They called her cursed.
But Lyara Nox had never known anything else.
---
Long before the Arcanum Academy, before she ever met Aedric Valtoris, Lyara had lived among the Silent Sisters of Vorlan — an order of priestesses born blind but blessed with the Sight.
Lyara was different.
She'd been born with vision.
And yet, when she turned twelve, she saw her first death.
A vision.
Her own.
---
The priests called it a glitch. A divine joke. A fate she'd misunderstood.
But the visions kept coming.
Spirals of fire.
A burning prince.
A world breaking like glass.
And at the center of it all, a name carved into her bones long before she could speak:
> Aedric Valtoris.
---
Even now, years later, as she stood alone beneath the twin moons of Veyra, her eyes pulsed with light that wasn't her own.
The Fate Mark on her palm had begun to bleed again — thin black smoke curling from the sigil etched into her skin since birth.
> He's waking…
> The Warden.
---
The last time the mark had burned this way, she had nearly died.
The creature she saw in that vision — a man with a stitched mouth and no face, wrapped in chains of black mist — had whispered her name.
"Lyara Nox… You are mine."
She hadn't spoken for three days after that.
And now, the mark had flared again.
And it flared because Aedric was changing.
---
She had seen it back in the Sealed Library — the Codex of Ruin hadn't just shown Aedric's future.
It had shown hers.
Standing beside him.
Or buried beneath him.
She didn't know which yet.
---
Suddenly, the wind shifted.
Cold.
Wrong.
Like the forest behind her exhaled death.
She turned.
And there he stood.
Not Aedric.
Not Caelen.
But a stranger draped in shadow.
He wore a crown of bone.
His hands were wrapped in vines that bled red.
And where his eyes should've been, there were only voids — empty, endless.
"Oracle," he rasped, though his mouth never moved.
She staggered back.
"You… you're not supposed to be real."
"I was not," the thing replied, "until he awakened."
He took a step closer.
The trees withered behind him.
"The last Flameborn unsealed the Codex. Now I remember. Now I return."
She raised her hand — summoning frost, wind, light.
But the figure didn't flinch.
It simply lifted one finger.
And her vision exploded.
---
💭 Vision Sequence: The Warden's Curse
She was falling.
Falling through endless fire.
The world split apart.
She saw Aedric, his body torn open, standing atop a mountain of corpses — his crown twisted, his eyes blazing.
She saw herself — bloodied, bound, kneeling before the chained god.
And behind it all… laughter.
Not cruel.
Worse.
Inevitable.
---
She gasped awake.
The figure was gone.
But her mark now bled openly — a line of black-red dripping to the grass.
She collapsed to her knees.
> The Warden has returned.
> And he remembers Aedric's name.
---
🏰 Back at the Citadel
Aedric paced across the broken tower floor.
He had felt it — a disturbance in the weave of flame.
Not pain.
Not fear.
Something older.
> Like being watched by something you once killed… but never buried.
The door burst open.
Lyara stumbled in — pale, shaking, her mark wrapped in a hastily conjured frost-bandage.
He rushed to her.
"Lyara—"
"It's him," she whispered. "The one before you."
Aedric froze.
"What?"
She looked up, eyes glowing with terror.
> "The first Flameborn."
---
And in the realm beyond flame and shadow, deep within the echoing hollows of the Prison of Chains, a throne of skulls trembled.
The Warden, the god-eater, the curse-breaker of the old pantheon, opened his eyes.
And smiled.
"Come find me, Flameborn."
---