The wind that carried them north was heavy not with dust or ash, but with expectation.
News traveled faster than flame.
By the time Eren, Elira, and Syra left the ruins of Serethal behind, the world already whispered of a bearer who had stepped through the Sundered Gate and returned unburned. In taverns carved into cliff-faces, in shadowed forests where old Orders lingered, in the vaults beneath high towers where ancient Seers still breathed through masks of gold they spoke the name he had given freely:
Eren.
No titles. No honorifics. Just the name of a man who had faced the flame and made it his own.
But not all whispers were kind.
Some called him the False Flame. Others, The Second Wound. The Ashen Reclaimers declared him Proof of Return. The Red Circle marked him Herald of the New Pyre.
And the Covenant?
They said nothing.
They simply moved.
Eren and his companions knew war was coming long before the first banners were raised. You could feel it in the air the silence in the animals, the way the roads no longer sang with trade carts, the tightening of every villager's gaze when strangers approached.
By the fourth day of travel, they saw the first signs.
Villages abandoned. Crops left to rot. Not from plague, not from famine but from fear.
Eren rode quietly at the head of the small column. They had no army. Only themselves and a single message burning behind his eyes:
We are not running anymore.
They made camp in an old stone outpost nestled beneath the cliffs of Darnhollow. It was one of the few places Elira said still held fragments of the old Veil magic a place where sound twisted, where spoken truths could linger for hours before fading.
Syra didn't sleep that night.
She kept watch atop the crumbled wall, staring into the black woods to the west.
Eren found her there before dawn.
"Something out there?" he asked.
"Not yet," she replied. "But soon."
He leaned beside her. "You've been quiet."
"I've been listening."
"To what?"
She glanced at him. "The world. It's… adjusting to you. Like muscle learning to carry new weight."
Eren looked toward the horizon. "Feels like it's bracing to drop me."
Syra smirked faintly. "It might. But not yet."
A silence stretched between them comfortable, if tense.
Then she said, "Do you know what the Circle's doing?"
He shook his head.
"They're not just recruiting. They're anointing. Trying to name a new flame-bearer before your image spreads too far. They want to erase you by overwriting you."
Eren clenched his fists. "Then I'll give them something they can't ignore."
By the end of that week, they reached a crossroads carved into the cliffs.
There, they met the first resistance.
A warband of the Red Circle had claimed the old fort that guarded the northern trade route. At first, it seemed abandoned no banners, no firelight. But Syra spotted the runes beneath the stones Circle sigils, meant to mislead the eye.
Eren didn't hesitate.
"We smoke them out."
Elira raised an eyebrow. "There could be two dozen men in there."
"Then they'll fall together," he said. "I'm done being quiet."
Syra gave a short nod. "Then we draw them out."
They struck that night.
Elira scaled the rear wall using old siege vines. Syra disabled the outer traps and marked the inner courtyards with smoke powder that would blind and corrode. Eren walked through the front gate when the signal went up cloak billowing, Akreth gleaming at his side.
The Circle recognized him.
Some ran.
Most fought.
They died.
The flames from that skirmish rose high enough to be seen from three valleys over. Eren didn't speak a word during the battle, nor afterward. He simply stood in the courtyard of the fallen fort, wiping ash from his blade.
The surviving guards few and frightened were bound and given a choice:
Spread the truth, or become part of it.
Most chose to run.
One knelt.
Eren offered him no blessing. No mark. Just a single sentence:
"The fire no longer takes what we don't give."
By the next morning, six more travelers had joined them. By nightfall, there were fourteen. A healer. Two swordhands. A woman who once sang for kings. None of them had powers. None of them carried banners.
But they carried resolve.
Eren didn't ask for loyalty.
He didn't need to.
Syra spoke what none of them would say aloud: "You're becoming the center of the war."
Elira added, "And not because you started it."
Eren nodded. "Because I'm the only one walking through it."
On the tenth day, they saw the first banners.
A line of Covenant scouts watching from a cliff. They didn't speak. Didn't move.
But their message was clear.
The war wasn't coming.
It had begun.