Kael
The world burns like it's remembering her.
I don't move for a long time. The gate of fire she stepped into has collapsed into a smoking scar across the horizon. The air is thick with ash, every breath tasting like iron and loss. My hand still tingles where she touched me—where her heat sank through my skin and marked me as hers.
The others will say the Flame is gone. That the realm has fallen silent. But I know better.
I can still feel her.
She's everywhere now—in the wind that carries the embers, in the earth that trembles when I speak her name. The bond hasn't broken. It's changed. Stretched into something ancient and endless, something that hums beneath my skin like a second heartbeat.
I reach toward the place where the fire consumed her. The ground is blackened, glass-smooth from the heat, but at its center lies something untouched—a single mark, carved deep into stone. The same sigil that once burned on her back.
The Blood Marked.
The name feels heavier now. Not a curse. Not a title. A promise.
I drop to my knees beside it, the memories flooding in—her laughter, her fury, her refusal to bow to fate. Every moment between us burns behind my eyes, until the pain is indistinguishable from the longing.
"You said to remember who you were before the fire," I whisper. "But I can't. That version of you doesn't exist anymore."
The wind stirs, hot and restless. The ash at my feet shifts, forming faint lines—writing that fades before I can fully see it. But I don't need to. I already know.
She's not gone. She's building something on the other side.
The sky splits open again, distant but growing. A new light bleeds through, colder than the Flame's warmth but just as unnatural. And for the first time, I feel something else pushing against the bond—another power waking in the void she tore open.
A whisper threads through my thoughts, too soft to be real. Kael…
My heart stops. It's her voice. Fainter than breath, but there.
"Nyra?" I breathe, searching the shadows, the smoke, the sky itself.
Nothing answers—just the slow roll of thunder and the echo of her name carried by the wind. Still, the bond pulses once, steady and alive.
I rise slowly, staring at the horizon, where the fire has begun to fade to gray. Somewhere beyond that ruin, she's waiting—or fighting—or becoming something no one can name.
And me? I'm not done either.
I take the blade she left behind, its edge still warm, and drag it across my palm. Blood meets the mark on the ground. The world stirs in response, a hum of power that isn't just hers anymore. It's ours.
"Then let the gods remember," I say softly, voice rough with smoke and resolve. "The Blood Marked is not finished."
The wind howls, carrying her name through the ruins as the first light of dawn breaks across the scorched horizon.
And in that fragile silence between one heartbeat and the next—
the Flame breathes again.