Altan hadn't moved in hours.
He stood before the monolith at the center of the ancient circle. Black stone, veined with ember-like lines that pulsed faintly under the surface. He stared like he wasn't seeing the stone, but something far beyond it.
What he saw was not a vision. It was memory etched into the monolith itself.
The Nerathil had not always been monsters. Once, they were a proud people. Skilled, fierce, obsessive. They cracked open a gate to another realm. Not out of desperation. Out of pride. Out of a belief that nothing beyond their understanding could ever touch them.
They were wrong.
What came through the rift took them apart.
Not with armies. With corruption.
It started slow. Infection spread through contact, biting, clawing, tearing. The creatures didn't just kill. They converted. One wound was enough. Minutes later, the fever would start. Then the convulsions. By nightfall, the victim's skin would begin to blacken at the joints. Their breath would rasp like dry iron grinding in the lungs.
Then came the breaking.
Limbs twisted out of shape. Bones warped, pushing through flesh in jagged spikes. The body hardened in places, softened in others. Metal didn't seem grafted to them. It grew out of them, as if forged from within. Jaws widened. Eyes clouded. The mind went first.
Those who turned were no longer human. They didn't remember who they were. They hunted anything that wasn't like them.
The Nerathil became hosts.
Not dead. Not alive. Just vessels. Twisted things held together by purpose and pain.
The record on the monolith called them Ruinborn. Altan now understood why.
They weren't an army. They were a plague with weapons.
As the plague spread across the island and into the surrounding archipelago, entire villages were lost in days. The infection moved faster than word. By the time most understood what was happening, it was already too late.
But not for all.
The first to rise and fight against the Nerathil were a nation apart, an old warrior order of women known as the Keepers of the Flame. They had no kings, no lords. They answered to fire alone. Priestesses, soldiers, and smiths, all trained from birth. They didn't wait for orders. They didn't ask for help. They acted.
They had seen the signs before anyone else. They understood what the Nerathil were becoming while others still clung to denial.
They met the creatures on the red fields of Namarak.
Altan watched it unfold.
Shields scorched black. Sabers glowing white-hot. Flame banners snapping in the ash-choked wind. Rows of armored women stood shoulder to shoulder, unmoving even as the sky burned. Behind them, fire-wielders raised their hands, channeling raw heat into arcs of searing flame that scorched flesh from bone and burned the Ruinborn's marrow from within.
"Hold the line," a captain barked, her helm cracked down the side, her left arm limp and bloodied. "They don't stop unless we burn them. No ground. Not one step."
Then it came.
The Crawlborn hit first. Foul things, half-human, half-pestilence, burst up from the dirt like diseased moles. Clawed arms reached from beneath the soil, dragging soldiers down by the legs. Screams cut through the ranks, but the front held. Spears tipped with alchemical fire impaled the creatures mid-lunge, and their bodies writhed as flame chewed through rot and sinew. The stink of charred infection hung thick in the air.
Skulkin followed, sprinting in packs, lean rabid things with talons like hooked saws. They slashed at exposed throats and tore at joints. One leapt over the front line and sank its claws into a Keeper's face. She didn't fall. She grabbed it by the jaw, forced its head back, and let a war-priestess behind her torch it from the inside. The thing screamed as its skull boiled.
Dreadblades crashed through the line next. Hulking brutes, patchwork armor fused to bone, each one dragging a cleaver thick as a door. One swing cleaved through three women, hacking them down in a geyser of blood. But the fourth Keeper didn't flinch. She stepped over the corpses, drove her torch-blade into its spine, and twisted until the thing convulsed and dropped into the dirt, twitching like a gutted boar.
More kept coming.
The Hollowhands rose last, rot-soaked casters wrapped in strips of preserved skin. They vomited ruin from their palms, clouds of black bile that melted through metal and flesh. One blast turned a shield wall into slurry. The women behind didn't scream. They dropped, disintegrating where they stood.
But the Keepers struck back. Catapults loaded with molten stone slammed into the ranks of the enemy. Firebombs rained from behind. One priestess, too injured to stand, whispered a curse and crawled beneath a Dreadblade's feet with a flask of ember-oil. The blast tore the creature's legs off and lit half the battlefield.
Steel clanged. Bones snapped. Screams rose, broke, and vanished under the weight of war.
For a time, it looked like the Keepers would win.
They fought without panic, without hesitation. Even when their sisters fell, they stepped into the breach. Even when their arms failed, they bit and clawed and burned what stood in front of them. The flame was their god. And in that moment, it answered.
But the rift never closed. More came through, bigger, faster, transformed. The tide shifted. The Keepers began to fall. And the flame began to dim.
Each battle left fewer Keepers standing. The flame, once their greatest weapon, began to falter. Their numbers thinned. Their strongholds were breached from within, rot seeping into even the most sacred halls.
One by one, the orders fell.
The last stood at Orûn-Mal, a fortress monastery carved into the cliffs, its foundations fused with firestone. There, the final bloodline of the Keepers made their stand. The line of Veyda. Ten warriors remained. All family. Sisters, cousins, mothers and daughters. They had no reinforcements. No path of retreat.
So they did what the others would not.
They used the forbidden technique of their bloodline.
Flame took form within them, wrapping their bodies in living fire. Not conjured. Bled. Their skin cracked. Eyes burned white. They became flame given shape and fury. They charged the rift, cutting through the Nerathil with no thought of defense. The ground scorched under their feet. Every strike burned through steel, bone, and whatever foulness moved beneath the Ruinborn's flesh.
But the technique came at a price.
The land itself ignited behind them. Forests blackened. Stone melted. Even the sacred wells boiled dry. As they fought, the cliffside burned, and the monastery with it. When the last of them reached the rift gate, they unleashed everything. Their bodies collapsed into pure flame. It swallowed the breach.
And the rift shattered.
The gate was sealed. But the last of the Veyda bloodline died in the blaze. Not a corpse was left. Only ash.
Altan blinked, and the vision ended.
***
The wind shifted.
Far from the ruins of Orûn-Mal, beyond the shattered coastlines and buried cities, a fire crackled in the heart of the mountains. Deep within a forest untouched by time, a circle of women stood barefoot in the dirt, flames dancing around them in a perfect ring. Their faces were painted with ash. Their eyes reflected the blaze.
They felt it.
One of them gasped, clutching her chest. Another fell to her knees, mouth open in silent horror. The youngest among them wept. Not from pain, but from recognition.
The gate had opened again.
A figure stepped forward. Older than the rest, her hair white, her spine bowed not by age but by memory. She had survived the first burning. Carried the knowledge in secret. Passed it to daughters who were not hers. For five centuries, she had waited for silence to be broken.
Now the flame spoke.
She lifted her hand. The fire bowed with her.
"Summon the Captain," she said.
The younger women stared, breathless.
"The gate at Orûn-Mal was forced open by unknown forces… and the Nerathil have returned."