CHAPTER SIX:
The Heralds of Dust
When the winds began to carry ash instead of blossoms, the people stopped whispering prayers. They began speaking names—names not found in the holy registry, nor sung in the old songs. Names carved into the walls of hidden chambers, inked in bone, remembered in silence.
And among these names, one began to surface again and again—Thireon.
The child who dreamed in glyphs had grown. Only seventeen turns, yet his eyes bore the gravity of unspoken epochs. He walked with the stiffness of prophecy, as if his body strained to contain what should never have been caged. The Codex bled from him in symbols, leaking onto walls and minds wherever he lingered too long.
The High Quorum declared him cursed.
The Pale Covenant called him a Herald.
Kael-Mirath simply watched.
"You're not a child anymore," Miraen whispered one dusk, watching Thireon sketch a spiral of flame across the sandstone with his finger. The symbol shimmered, then vanished into the ground.
"I was never allowed to be one," he answered. Not bitter. Not sad. Just... fact.
In the cities that still stood, rumors circled like vultures.
Vaelthien—now renamed Dustrest by its weary survivors—became a refuge not for hope, but for the discarded. Here, the broken singers, failed templars, silenced scribes, and exiled dreamweavers gathered in what was once a sacred garden. They tended not flowers, but memory.
And then came the dreams.
Uninvited, insistent, they came.
Every sleeper of Dustrest reported the same visions:
A black sun rising over an ocean of ember.\n- A figure—cloaked in both light and dust—walking barefoot across the coals.\n- A broken Testament, and a stitched Codex, bound together by a thread of blood.
The consensus was unanimous: Thireon was the key. Not to salvation. Not even to power. But to understanding. A final convergence.
But not all saw convergence as hope.
Far in the North, where frost still clung to the mountains, a conclave of old flamebearers met in secret. Known only as the Scorchbound, they were remnants of the Flame Orthodoxy—those who had buried the older heresies beneath layers of soot and sanctimony.
They declared Thireon an Apostate Herald and invoked Protocol Pyre—an ancient rite of cleansing by fire, reserved for those deemed "threadsplitters," beings whose existence risked unraveling the entire cosmic weave.
But the Codex had already warned them:
> "Burn the boy, and you burn the boundary between worlds."
Kael-Mirath read the passage by candlelight, his hands trembling. The Testament had offered no counter.
In the deep ruins of Ardenthal, beneath shattered glass spires, a secret chamber long sealed cracked open on its own. Inside, the skeletal remains of the last Ember Oracle wept molten tears. Upon her chest, carved in the language of the old gods:
> "He is not the end. He is the page before it."
And so, the Herald walked southward, unarmed, unread, but not unseen.
Behind him followed the dust.
Ahead of him—truth, or obliteration.