The wind that swept over Seridan’s high towers felt wrong.It wasn’t storm wind. Not the burn of shard fallout or the echo-surge of Sentinel passage.This wind was quiet.Soft.And heavy with expectation.It arrived an hour before Samuel did.Cela felt it first—midway through a relay briefing. She paused mid-sentence, her hand tightening on her dagger hilt.Tirren noticed too. “Something’s... approaching,” he whispered.Sarah stepped onto the balcony and lifted her gaze to the horizon.The air shimmered.The sky bent.And then—He walked out of light.Samuel’s form was cloaked in still-flame.Not flickering. Not wild.Still.White-blue with edges that hummed, the way a sword does when it’s drawn too slowly.His boots barely touched the stone as he stepped into the main atrium.No announcement. No flare of dramatics.He just returned.“Samuel—?” Sarah breathed, rushing forward, eyes wide.He raised a hand—not in warning, but in gentle caution.“Careful,” he said. “I’m still… settling.”

They had forgotten the child.Not out of carelessness.But because the war had grown too loud.Too bloody.Too immediate.In the swirl of flame drills, Ashborn recruits, relic scouting, and sentient shard attacks—he had simply become a shadow. A silent presence in the corner of the Flame Nexus, watched but not touched.He didn’t cry. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t age.Only watched.Eyes too wide.Too dark.Too knowing.Until the night Sarah rose reborn.And he spoke.It happened without warning.He stood in the center of the courtyard, barefoot, eyes on the sky.Cela was the first to notice. “Where are the guards—?”Then she saw the light.The glyphs etched along the child’s arms—always dormant—now shimmered with blue flame.Not Guardian flame.Not Gatekeeper’s rot.Something else.A third song.Samuel arrived instantly.He didn’t ask questions.Didn’t demand answers.He just stepped forward and knelt.The child looked at him and finally blinked.“I remember now,” the boy whispered.“Remember

The sun rose over Sanctuary like a banner of golden fire, stretching its rays across the fractured peaks and quiet valleys of the world they’d almost lost. Smoke still lingered in the far distance—wounds of war that hadn’t yet healed—but within the city’s heart, drums beat and laughter rang from balconies. Flowers hung from shattered balconies. Children danced barefoot in the streets where only weeks ago blood had soaked the stone. It was, by all measure, a day of celebration.But Samuel stood on the edge of the northern terrace, unmoving, eyes fixed on the horizon as if something still waited out there. The wind tugged at the edges of his flame-scarred cloak, the emberwoven threads catching light as if about to ignite. His left hand trembled faintly, though he hid it in the folds of his sleeve.“Samuel.” The voice behind him was soft, familiar. Sarah stepped up beside him, her white armor dulled from battle, streaks of dried blood still clinging to her greaves. “You’re missing the ce

The morning began with light—sharp, golden, and cold. The kind of light that revealed more than it comforted.Lin stood in the Observatory Chamber, her hands braced against the edge of the Void Map. Dozens of glowing threads pulsed across the table’s surface, showing leyline tremors, residual shard echoes, and minor flickers of flame magic across the fractured regions. But the lights were dimmer than yesterday.And none of them matched what she felt inside.“Again,” she muttered.The apprentice beside her flinched. “Lady Lin, we’ve rerun the pulse analysis seven times. The Void signature under the capital isn’t changing—”“Run it again,” she repeated, sharper now.The room quieted. The humming crystals above their heads flickered once, reacting to the spike in her aura. The runes carved into the circular wall shifted slightly, as if sensing agitation.“Lin,” a voice called from the entrance. It was Sarah, armored but relaxed, a cup of darkroot tea in one hand. “You need to rest.”“I’m

It started with a blink.One moment, the Flame Net pulsed steadily across the Southern Realm—alive, intricate, breathing like veins beneath the earth. And then, like the sudden extinguishing of a candle in a sealed room, it went black.Not dim. Not broken.Just gone.No signal.No heat.No trace.At the southern monitoring outpost known as Virel’s Eye, Technician Elos was the first to notice. He stood frozen before the observation crystal, its once-glowing lattice now dull as stone. His mouth opened, but no sound came.Then the alarms began to chime.Not the usual signals—these were low-frequency, distorted, grinding against the ears like metal tearing underwater.Elos stumbled back, knocking over a stack of shard-readers. His partner, Mareth, ran in from the hall.“Elos, what is it—”She saw the crystal.Both of them stared in silence.“Elos…” Mareth’s voice trembled. “That’s not just one break. That’s all of them.”In the high chamber of Sanctuary’s Flame Council, six voices argued