Pain was the first thing he felt.
Not the pain of memory or sorrow. Not yet. This was raw, physical, and crawling—like nerves being rewired through the cracks of a burnt shell.
Solum gasped.
Air dragged in like broken glass—jagged, wrong. His lungs fought to fill, but they sucked in only ash-thick muck, laced with heat and iron. He gagged, coughed, and spit out something black and sticky. It tasted of smoke, stone, and everything he thought he'd left behind on the altar.
He tried to rise.
Muscles refused. His arms twitched, but didn't obey. His fingers scraped against cold, wet rock. His back arched. Pain bloomed in hot pulses. Something inside him had been rearranged—and not kindly.
The altar. The crowd. The fire.
Gone.
The chanting was silence now. The light was gone. The priest, the ceremony, the sacred torch—they'd vanished like smoke through cracks in a dying world.
Where was he?
The ceiling above him pulsed with dull, reddish veins—like the inside of some ancient beast. The stone walls curved, enclosing him like a swallowed secret. Everything was slick, warm, and still trembling with the aftershock of the ritual.
He wasn't dead.
But he wasn't whole, either.
Eventually, the pain thinned just enough for him to crawl. He dragged himself upright, bones grinding, every movement like learning a ruined body for the first time. His robes were half-melted into his skin. His chest bled in lines where the sacred oil had scalded through fabric. His skin looked like cracked clay, blackened and flaking.
He reached a wall, steadying himself.
That's when he saw it.
Not a wall—writing. Burned into the stone, long before he'd arrived.
The cave was lit only by faint red pulses coming from underfoot, but even in the weak glow, the message was clear. These weren't markings made with tools or time. They were scorched in, seared deep into the walls like brands on flesh.
He stared.
Symbols at first—then words, ancient and jagged. Language formed by fire and grief.
He read them aloud, voice rough and low.
"The First Ember never rose."
"Buried beneath the glow."
"The light above feeds on the flame below."
Solum froze.
His fingers brushed the last line again, as if touch might change the meaning.
He had believed he was rising. That the fire would lift him, redeem him, set him apart.
But this… this said otherwise.
The First Ember had not become a god.
He had been buried.
Hidden. Imprisoned beneath the city, beneath the towers, beneath the ritual Solum himself had fed. Not to honor the Ember—but to keep him from rising again.
By the Lightkeepers.
By the ones who claimed holiness. The ones who hoarded glow in their towers while the rest of the world rotted in shadow.
Solum's knees gave out. He slid to the floor.
He wasn't chosen.
He was a sacrifice.
No—worse. He was the match they used to relight the chains.
The altar hadn't elevated him. It had used him.
He looked down at his hands. Shaking. Split. Still ember-warm.
He should be dead. There was no reason he'd survived what he did—unless…
No.
He didn't survive.
He was kept.
The cave wasn't a tomb. It was a gate.
Somewhere below, deeper than even this chamber, the flame still lived. A real flame. Not a symbol. Not a sermon.
The First Ember. The true one.
And Solum was not it.
He laughed once—a short, ugly thing. Then coughed again. Blood this time.
So that was it.
He was not the savior. Not the story. Not the light.
He was the cracked vessel.
The warning bell.
The burned-out spark left behind to dig up the truth.
The wall pulsed behind him once more. A line flickered to life beneath the others, glowing faintly in letters made of pain.
"When the flame rises again, the towers will fall."
Solum closed his eyes.
Good.
Let them fall.