2025-06-13 00:14:13The flames flickered low in the aftermath of the battle. Alan stood alone in the clearing, surrounded by scorched earth and broken trees. The silence was deafening,no wind, no birds, just the faint crackle of burning leaves.
His hands still trembled. He had done that. He had conjured fire and lightning without a single incantation. With no scroll, no training, and no spirit root, at least not the kind others could see.
“I’m not rootless,” he whispered, voice shaking. “I’m something else.” His eyes drifted toward the fallen enemies. The Order of Binding. Assassins in bone masks who knew his name… and feared what he could become. “That power was sealed for a reason,” one had said.
But sealed by who? And why? Alan staggered toward one of the masked corpses, knees still weak. His palm stung with phantom energy. The body lay crumpled beneath a twisted oak, its blade embedded in the earth beside it.
Alan knelt, searching the robes. A scroll tied with black twine slid from a hidden pouch. He unrolled it with care. At the top was a sigil he recognized from his parents’ journal: a black eye within a triangle, the seal of Nihros.
The message was written in a jagged, furious hand: “The Eye has chosen a vessel. The Seal is broken.
Initiate Protocol Nine. Eliminate Alan Smith before the Legacy fully awakens.
Alan’s throat went dry. They didn’t just want the medallion. They wanted him dead. Before he could understand what he was.
A branch snapped behind him. Alan spun. But it wasn’t another attacker, it was a young woman, half cloaked in a hunter’s hood, her bow aimed straight at his chest.
“Don’t move,” she said calmly. “I saw the explosion from two valleys over. You burned down half the forest. Who are you?”
Alan raised his hands slowly. “I don’t want trouble.”
“Too late,” she said, stepping closer. Her eyes, sharp, grey, calculating narrowed. “Those men were from the Order of Binding. Are you insane?”
“I didn’t call them,” he said. “They attacked me.”
“They don’t attack nobodies.” Her gaze darted to the medallion at his hip. Her voice lowered. “Is that… the Eye of Nihros?” Alan’s silence was all the answer she needed. Her bow wavered for a moment.
Then she lowered it. “You’re either the stupidest person I’ve ever met, or the most dangerous.” She walked toward him, eyes never leaving his face. “My name is Kaela Thorne.”
The name struck like a hammer. “Thorne? As in Elder Thorne?”
“My father,” she said flatly. “He runs the outer sect of Liora. Doesn’t know I’m out here.”
Alan didn’t know what to say. Kaela didn’t wait for him to try. “You’re coming with me.”
“Why?”
“Because if the Order’s after you, you’ll be dead by tomorrow unless someone shows you how to survive. And because…” She hesitated. “I’ve been tracking rumors of the Eye for years. I never thought it was real. Until now.”
Alan hesitated, but then nodded. Kaela turned and began walking.
“Where are we going?” he asked, hurrying to follow.
“To a place where no one dares go. A place that might have the answers you need.” She paused at the forest edge and looked over her shoulder. “The Ruins of Aetheryon.”
The Ruins of Aetheryon — The Next Night
They traveled through broken canyons and quiet, moon-drenched valleys. Kaela moved like a shadow, swift and sure. Alan followed, learning quickly to trust her judgment, and her instincts.
By nightfall, they reached the ruins.
Jagged towers loomed from the cracked earth like fingers of a buried giant. Arcane runes shimmered faintly on black stone. The wind howled through the empty halls. Alan felt something stir in his chest again.
“This place is…” he whispered.
“Older than kingdoms,” Kaela said. “Before sects, before the Orders, there were the Primordials. This city was theirs.”
They entered a crumbling temple. At the center stood a pedestal, and on it, another medallion. Cracked. Lifeless.
Kaela approached it with reverence. “They were trying to replicate the Eye,” she murmured. “But they failed.”
Alan stepped forward. The medallion at his side vibrated softly. Suddenly, light flared through the ruin.
Kaela drew her bow. Alan backed away from the pedestal.
From the shadows, a figure emerged, hooded, bent with age, but radiating power.
“You carry the Eye,” the figure rasped.
“Who are you?” Alan demanded.
The figure stepped closer. “I am the Warden of the Forgotten. Keeper of the Nihros Legacy.”
The air grew still. “You are the last,” the Warden said, voice heavy with ancient weight. “The last heir of a line that once defied gods. The Eye chose you because your blood remembers.”
Alan’s heart thundered. “But I don’t know what it wants,” he said. “I don’t know what I am.”
The Warden extended a hand. “Then kneel, Alan Smith. For tonight, you begin the Rite of Unsealing. And the truth shall burn away everything you thought you knew.”
