Theodore tossed the book onto Ezra's cot. It hit the mattress with a thud that echoed louder than it should have, as though the thing had weight beyond its size—like something buried inside it struggled to be heard. Dust lifted in a lazy spiral, disturbed from ages of sleep. Ezra reached for it, but paused. The cover wasn't leather. Not quite. It was warm—living warm—like skin that remembered the sun. When he laid his fingers on it, the surface gave, just slightly, as if it exhaled. It pulsed once. Then again.
Theodore watched from the doorway, his usual smirk nowhere to be found. "Read that first," he said, voice dry, but stripped of mockery. "Then come tell me again how badly you want to touch a demon."
Ezra frowned. "I thought they were called celestials."
"Call them what you want," Theodore muttered. "A rose by any other name still burns the soul out of your ribs."
Ezra reached again, but Theodore's hand shot out like a viper, gripping his wrist. His eyes—normally sleepy and amused—burned now with something sharp and ancient. Not fear. Recognition. "Every fool who tried left a stain in that book. Most didn't make it past page three."
Ezra swallowed. "What happened?"
Theodore let go. "Their eyes melted. Their bones turned to sugar glass. Pick your ending. They all scream the same."
He turned away. "Read it. Alone. Cover to cover. Then we'll talk."
Ezra opened it.
The pages were brittle, yellowed, but the ink—oh, the ink moved. Not visibly, but aware. Like it noticed him. Like it was watching. The first entry was signed in a jagged, scorched scrawl:
I, Elias Veyne, sought the voice behind the flame. On the third night, my blood boiled. They poured water down my throat. It steamed back out. My screams melted the stone. I write this with blackened fingers. Do not follow.
Ezra turned the page.
Kira of the White Sands made it to the seventh invocation. When they unwrapped her body, her skin disintegrated like burnt paper. We buried an empty coffin.
The parchment there was marked with a dark brown smear. Dried blood. He touched it—instantly, the paper bit him. A hiss of pain. A drop of blood. It vanished, absorbed.
Next:
Joren the Reckless laughed through the final incantation. They found his teeth embedded in the ceiling. His tongue was still burning when we arrived.
Ezra's stomach churned. He turned the page again.
The writing changed. Crisp, sharp. Familiar.
Miss of House Veyne completed the communion. The fire hollowed him. What walks in my skin is not what entered the circle.
Ezra stared at the name, then looked up. Theodore stood in the doorway, silent.
"This isn't magic," he said. "It's a slow suicide."
The final page was blank—except for one sentence burned into the top.
Your turn.
And beneath it, the page waited. Ezra's hands trembled as he reached for the pen.
They left under cover of night. No torches. No moon. Only frost and wind and the bone-rattle silence of the mountain trail. The path curled above the clouds, into dead air where breath felt like broken glass. Stars crowded close, suffocating. Watching.
"This is where the brave come to scream," Theodore said, kicking aside a half-frozen ribcage. "Try not to embarrass yourself."
At the summit stood nine monoliths. Black stone, ancient as the world's breath. Obsidian slick with frozen mist. Words etched into them shifted when Ezra blinked—warnings older than any kingdom. His brand throbbed under his shirt.
Theodore dipped a brush into a vial of starlight-infused mercury. "The First Sun died screaming," he muttered, painting sigils onto Ezra's chest, "and from its corpse, seven divine embers scattered. What's inside you? One of them."
Ezra swallowed. "And the others?"
"Waiting."
Then Theodore was gone, leaving Ezra alone at the peak.
The first night, Ezra meditated in the center of the circle. The cold bit deep, but the brand on his chest burned hotter. The wind howled like wolves starved of gods.
The second, he whispered every invocation Theodore had drilled into his skull. His voice cracked. His tongue bled. The mountain didn't care.
The third night, his voice broke entirely. His blood felt like it was turning to ice. Or fire. Or both.
Time unraveled.
The sun stopped rising. The stars froze mid-breath. Ezra marked the days by how his body changed.
