What Remains After Flame

The sky above Vel'Kareth pulsed with molten rhythm as ever but something was different in the air. The city didn't move in a different way, but it looked differently now. People were beginning to speak softly, and walk urgently. Not from fear. From sensing something was there, even if they couldn't name it.

Anna and Michael were seated on the rooftop terrace of her home, the kind of still space that only firelight and time could carve. Below them, Kael schooled Arion, their shouts and the rare bolt of stave meeting earth vibrating faintly through the air.

"I once had a brother," Anna said, not suddenly, but softly.

Michael looked at her.

"In one of my lives," she added. "He was younger. Thought the world might reignite if only you burned the right things down first."

"Did it work?"

She smiled weakly, gazing on the horizon. "For a little while. Until he figured out he'd begun with the wrong things."

Michael stayed quiet. The fire between them crackled softly in its basin.

"I don't remember the name," she said. "But I remember the expression in his eyes when I saw him one last time. It wasn't anger. It was… disappointment. Like he had hoped I would sit there with him."

Michael looked at her again.

Not with pity. With recognition.

"You still think about him?"

"Just when people say the world's too broken to fix."

She looked over at him, eyes warm, tired, but clear.

"And you, at times, remind me of him." Not the way he ended up. The way he started."

Michael let out a loud, long low breath. "I don't know if that's a compliment or a warning."

Anna smiled. "Yes."

Below The Map

Kael had brought Arion with her to check out a report from one of Orien's outer patrols. A nearby summoner checkpoint near the collapsed Soulfont had fallen silent. Not attacked. Just… off.

When they got there, nothing appeared amiss except the fire markers had been turned. Not burned. Bent. Like the flame had attempted to speak, but had been interrupted mid-sentence.

Arion trudged along a Thread trail drawn through the ancient summoning lines below the checkpoint. Well, it wasn't glowing but it hummed, faintly, against his palm. A resonance pulse. Ancient. Not local.

Kael crouched beside him. "That is not Pyrrhion signature."

"No," Arion whispered. "It's… older."

He touched the edge of a split floor panel —and it opened, not through some sort of magic, but by Thread response.

Inside: a hidden chamber. Small. Ran in silence. And at the center

A map.

Twelve Realms. One missing.

Not faded. Not destroyed.

Scratched out.

And at the bottom, all but obscured by dust and years:

Eidara was right. We only delay the fire.

Whispers in the Wind

That evening, when Anna and Michael returned and joined the other diners, Kael spread the map over the table. Anna's face remained impassive but her lips pursed slightly.

Arion skimmed one finger over the exact spot of the missing Realm.

"She's not coming back; she's coming back." "She is going to try to finish what she started."

Michael gazed out the window — Pyrrhion's sky thick with flame, but unyielding and steady.

But underneath it all, he could feel the edges of something fraying.

The next call came at dawn.

A guild runner barefoot, tinged with dust, and not yet knee-high to a staff—burst into the courtyard in the middle of breakfast, panting as though the very air had been after him.

"Order from the Emberline quarter," he panted. "They need help. Overnight, Soulfire spires cracked open something dug up under the Thread lattice. Spirits aren't responding. Three summoners missing."

He looked at Anna.

And only Anna.

Not out of command. Out of expectation.

She rose slowly, brushing her sleeve before her gaze flicked to Kael, then Michael, then Arion.

No hesitation.

"We'll go."

The Emberline Fault

The quarter was not far away but it felt like worlds.

Thread energy here writhed unpredictably. Summoners from the local guild outpost had already sketched containment wards, but the fissures in the fountaining fireline cut beneath the city's foundation far deeper than any natural fault line had a right to go.

Kael gazed at the scorch marks. "This wasn't a surge."

Michael knelt at one of the glyph fractures. "It tunneled. From below. Like it was hiding from being found."

Arion shivered faintly. "Not spirit movement. Something with intent."

They went down a path to an old sublevel — a collapsed flame chamber that had been used for stabilizing starter threads. Now it crackled with interference.

They found it at the far end.

Half-disintegrated, sealed cage, scrawled runes in a dialect even Anna didn't immediately identify. Inside it: nothing.

Outside there: three names etched in ember-chalk, undone.

Kael touched one and pulled back quickly.

"That's a binding pattern. Old."

Arion narrowed his eyes. "This was not a failure of nature. Someone was trying to pick something here."

Michael turned slowly. "Did we stop it?"

He glanced at the floor. At the dust. In the silence.

"No," she said. "We got here after."

...

Stepping back into the open air, a soft wind stirred across the seared stones.

Michael was the first to notice it a pattern traced into the ash at the edge of the spire, nearly too subtle to see.

A handprint.

Not large.

But scorched right into the surface the flesh seared, not charred.

And next to it, in the vernacular of Thread-keepers:

"Mercy is a luxury for those willing to take it."

That Evening  Back at the House

Anna was at the window, watching the sky. Kael was honing her blade in the next room. Arion looked again at the symbols he'd written down before. Michael looked at the flame basin — still, warm, waiting.

"We weren't meant to be in this," Arion said.

"No," Michael replied. "But we are."

Anna didn't move.

But she spoke softly not to them. Maybe not even to herself.

"She knows we're here now."

And well out of Pyrrhion's light…

Eidara smiled.