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Chapter 119: Shadows of the New Order
The world had shifted, subtly but unmistakably, in the wake of Alan’s absence. The skies still bore the marks of the war, the land still carried scars of battle,but the absence of the Flamebearer was a wound far deeper than any physical scar. It was as if a heart had stopped beating, and though the body of the world still moved, it did so with a faltering rhythm, uncertain of its own survival.At the center of this new uncertainty was the Council of Dawn, the hastily re-formed governing body made up of surviving lords, scholars,and mystics who had banded together to keep order after the final confrontation. Their meetings, once filled with fiery arguments and desperate solutions, were now subdued affairs, cloaked in the weight of silence.Everywhere, whispers filled the streets:“Where is Alan Smith?”“Wasn’t he supposed to return?”“The Flamebearer doesn’t die… he can’t die.”Yet days had turned to weeks, and no trace of him had surfaced. In the great hall of the Dawn Citadel, the
Chapter 118: A World Without Alan
The silence after the shattering of the crystal was unlike any silence the world had ever known. It was not emptiness, it was suffocation,the weight of a thousand unspoken laments pressing upon every soul across the continents. Where once the pulse of Alan Smith’s existence threaded the veins of creation, there was now… nothing.The world trembled. Not from earthquakes, nor storms, nor celestial cataclysm, but from the raw absence of a presence so deeply woven into the tapestry of fate that reality itself staggered to find balance without it.In the Sacred Citadel, where moments before Alan had stood at the center of converging destinies, the place was barren. Only fragments of broken light hovered in the air like shards of forgotten memory.His companions, Mira, Kael, Seraphine, and Darius, stood motionless, their eyes wide, their mouths half-open as though frozen mid-breath.It was Seraphine who moved first. She stumbled forward, reaching toward the space where Alan had been, her h
Chapter 117: The Editor Arrives
The battlefield was silent. The last fragments of the True Author’s ashes scattered into the void, each particle glowing faintly before dissolving into nothing. The quill he once held, the weapon of his dominion, was gone.Alan lay in Calla’s arms, unconscious but alive, the glow of the forbidden name still pulsing faintly within his chest. His hand twitched around the rebuttal quill. It should have been over. It wasn’t.The stranger’s arrival was like the flip of a page in a book none of them had ever opened. She stood where the True Author had perished, framed in the collapsing remnants of erased realities.Wings of rejected endings arched from her back, shimmering, broken fragments that bled sorrow and fury.She was beautiful and horrifying all at once. Her armor was a mosaic of contradictions: the final death of a hero in one shard, the confession of love cut from another, the betrayal that never made it to print across her gauntlet.Her eyes glowed the cold silver of editorial in
Chapter 116: The Name That Unwrites
The beam of null-ink ripped through the sky like divine lightning, Alan tackled Proto-Alan out of the way, shielding the fragile boy with his own body as the blast hit the ground behind them and unwrote the land itself. Trees blinked out of existence. Stones became blank spaces.Even the concept of time stuttered. Yet the name, the one carved into the cracked ground, remained. Alan had seen it. He couldn’t remember it. But he had felt it, and his soul now shivered beneath its weight.Calla pulled him up. “Alan! Are you alright?!”Alan staggered, blinking rapidly. “I… I saw everything. But it’s gone.”Mira crouched near the carved name, reaching for it, but her fingers passed through the letters like smoke.“It’s receding,” she said. “He’s trying to delete even the memory of it.”Proto-Alan was trembling. “He’ll find us. He’ll come himself.”Codex, now a pulsating prism of fragmented knowledge, whispered, “The True Author is rewriting Volume Zero as we speak. If we stay too long, we’ll
Chapter 115: Volume Two Begins
The impact shattered everything. The throne room’s marble tiles cracked as radiant glyphs spilled from the open tome behind the True Author.Worlds collided, not physically, but conceptually. The rules of their reality twisted, mutated, and fractured as the structure of the multiversal storyweb was revealed.Alan screamed, not in pain, but in resistance. He was not ready to lose. Alan and his companions were yanked upward, out of the Archive, through the spiraling light of the Bastion’s broken ceiling, and hurled into a swirling nexus of realities.They landed atop a transparent platform suspended in the void. Below them floated hundreds of realms, each a story, each with a protagonist, each with a war, Some were dark and violent, Others gleamed with romance.Some were empty. All were bound by the True Author’s hand.Before them, floating just beyond the veil of space, hovered reflections of Alan and his team, alternate versions from alternate Volumes.One Alan was a tyrant in obsidia
Chapter 114: The Redraft War
For one heartbeat, the Archive stood frozen. No wind. No breath. No thought. Even the sun, that stubborn narrator of time, dimmed like a forgotten sentence. The word “Redraft” rippled across existence. And then, reality fractured.From the seams of the Archive, two versions began to emerge. One shimmered with familiar warmth, the world as it was, the flame-scorched battlefield, Calla’s trembling form, Mira’s defiant tears, Codex’s flickering light. The other?The Author’s Redraft. Perfect lines. Clean arcs. No anomalies. No rebellion. It was lifeless. And yet, it was overtaking everything.Alan’s companions began to glitch. Calla looked down at her sword, now reformed into a ceremonial dagger. “What… is this?” Her voice was flatter.Mira looked at her hands. The scars from the Soulfire Trial were gone. “I don’t remember… why I’m angry.”Codex panicked. “They’re being overwritten! Their prior selves are being erased and replaced with idealized variants.”Ilien screamed as his laughter
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