The road from Greyfield Crater was barren, winding through dead hills where trees had forgotten how to bloom.
Lira had been walking for two days, guided only by instinct — and the strange, pulsing shard she kept wrapped in cloth, tied tight against her ribs. Every few hours, it beat once, like a weak heart. A reminder. A whisper. A promise.
She didn't know where it was leading her.
Only that it was.
The world she walked through was quiet, but not peaceful.
The aftermath of the Flame Era lingered in everything — abandoned temples, half-burned cities, statues decapitated by revolution, now buried in moss and rust.
Ten years had not been enough.
People no longer feared flame.
They simply forgot it.
And in forgetting, they grew comfortable again.
Lira had grown up in one of those forgetful towns — behind cracked stone walls, listening to old men spit whenever Kael's name was mentioned. Her mother had whispered stories of him in secret. Called him the boy who chose mercy.
But the villagers called him something else:
"The coward who walked away from fire."
Lira had believed her mother.
Until the dreams began.
The first had come a month ago.
Kael standing on a bridge of smoke, speaking without moving his lips.
He had said only one thing:
"The flame ended with me. But what came before… didn't."
The next night, she dreamed of a name she'd never heard before:
Ashmourn.
And when she woke, her pendant — her mother's pendant — had cracked.
Inside was the shard.
And everything changed.
Now, walking past a burned-out watchtower, she paused.
A whisper.
Not in her mind — around her.
"…flame…"
She turned slowly.
No one.
"…she carries it…"
Lira drew her hood up. Her fingers brushed the hilt of the dagger hidden at her belt — one she had never used.
But the voices grew louder.
From behind ruined stone and crumbling trees, figures emerged — thin, pale, faces wrapped in old cloth. Eyes glowing faintly red.
Flame Eaters.
Worshippers of the Ash — cultists who believed all memory must be consumed.
One stepped forward, arms outstretched, nails blackened with ash.
"The spark walks. Give it. Burn, child, burn."
Lira's breath caught.
Three. Four. Five of them.
Too many.
She stepped back—
But the shard flared.
A single white pulse.
The ground beneath them shuddered.
The Flame Eaters screamed, clutching their heads.
And then… they ran.
Lira stood shaking, alone again.
She fell to her knees, panting.
"What did I just do?"
The shard, once dormant, pulsed again.
Twice.
Then three times.
That night, she camped beneath a shattered bridge.
She could not sleep.
She stared at the shard resting in her palm — no bigger than a coin, yet heavy as iron.
She whispered, "What are you?"
It pulsed once.
Then — somehow — formed a word in her mind.
"Remnant."
A voice — not Kael's, not hers.
Low. Calm.
Older than either.
She dropped it in fear.
But the shard did not fall. It floated. Gently.
And from it, an image formed in the firelight:
A hall of stone. Vast. Silent. At its center, a throne — not of gold or fire, but ash.
And on it sat a figure without a face.
"You carry the last breath of what I was."
"And the first breath of what I will become."
Lira's blood turned cold.
She backed away.
But the shard only dimmed.
The vision faded.
And the voice whispered:
"North."
"Where the temple tried to bury me."
"Where even Kael feared to tread."
The next morning, Lira walked north.
She passed no towns. No travelers.
Only the scar of the world — places where fire had tried to be god, and failed.
But she was not alone for long.
By the second dusk, someone was following her.
She didn't turn.
She didn't run.
She waited.
And when the figure finally emerged from the dust trail behind her, she was already gripping her dagger.
It was a man — young, maybe twenty, in a faded Temple robe with half the sigils ripped off. His face was tired. Honest. Scarred.
He raised his hands.
"I'm not here to hurt you."
"Then why are you following me?" Lira asked.
He paused.
"Because I've seen that shard before. And I've seen what happens when it falls into the wrong hands."
She studied him.
"Who are you?"
He gave a crooked smile.
"My name's Aerun. I was supposed to burn with the Temple."
They sat at a ruined fountain that night.
Aerun explained in fragments.
He had been a Flamekeeper Initiate during Kael's war — too young to fight, too scared to believe.
But when the Temple fell, he had seen things.
A room beneath the ruins.
A seal with Kael's name on it.
And under it, a scroll — blackened, wrapped in chains, written in a tongue no one dared read.
He had hidden it.
And years later, it had begun to whisper.
Just like her shard.
"Ashmourn isn't new," Aerun said, poking at the fire.
"It's old. Older than the Flameking. Older than language. It's the first shadow."
Lira stared into the flames.
"Then why did Kael never destroy it?"
Aerun looked up.
"Maybe he couldn't."
They traveled together the next day.
Toward the Northern Silence — a frozen wasteland where the Temple once exiled dangerous magic.
There, the shard said, lay the Pale Gate.
And behind it:
"The memory that even fire couldn't burn."
As night fell on the fourth day, the landscape changed.
The stars disappeared.
The wind grew still.
And in the sky, a second moon — faint, red, pulsing — appeared.
Aerun stopped walking.
"Do you see that?"
Lira nodded slowly.
"It's not real, is it?"
Aerun's voice cracked.
"It's a warning."
The shard in Lira's chest pulsed five times.
And then she heard it again.
That voice.
That presence.
No longer whispering.
Speaking.
"You come closer."
"And yet you do not ask why I wait."
She clutched the shard.
"What are you?"
The answer came like thunder.
"I am what's left when mercy dies."