The Blood Beyond Fire
The Aftermath – Vale of Banners
Silence clung to the Vale like a burial shroud.
The scorched ground still smoked where Ashren had stood, a crater carved by the force of his unleashed power. Dozens of Hollowborn had been reduced to dust, and yet… there was no triumph in the air.
Only fear.
Men stared at him as they would a weapon—sharp, unpredictable, and capable of ending everything.
Ashren stood at the heart of it, chest heaving, veins still glowing dimly with frostfire. His eyes, for a moment, had gone completely white—no pupils, no humanity.
He had become something else.
Something older than vengeance.
The Memory in the Flame
Later, alone in the war tent, Ashren tried to understand what had happened.
The visions hadn't been dreams.
They were memories. But not his.
He saw a battlefield of silver sand and black skies. A man cloaked in flame led an army of frostbound titans. At his side—a woman with eyes like Seris.
They fought the Hollow Queen when she first crawled from the Wound Between Worlds.
And they lost.
Ashren stumbled back from the vision, blood dripping from his nose.
This was no inheritance.
It was a curse passed down through time.
The Hollow Queen Reacts
Far away, in her throne of bone and root, the Hollow Queen stirred from her meditation.
A ripple had reached her—an echo from the depths of the Vale. She tasted the blood of the First Flamebearer and smiled with blackened lips.
"He awakens," she whispered to no one and everyone.
Her court of broken souls knelt silently, weeping shadows in unison.
"Let him burn. And when he is ash… I will wear his memory like a crown."
She rose, her monstrous form peeling back to reveal a woman's face beneath—a beautiful, ageless thing.
And her army began to move.
Seris's Discovery
Meanwhile, Seris returned from the crypt with ancient texts, bone-carved fragments, and the cracked core of the sarcophagus. It pulsed softly in her satchel, warming whenever Ashren drew near.
She met Caelis and the others in the strategy hall.
"This is older than the kingdoms," she said. "Older than the Hollow Queen. He wasn't just born with fire. He was chosen by it—shaped by it."
"But chosen for what?" Caelis asked.
Seris looked out the window toward the blackened crater.
"To end what was started a thousand years ago."
Ashren's Isolation
Ashren kept his distance.
He didn't speak.
Didn't eat.
Didn't sleep.
The power within him had grown quieter, but not dormant. He feared every breath might spark something irreversible.
He remembered the boy with the locket. The rebels who looked at him like a god. The deaths he caused when he lost control.
What if this is who I really am?
But then Seris entered the tent.
She didn't speak either.
She just reached for his hand—and for once, his fire didn't burn her.
Instead… it recognized her.
The Decision
That night, he stood before the rebels—not as a leader, not as a hero, but as a man trying to become more than his curse.
"If you follow me," he said, voice low, "you follow a fire that may consume us all. But I promise you this… I'll take it to the Hollow Queen's throat before it takes you."
No one left.
Instead, they knelt.
And in the distance, the Wound Between Worlds pulsed—like it, too, was waiting.