The flame did not burn her—it spoke, and its voice carried the weight of every forgotten Warden who had ever dared to dream.
Evelyn knelt at the hollow of the vault chamber, breath caught somewhere between awe and terror. The ember that hovered in her palm—a fragment of the ancient heartfire—pulsed with a rhythmic hum, not unlike a distant heartbeat echoing through stone and time.
Torren stood behind her, silent but watchful. His bandaged side still bled through the wrappings, but he made no complaint. He hadn't since they'd entered this place—a ruin older than memory, carved into the bones of the Listening Earth.
She wasn't sure if it was the silence, or the strange markings on the vaulted ceiling, or the whisper of wind that shouldn't exist underground—but Evelyn felt watched.
The ember flared again. Gold-orange light spilled from her palm and touched the carved floor like ink soaking into paper. Glyphs awakened, glowing faintly. She did not know the words, but they knew her.
"Fire remembers," a voice said, not aloud, but within. Deep. Feminine. Ancient.
Evelyn staggered backward, dropping the ember—but it did not fall. It hovered where her hand had been, spinning slowly, casting shifting shadows on the stone.
Torren reached for her. "Evelyn—what is it? What's happening?"
She opened her mouth, but her voice came out strange. Distant. "It's... speaking."
He glanced toward the ember warily. "We should go. You're not—this place is wrong. You're shaking."
"I'm not afraid," she said, and it was the truth. The fear had burned away in the fire's presence, replaced by something colder, sharper. Wonder. Recognition.
The glyphs on the walls formed a circle of light. Evelyn stepped forward again, and the air around her shifted like the opening of a great unseen eye.
The world peeled away.
She stood on a charred plateau beneath a sky of swirling ember-clouds. Monoliths, broken and weeping molten light, circled the plain like fallen sentinels. In the center of it all stood a figure.
Cloaked in robes that moved like fire-smoke, skin etched with smoldering lines of power, the woman did not look up as Evelyn approached. Her eyes were silver—not reflective, but luminous, like moonlight on water.
"You are late," the woman said.
Evelyn blinked. "Do I know you?"
"You knew me once. Before memory. Before the core knew your name."
The fire surged around the woman's feet, but did not consume. Evelyn felt her breath falter. "Are you one of the First?"
The silver-eyed figure smiled. It was not comforting.
"No. I am before even that. I am what came after the light was stolen and before the Wardens made their Oaths. I am the memory of the First Flame, kept alive by voices like yours."
Evelyn reached for her core—felt it pulse inside her, fractured but humming in resonance. "What do you want from me?"
"Nothing you are not already becoming."
The monoliths groaned in the distance. Ash rained down like snow. The woman extended a hand, and Evelyn took it without hesitation. Fire roared between their palms.
"There is a path that begins here, flamebound one. You have heard the Hollow whisper. You have seen the Echoed learn. The old balance crumbles. And when it does..."
A vision struck her like a storm: a city drowned in cinders, children with molten eyes, torches lit against a rising dark that walked and spoke and remembered.
"...you will decide what lights the way forward."
She woke gasping, slumped against the vault wall. The ember was gone.
Torren crouched beside her, his face pale. "You vanished. Just stood there—staring into nothing. You said names I didn't understand."
She wiped her brow. Her skin was damp with sweat, though the chamber was cold. "It showed me things."
He studied her for a long moment. "Evelyn... is it you talking? Or whatever's inside you?"
She didn't answer.
Because she wasn't sure anymore.
That night, as they camped on the ridgeline above the vault, Evelyn kept the fire low. She listened to the wind move through the rock, and every now and then, she thought she heard the same voice again—soft, buried in the wind like a prayer spoken in reverse.
Torren said little. He kept the edge of his blade sharp and his back to the fire.
When she finally lay down to rest, she looked to the stars, which felt somehow dimmer than before.
The First Flame had remembered her.
Now she had to remember herself.