The Singing Scar
The land changed long before they reached it.
Evelyn felt it in her bones—an ache beneath the core's steady hum, like an old song she had once tried to forget now playing again in a broken rhythm.
Even the wind was wrong.
Where the eastern fields had been flat and riddled with bones and dust, here the air shimmered, and the soil sang.
Not loudly.
But in pulses.
Breathless, rhythmic pulses.
Like the heartbeat of something too old to die.
Torren said nothing, but his hand lingered near his blade more often than before. His eyes swept the horizon, then the sky, then back again—as if expecting something to rise from the cracked land and name them trespassers.
They crested the final ridge at dusk.
And there it was.
The Singing Scar.
A gash in the earth miles wide and leagues long. Not a canyon. Not a natural break. No.
This was deliberate.
Carved.
Wrought by a hand—not of man, nor beast, but something in between. The edges of the ravine glowed faintly in the dying light, as though the stone itself remembered fire.
And the sound...
The sound came not from wind or wildlife, but from the stone walls themselves. Like metal cords drawn taut and vibrating beneath the skin of the world.
A wordless harmony.
Evelyn fell to her knees, unbidden. The weight of it crushed against her chest, hot and terrible and familiar.
Torren moved to her, alarmed. "Evelyn!"
"I'm fine," she gasped, though her palms glowed now—corelight radiating from the veins like rivers of gold beneath her skin.
"They made this," she whispered. "The First Corebearers. Or what was left of them."
"How do you know?"
"Because it's singing in my blood."
The descent was treacherous.
Loose shale and whispering winds challenged every foothold. But they went anyway—drawn not just by purpose, but compulsion. At the base of the scar, the stone gave way to obsidian panels, layered like scales. Symbols were etched into each one. No dust settled. No moss grew. It was clean, ageless.
Evelyn's steps slowed.
Each stone vibrated beneath her soles, resonating with her breath.
She reached the center.
A raised dais, circular and flat, stood before her like an altar.
She stepped onto it.
The moment her foot touched the heart of the scar, flame bloomed.
Not literal fire—but memory.
Voices.
So many voices.
"Sing, Eyrelin."
"Bind the hollow flame."
"You must remember."
"You must choose."
The world fell away.
Evelyn stood in a memory not her own. Again.
The sky above was black and cracked with lightning. A city burned in the distance—its towers swallowed in unnatural flame.
She stood before a thousand kneeling figures.
Each bore the corebrand behind their heart.
Each looked to her.
Her hands were raised, wrapped in fire not her own.
And her voice, when it spoke, was both hers and not.
"You followed me here, across ash and bone. But I cannot lead you where I must go next."
One figure—Torren's mirror, but older—stepped forward.
"We would follow you into Hollow, my Flamewarden."
Eyrelin—Evelyn—shook her head.
"You must survive. And survival needs stories. Tell them. Remember me as fire. That is enough."
She turned away.
Walked into the heart of the void.
And disappeared.
Evelyn screamed.
Reality snapped back like a whip.
She collapsed against the obsidian, sweat pouring from her brow. The flame inside her dimmed to a flicker.
Torren knelt beside her, panic etched across his face.
"What happened?"
"I was her," she rasped. "For a moment. I remembered... everything she gave up."
"You're still you, though. Right?"
Evelyn looked at him, eyes shining with afterlight.
"I think I'm both. Her echo. And myself. Whatever that means."
Silence returned to the scar.
But Evelyn knew the cost.
That memory wasn't just a vision—it was a vow.
A turning point.
Whatever lay ahead, she would no longer simply follow fate's trail.
She was the trail now.
Fire-walker. Echo-carrier. Coreborn and cursed.
She stood slowly.
The obsidian platform no longer hummed.
Instead, it waited.
And in the center, where she had stood, a new glyph burned itself into the stone:
"SHE REMEMBERS."