Night lay gentle across the ruins.
Only the wind moved — soft, whispering through cracked stone and sleeping grass, carrying the faint scent of iron from where the forge had burned.
Lyraen sat beside Kael's resting form. The firelight had faded hours ago, but the air still shimmered faintly, as though the night itself remembered the heat. His chest rose and fell in steady rhythm, yet every breath seemed to hum with something deeper — a pulse that wasn't quite human.
She'd seen strange things before: men who heard voices in dreams, relics that wept light, nights where the stars seemed too near. But this… this was different.
When Kael had fallen silent after the fire's awakening, she'd feared he was gone. Now, as she watched him, she wasn't sure he had come back entirely.
The ground was cold beneath her palms, but when she touched his hand, it burned faintly — not with pain, but with a low, living warmth, as though a forge smoldered just beneath his skin.
The night deepened. The ruins grew quiet. Even the insects had stopped their song.
Then she heard it — faint, rhythmic, almost like a heartbeat, but too vast, too far away. It came from the horizon, pulsing through the air, shaking the stars in their places. The fire's ashes stirred, forming spirals that drifted upward like breath from an unseen mouth.
She rose slowly. "Kael?"
No answer. He slept, brow furrowed, eyes moving behind closed lids.
The pulse came again, stronger this time. Somewhere beyond the clouds, lightning flashed — but it was wrong. The light didn't fade; it bent backward, curling like a living thread through the sky.
The wind changed direction. It carried whispers, hundreds of them — soft, broken, half-language, as if the night were trying to speak but couldn't remember the words.
Lyraen pressed a hand to her chest. "The gods…" she breathed. "They're watching."
Kael stirred. His fingers twitched, sparks crawling between them. The forge-mark along his arm flared once, a single ember of molten gold, and the whispers stopped. The world went utterly still.
Then, in that silence, a new sound came — low and distant, like the echo of a great door opening across the stars.
She turned toward the horizon.
The clouds there weren't clouds anymore. They were folding, drawn inward toward a single point of darkness at the edge of the sky. From it came a light not of fire or sun, but something deeper — an inverted radiance, burning without color.
Her breath caught. She couldn't move. Every instinct screamed to flee, but her legs felt carved from stone.
The voice came, soft and near, though it carried no sound.
Do not fear, child of dust.
She looked around wildly, searching for the source. The words seemed to bloom in the air around her.
He wakes soon. When he does, tell him I am coming.
The light on the horizon pulsed once — and vanished.
The night returned, but the stars flickered wrong, rearranging themselves into constellations she had never seen. The world exhaled, the silence breaking as crickets resumed their song, as if nothing had happened.
Lyraen stood trembling beside Kael. His forge-mark had cooled again, but she could still feel the hum beneath his skin — the heartbeat of something vast and ancient.
She knelt, brushing ash from his cheek. "Kael," she whispered, voice shaking. "What are you becoming?"
Far above, the stars seemed to listen.