CHAPTER 5:
Ember Requiem
The cities did not fall with war drums. They fell with whispers.
It began in the high towers of Ardenthal, the city where the sky itself had been bound by decree. Each evening, Miraen's voice echoed from the upper terraces of the Celestial Chorus—a fading remnant of her past life as Choirkeeper. Yet now her songs were hymns of mourning, not praise. She sang not to gods, but to the dying resolve of empires.
Kael-Mirath stood in the shadow of the eastern spires, watching the wind tangle Miraen's pale hair as she stood against the twilight. There was no smile left in her. Only song, and silence.
"The Testament shifts again," he whispered, holding the leather-bound relic close to his chest. Its runes flickered like breathing embers.
Beneath the skin of the city, The Pale Covenant moved.
They had no banners, no war cries. Only paper, fire, and song. Their doctrine, bound in the Silenced Codex, offered a mirror to the Testament of Flame—a mirror cracked, defiant. Where the Testament spoke of order, the Codex urged defiance. Where the gods demanded worship, the Codex demanded remembrance of their fallibility.
Soriel's betrayal was no longer veiled. In the Council of Crystal Embers, the Grand Arbiter's throne sat empty. The chamber—once lit with seven sacred braziers—was cold.
Soriel had vanished days before the Covenant's first public invocation, taking with him the Seventh Flame Sigil and the Ark of Ember Laws. When questioned, the senior lords of the House of Skyfall spoke in riddles. When pressed, they wept.
Kael-Mirath now wandered the periphery of prophecy and purpose, guided only by Miraen's unraveling songs and the chaotic glyphs emerging from the Testament's living script.
"Do you see it?" Miraen whispered one night, standing beside the Weeping Pillars.
"See what?"
"The future, Kael. It no longer flows. It breaks."
The next morning, three cities burned.
Sanctumward, the holy capital, imploded from within—an archbishop incinerated in prayer by a spark no one saw. Lir-Venn, the haven of healers, erupted into madness as its waters turned to dust. And in Oss-Kheral, the dreamvaults collapsed, unleashing prophetic fever into the minds of a thousand sleeping seers.
The Covenant claimed none of it. They did not need to.
The Testament began to bleed. Not metaphorically. Kael-Mirath opened it in silence beneath the mourning tree of Vaelthien, and dark ink spilled from the pages like blood.
On that day, Miraen refused to sing. Her silence was heavier than thunder.
In the mountain crypts, a boy named Thireon awoke, his eyes marked with glyphs from both the Testament and the Codex. He had not read either. He simply dreamed them. He was the first child of the Covenant born after the Ashfall.
He would not be the last