The Blood That Remembers

"Magic fades. Empires fall. But blood… remembers."

Location: The Wailing Forest – Border of the Forbidden North

Night draped the trees like velvet soaked in ash.

The forest moaned with every wind.

It had no birds. No beasts.

Only lost memories.

Aelios stepped between the roots, silent, the shard from Saelyn still pulsing in his palm.

Its hum had led him here through valleys of bone, across rivers of dusk.

And now it whispered.

Not in words.

But in blood.

He knelt. Pressed his hand to the earth.

The roots burned blue.

The air cracked.

Suddenly the trees moved.

Not wind.

But memory.

From the soil, a voice rose ancient, gravelled, almost broken:

"I remember you, little flame."

The ground split.

And from it rose a monolith of glass and amber, pulsing with veins of light.

Inside it:

A figure.

Trapped.

Eyes closed.

Armor of obsidian.

A crown broken in half.

"Father?" Aelios whispered the word unfamiliar on his tongue.

But it wasn't the emperor.

This was someone older.

The First Flamebearer.

The first of Aelios' bloodline erased from history.

And he was still alive…

locked in eternal stasis by the Veil, for crimes they never dared speak.

The Blood Trial Begins

The shard in Aelios' hand shattered.

And the forest howled.

A ring of flames erupted around him blue and silver, not of this world.

Symbols danced in the fire:

🜁 The Sign of Sky

🜃 The Root of Bone

🜄 The Eye of the Hidden Sun

Then came the Voice again:

"Only blood that remembers its sorrow can command its legacy.

Burn, or be forgotten."

And so it began.

Aelios screamed as the fire pierced him not to destroy, but to awaken.

Visions flooded his mind:

A thousand ancestors.

A war that reshaped the stars.

His mother… wielding the fire of gods.

Himself… standing atop a shattered palace, the world kneeling, the sky cracked.

Elsewhere…

In a moonlit chamber deep in the capital, Seren stared at the mark left by Aelios on the prince.

She had seen that power once before in a rebellion long buried.

She remembered a man who looked like Aelios.

And she remembered… being saved.

Her memories had been erased.

But the fire of that night still lingered in her bones.

"He's not just prophecy," she whispered.

"He's the scar they tried to forget."

She closed her book. Took her blade.

And for the first time in her life…

she hesitated before the hunt.