended from the cliffs at midday.
The valley below was deadland—cinders and glassed soil stretching for miles. Nothing grew. The trees were skeletal remains, their branches burned white. The old roads had melted into veins of obsidian, slick and cracked.
Kael walked through them anyway, wrapped in a threadbare cloak, sword at his side. Not the sacred blade of the Ember Monks. Just steel. Steel that bled like everything else.
He walked toward nowhere—until he found the wolf.
It was waiting for him.
Massive. Silent. Ash-gray fur and eyes like burning coals.
It did not snarl, nor did it run.
It just watched.
Kael froze and slowly reached for his blade.
The wolf tilted its head, as if amused.
You carry her spark, a voice said. Not aloud. Not from the beast's mouth. From within Kael's flame, which flared suddenly—alive for the first time in days.
Kael staggered.
Seconds passed as the wolf approached Kael and then sat.
Kael knelt as his heart pounded.
"…Ashira?"
No answer.
Just the wind and the wolf.
And the trail it began to walk, slow and steady, toward the eastern peaks.
Toward flame.
Toward others.
He followed without thinking.
Hours passed. The cold crept in again—wrong cold. The kind that didn't numb, but hollowed. He'd felt it before, during the monastery's fall. His breath fogged even in sunlight. And then—
He saw it.
A mark in the snow.
Not tracks, but Runes.
Carved into the ice with inhuman precision. Five symbols, spiraling outward like a frostbrand:
• Silence
• Judgement
• Memory
• Fire
• Godless
Kael stepped back, every instinct screaming.
The wolf growled once. Low.
And Kael understood.
The Pale Choir had passed this way.
That night, Kael found shelter in the ruins of a watchtower, half-swallowed by snow. He lit no fire. Not for warmth. Not for safety.
He didn't need warmth.
The fire was returning.
He could feel it waking—aching. As though every ember in the world had been waiting for him to suffer enough to deserve its voice.
He stared into the darkness, sword across his knees, listening.
And when sleep came, so did the flame.
This time, it showed him a city of ash. A woman of fire. A god, dying.
And the words, not spoken but burned:
Ashborn. Rise.