The shrine wasn't stone—not exactly. Up close, Evelyn saw it was fused bone and slag-glass, calcified into curves and spirals that mimicked breathless agony. Faces—real or imagined—jutted from its base like fossils in pain, and the smell that rose from the cracked altar basin was old copper and ash. Not rot. Not decay. Just memory… burned and buried.
Torren hesitated at the edge of the clearing. His jaw set, one hand clenched white around his walking stave.
"Are we… meant to enter?" he asked, voice low.
Vareth didn't answer right away. He approached the structure with a reverence that bordered on fear, then knelt—not in prayer, Evelyn thought, but in warning.
"This is a Flamewell. Last lit during the War of Tithes. Shriven means it's empty… or that something took the fire from it."
Evelyn stepped closer. The heartshard in her chest pulsed once—hot and insistent.
"Do we relight it?" she asked. The idea came unbidden, but her fingers already itched, the ember inside aching to reach.
"You're not supposed to," Vareth said. "Unless you were born to it. Unless it asks."
Silence.
The wind had gone still again.
Then the echo returned—not from the cliffs, but from the shrine itself. A distant hum. A murmur without voice, pressing behind her thoughts like water behind stone.
Torren reached toward her. "Evelyn—"
"I hear it," she whispered.
She stepped into the threshold.
Her foot crossed the line of soot and ash, and the shrine flared—brief and bright—as if gasping. Light cracked from the base like veins igniting. Vareth swore and pulled his blade. Torren moved to follow her, but the shrine pushed, like a pulse of heat and silence that knocked him back a step.
Only Evelyn remained standing.
The flame curled up her spine—not fire, but memory in heat-form, images burned into thought. She saw a child's hand reach into a brazier, not with pain, but need. She saw mountains turning black, not because they were dying—but because something beneath was waking. And she saw the woman again—the mirror-eyed shape who did not smile, only watched.
"You carry what should have died," said a voice from the core of the shrine. "You light what devours."
Evelyn dropped to one knee, teeth clenched, palm pressing to the stone floor as energy licked out from her ribs. She could feel the shard splitting, not breaking—growing.
A figure shimmered in the flame—a ghost of something not alive and never quite dead. The Old Warden. Broad shoulders, antler helm split by time. He did not look at her. He looked through.
"We lit these shrines to hold the Echoed at bay," he said, voice burned and deep. "But each fire came with cost. One memory, freely given."
Evelyn stood, trembling.
"What memory?" she asked.
He turned.
"Yours."
She flinched as the flame touched her temples—memories bleeding from her in golden threads: her father shaping ward-posts under the elderwood trees. Her mother's hand brushing a glyph-stained journal. Torren, bruised and proud, offering her the carved knot-stone when they were children.
One memory vanished, stolen like a snuffed candle.
She didn't know which.
Then, fire. Real and sudden. The basin lit, a slow burn of unnatural light—the heartfire.
The shrine breathed.
Ren dropped to one knee outside, muttering something in another tongue. Torren surged forward again, forced back by a flickering heat wall.
Vareth merely watched. "It accepted her," he murmured.
But Evelyn couldn't hear him anymore.
She stood within the shrine, and the flame curled around her shoulders like a crown.
Her eyes flickered amber.
The shrine whispered again: "One fire kindles another. The waste remembers. The waste watches."
When the light finally died down, Evelyn staggered back into Torren's arms.
He caught her, just barely.
Her skin was warm. Too warm. And her eyes did not blink for a long, long time.
Vareth knelt beside her, his expression unreadable. "You've marked yourself," he said. "Every Warden for a hundred miles will know something's changed."
Evelyn looked at him, unsteady but alive. "I didn't choose it."
"No," he said. "But it chose you."
Behind them, the shrine continued to glow.