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The wind howled through the broken ribs of the old observatory like a beast still mourning its dead.
Far from the temples and cities, buried beneath layers of sand and silence, the House of the Ecliptic Flame stood in ruin. Its stone dome had cracked a century ago under the weight of time and forgotten war. Now, only the stars visited its halls — and even they watched from a distance.
Beneath that fractured dome, a man knelt in final breath.
His hands trembled as they scrawled the last line on a parchment older than the empire itself. His fingers were stained with ink, sweat, and something far darker.
Blood.
Not his own.
"Lae...kha...Kaelren…" he whispered, tracing the final constellation with what strength he had left. His voice echoed off the dome in a tongue no longer spoken in the world of men.
On the floor before him lay a celestial map — unlike any the current scholars would dare draw. It was not aligned to the common star chart. It curved unnaturally, pulling eastward, where a blackened comet had once scarred the heavens in defiance.
At its center, two sigils twisted around each other in eternal orbit.
A crown. And a blade of smoke.
"Time is not a line," the man gasped. "It is a spiral. They always meet… too late."
A whisper.
No wind stirred. No footsteps sounded.
Yet something heard him.
The stars dimmed. The ink glowed faintly — burning silver and red.
The man coughed once, violently. Blood stained his robes. He looked up toward the open dome, where a blood moon hung heavy over the horizon. His voice cracked.
"I failed her. Again."
Then he fell — silently — upon the ecliptic floor.
His last breath joined the wind.
And the stars began to move.
Far above, deep within the outer spiral of constellations, a cold, forbidden light pulsed once — and then vanished.
—
Two nights later, a scavenger boy from the northern borderlands stumbled into the ruins looking for metal scraps. Instead, he found the body… and the map.
He never made it out of the desert alive.
But the wind carried the name he saw drawn in flame:
"Kaelren."
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End of Chapter 2
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