His fingernails blackened, twisted, then cracked off, replaced by talons. His hair fell out in thick, dead clumps. In its place, white-silver threads sprouted, impossibly fine, gleaming faintly. His eyes ached behind his lids. The brand spread, golden lines crawling like molten veins up his throat and over his shoulder.
The mercury he drank was no longer liquid. It was memory.
He saw vision : A shattered sun, bleeding fire across the void .A kneeling king, masked in silver, whispering to something beneath the world. A door sealed with screaming light.
And always, the voice.
Little ember, it said. So close.
Ezra looked down at his hands. They were wrong. Too many joints. Skin pulled too tight over gold-strung bone.
The seventh monolith gleamed like a mirror.
He approached—and it showed him not his reflection, but the fire inside him. The thing that had been caged. The hunger that had followed him since branding.
WHAT DO YOU OFFER?
The voice didn't speak. It pierced. A blade dragged across his ribcage from the inside out.
Ezra had no answer.
So the light answered for him.
Pain bloomed like a flower made of knives.
It started in his teeth. They cracked. Melted. Regrew sharper, hungrier. His veins split open and gold poured through them. His shadow writhed—then tore free, becoming something with eyes and fangs. It circled him like a predator.
The monoliths screamed. So did the sky.
Ezra didn't.
He was beyond sound.
His bones rearranged. His blood caught fire and stayed that way. His brand erupted in a sunburst of white and gold.
He burned.
Not from without, but from within.
The fire remembered.
And Ezra became.
The fire did not consume him.
It rewrote him.
Ezra's scream died before it left his throat, throttled by the sheer magnitude of the force crashing through his body. This wasn't heat. It was memory—a memory older than flesh, older than light, older than the gods themselves. It unspooled inside him like a forgotten prayer, one written in pain and sealed in gold.
His skin cracked. Not like parchment. Like porcelain. From the seams, light bled—liquid and holy and wrong. It was not meant for mortal vessels. It did not belong in this world.
But it had chosen him anyway.
The seventh monolith crumbled first, unable to withstand the resonance rippling off his body. Its ancient sigils burst apart, scattering into stardust, drifting away like ash from a dead fire.
He staggered to his feet.
His shadow no longer obeyed him. It crawled up the stones, spread across the altar like a stain, grew teeth. Eyes. A maw that opened wide, laughing soundlessly.
The voice inside him was no longer distant. It was in his bones now. It wore his heartbeat like a drum.
YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST. YOU WILL NOT BE THE LAST. BUT YOU ARE MINE.
He saw flashes—other vessels before him, scorched and hollowed, their souls swallowed like embers tossed into a dying furnace. Some had fought. Most had begged. None had survived whole.
But Ezra did not scream. Not again.
He stepped forward.
The remaining monoliths trembled. Their warnings flickered, unreadable now, overwritten by the sheer force of his awakening. The winds screamed in terror. Lightning forked down from a starless sky, striking the peak again and again. The storm was not around him—it was within him, and the world was simply reflecting what now lived inside his marrow.
His eyes burned away.
New ones bloomed.
Eyes made of fire and judgment.
He fell to his knees, palms pressed to the stone altar, mouth open in a wordless cry. Golden blood spilled from his nose. His spine arched, ribs cracking outward like wings trying to form. In that moment, Ezra did not know if he was becoming something divine—
—or something ruined.
Beneath the mountain, the world responded.
Somewhere deep within Blackspire's vaults, the second artifact—a blade forged in silence—wept. The third monolith in the capital's Hall of Thrones split down the middle. Across the sea, a prophet woke screaming, her eyes burned white, whispering only one name: Valentine.
And above it all, far above, in the throne room shrouded in eternal light, the King stirred.
He looked to the northeast, where the stars flickered unnaturally, where the air itself twisted as if it knew what had risen.
He smiled.
Because he recognized the light now flaring on the mountain's crown.
He had seen it once before.
Long ago.
And now, it had returned—reborn, remade, and bound to the name of a boy who had no lineage, no title, no destiny… only light.