Volume 2 – Inheritance of Fire
Chapter 1 – Echoes of Self
Part 2 -The Merchant-King
The spell circle burned blue.
Not fire. Not light.
Value.
That was the essence tied to this thread.
Where Darius answered through instinct and battle-scarred duty, this one came through tension—through calculation. The moment I touched the rune, I tasted copper and silk, heard coinfall on stone, and smelled ink-damp paper dried over flame.
Soren.
The city was vast. Older than Hollowreach. Older than the kingdom lines drawn in crumbling ink.
A walled trade citadel sitting on the edge of a river that gleamed like black glass. Canals snaked between towers carved with language I couldn't read, but which his hands knew. Somewhere deep in that market-sprawl, behind layered courts and quiet deals, the man who had once been Soren Vale stood watching the auction floor from a balcony draped in crimson cloth.
He wore it like royalty.
The robe. The silence. The expectation.
He had awoken three days earlier, lying across silk-stuffed cushions in a private railcar moving through an eastern corridor of the continent. No system noise. No startup chime. Just his own breathing, the scent of smoke-lacquered wood, and the distant hum of gears.
Two assistants had been there when he stirred. They called him Chancellor Vel Arden.
He hadn't flinched.
Hadn't asked who that was.
He had simply adjusted the gold clasps on his collar, stood without hesitation, and asked for his ledgers.
He hadn't remembered me yet.
But he remembered numbers.
The flow of power through coin and trade. The way to destabilize a monopoly with a whisper and reinforce a lie with a perfectly timed transaction. His staff had spoken of him in reverent tones.
"He predicted the collapse of the Southport Guild six weeks before the riots."
"He moved all our trade lines out of Ashkar Province before the siege."
"He negotiated the iron embargo without ever leaving his chambers."
They weren't fabrications.
He had done these things.
Not Soren Vale. Not the strategist I knew.
But the man he had become in this world.
That afternoon, he opened a locked chamber in the back of his estate.
The room was empty. No furnishings. Just a single pedestal, dustless. On it: a sealed obsidian coin. No markings. No kingdom crest.
Just a symbol.
A five-pointed star inside a crown.
He didn't touch it.
Not at first.
He stared for a long time, as if trying to remember whether it should frighten him.
Then he reached out and let his fingers rest on it.
And the world shivered.
From my side, I felt the magic activate.
But it didn't spark like Darius's had. It shifted.
The weight of it moved — like a currency exchanged across distance.
I saw nothing.
But I heard him.
His voice in my mind.
Not a sentence. Just one word:
"…Founder?"
Like a guess he didn't trust.
Like a name that lived somewhere behind memory, waiting for context to make it real.
In Vel Arden's quarters, the coin had melted into a pool of glowing mana, then vanished.
He didn't panic.
He poured a glass of red wine, sipped it slowly, and wrote three names on parchment:
• Caelan
• Darius
• Naomi
Then he circled "Ezra."
I opened my eyes in Hollowreach as the flame beneath Soren's rune turned silver.
Second connection complete.
He didn't know what had happened.
But he understood value.
And he had just begun investing in the truth.