The Flames Within the Chains
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The air was thick with soot and silence.
Chains rattled as Aedric knelt in the heart of the obsidian chamber beneath the crumbling fortress of Dreadhollow—a place even nightmares feared to visit. Shadows coiled around him like serpents, licking his skin with cold whispers of memory and torment. Blood from old wounds had dried into armor over his back, but it was not pain that anchored him—it was clarity.
He was not the boy who once begged the stars for justice.
He was not the prince who fell to betrayal.
He was fire.
And fire remembers everything it burns.
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The runes embedded in the blackened walls pulsed faintly. Each was a seal, ancient and unspoken, carved by magi who feared what Aedric now embraced. His body had become a vessel of forbidden flame. His veins hummed with cinders of a god's wrath. And yet, he waited.
Because she had not arrived.
The girl with the eyes that could see fate.
Lyara.
He had left her behind at the ruined temple of Oryn to chase the phantom of his brother—Caelen Valtoris. The name burned his throat even when unspoken. The half-brother who sat upon the throne built from their father's corpse. The betrayer cloaked in royal silk and venomous lies.
Aedric closed his eyes.
"I will not kneel again."
Suddenly, the chains binding his wrists began to glow—crimson red, like molten steel. The flames within him reacted not with resistance but recognition. He wasn't their prisoner anymore. He was their master.
With a slow breath, Aedric stood.
The shackles shattered.
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Elsewhere in the upper halls of Dreadhollow, the torches flickered erratically. A woman in shadow-black armor moved like a wraith between the rotting pillars. Her hood obscured her face, but the violet glow in her irises betrayed her.
Lyara Nox had arrived.
She followed the echo of prophecy, one that tied her fate to a prince reborn in fire. The vision she'd seen in her curse-glimpses kept replaying—Aedric, standing over a world broken in half, flame-crowned, soul-shattered, unstoppable.
But she didn't fear that version of him.
She feared the world that tried to control it.
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Belowground, Aedric ascended the spiral of cracked stairs, hands still steaming from divine heat. The fortress trembled slightly—not from quakes, but anticipation. His presence here was wrong. The seals were reacting. Magic forged to imprison monsters now feared what it had once bound.
He reached the gate of iron and bone.
A whisper slithered through the cracks:
> "You shouldn't be alive."
Aedric smirked.
"I'm not. I'm what comes after."
With a single step, the gate burst into ash. Beyond it lay the forgotten vault—a sanctum filled with relics of the fallen kingdom. And in its center, bathed in hellish red light, stood an altar with an ancient weapon embedded in stone: The Heartbrand—a blade once wielded by the Crimson Tyrant of old.
Legend said it could only be lifted by one who had died and returned.
Aedric approached.
The whispers grew louder, screaming now, warning him of madness, of ruin, of what he would become.
He ignored them.
His fingers wrapped around the hilt.
The fortress cracked.
And the sword slid free like it had waited an eternity just for him.
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Outside the fortress, Lyara arrived at the main gate just in time to see fire burst from its highest tower. The sky itself turned scarlet, clouds seared into spirals as magic writhed violently.
She whispered only two words:
> "He's awake."
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Meanwhile…
In the golden halls of Vel Siraeth, Prince Caelen Valtoris paused his toast. A flicker of flame danced on the rim of his wine. A chill spread through him. Something had changed in the leyline. His brother… was moving again.
He smiled.
"So. The ghost remembers how to haunt."
He turned to Selene, seated beside him—her expression cold, unreadable.
"Shall we welcome him back?" he asked.
She didn't answer.
Because her heart had just shattered all over again.
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