Francis_9439

Ashes of the First Flame

A novel by [Francis 9439]

For centuries, the world of Elaris has burned under the divine light of the First Flame, a sacred fire worshiped by the tyrannical Solar Dominion — a theocratic empire that claims godhood and unity through conquest. The Empress rules with holy fire and iron will, casting down cities that refuse her light, branding all who resist as heretics and rebels.

But across the shattered lands of the Free Marches, a spark of defiance refuses to die.

Kaelen Virelth, the exiled son of a disgraced noble house, is thrust into leadership after his brother is assassinated. Once a scholar and a pacifist, Kaelen becomes the reluctant face of a rebellion. As war spreads like wildfire, Kaelen must decide whether to become a killer to save the world — or lose everything he loves.

On the other side of the war, Serenya Valir, a devoted priestess of the Flame, begins to question the cost of blind faith. Sent to root out traitors within the Dominion, she uncovers dark secrets buried beneath sacred temples — and a prophecy foretelling a choice that will either redeem the world or end it in ash.

Amid the chaos rise other forces: the exiled Scorched Order, mage-knights blamed for a forgotten catastrophe; the elemental Aetherborn Tribes, whose magic the Dominion fears and hates; and the seductive spies of the Sable Garden, who pull strings behind every throne.

As old gods stir and ancient powers awaken, love blooms between enemies, loyalty crumbles into betrayal, and the line between salvation and damnation blurs. To stop the cycle of fire and ruin, someone must destroy the First Flame — or become its final bearer.

But power never dies quietly.

Ashes of  the First Flame

Rien waited until the second moon waned.

She had packed nothing but the mirror and a shard of old bone—etched with a single flame-rune she did not recognize but felt was hers.

The village of Lareth was quiet. Too quiet.

The silence wasn't peaceful. It was watching.

She moved through the trees like a whisper. Her feet remembered paths the forest had long since "forgotten." Every turn she took, she shouldn't have known.

Something deeper than memory guided her.

And the lie of the world hated truth.

She wasn't five steps into the outer woods when the first one came.

It unfolded from a tree, like bark turned inside out.

Its face was stitched from fragments of other faces. A dozen mouths. No eyes. Its limbs moved like thread pulled too tight.

"Return to forgetting," it crooned.

Its seams flickered. The bark-tree behind it groaned.

The creature hissed, and lunged—

The bone-shard flashed with sudden emberlight, carving a mark in the air that sliced the lie.

The creature howled and unraveled—vanishing like thread yanked from cloth.

She didn't stop running after that.

The forest bent strangely. Paths tried to loop. Familiar trees stood in the wrong places. But Rien trusted what the others had lost:

She ran until the sky broke open—not with thunder, but with a whispering sound like a loom turning too fast.

Above her, she saw threads unraveling in the stars.

And a voice—Kaelen's—echoed faintly:

"I touched it… and now it's everywhere."

Far across the world, Davin woke screaming.

A word etched itself in his skin: Rien.

Ashrel felt the wind carry her name through the northern peaks.

"She is the fire beneath the false."

And beneath the Ember Grove, the figure in the root-chamber paused.

That meant the Loom still had knots it could not control.

And somewhere, just beyond the edge of falsehood, Rien found a clearing that remembered her.

There, she knelt and placed the mirror in the grass.

In it, her reflection stared back—clear.

The Threadless Ones