The ground cracked with every step.
They said Mount Erendis had a heartbeat, and the Pilgrimage Road was its vein — a cursed path carved through black stone and sulfur fields, choked with ash where nothing grew.
It was the road of martyrs.
Archon-General Tharek Solen rode at the head of the column, his crimson warplate gleaming beneath layers of ash. Behind him, ten thousand soldiers marched in perfect silence, their spears angled to the sky, their faces unreadable behind masks of polished steel and sun-etched bone.
To the Dominion, war was worship. And Tharek was its high priest.
Beside him, cloaked in white and gold, walked Serenya Valir.
"You should not have gone to him," Tharek said without turning.
"I was sent as a voice, not a sword," Serenya replied. "And I spoke. Nothing more."
"You still carry him," Tharek said. "In your tone. In your hesitation."
She said nothing.
"You think I can't smell doubt? You think it doesn't burn?" His eyes finally met hers, cold and blistering. "We walk toward godhood, Lady Valir. If you drag human weakness into the Vault, it will consume you before the door opens."
Serenya looked ahead — toward the plume of black smoke rising in the east, where Mount Erendis loomed like the spine of a dead god. "And if it's not godhood waiting for us? What then?"
"Then we take it anyway."
That night, they made camp at the edge of the Cradle of Cinders — the last valley before the mountain, where lava once ran in rivers and the stars had not touched ground in centuries.
Serenya wandered from the firelight, her white robes dimmed by soot. Alone, she knelt again in prayer — not to the Flame, but to silence. The kind of silence she had not known since childhood.
Kaelen was right to walk away.
But I was right to stay.
Wasn't she?
In the outer tent of the war council, Tharek Solen unrolled a forbidden map — one copied from the ruins of a broken monastery in the far north. Its ink shimmered faintly with heat, and its lines pulsed with something unnatural.
Another figure waited across the firelit table: a masked woman draped in violet and veils.
"The Sable Garden sends its regards," she purred. "And its price."
Tharek's lip curled. "You deal in secrets. I deal in blood."
"Then you'll need both. The Vault has already stirred."
He leaned forward. "You've seen the signs?"
"Worse," the woman said. "I've seen who it calls to."
Far below, in her tent, Serenya dreamt of a hand reaching through flame — not to strike her, but to hold hers. When she tried to see the face, it was always his.
And when she woke, the tent was cold, and her breath came out like frost.
She stood, slowly, her eyes falling on the scroll she'd hidden in her satchel — the one she had stolen from the Grand Archive. The one that began with a single, ancient line:
The First Flame does not burn alone.