The night had settled thick over the reclaimed Thornfields, but Caelen could not sleep. The wind sighed through the grass like a forgotten voice, and the stars blinked like old memories. Elira slept beside the fire, curled close to the warmth, her breath slow and steady. The Weeping Blade lay across her knees, faintly pulsing.
Caelen stood at the edge of the camp, watching the distant hills where darkness never quite seemed to leave. Something had changed. Something had been stirred.
He'd been feeling it for days now—a pull, faint but growing, beneath the earth. A sorrow he didn't recognize. Not human. Not recent. But vast. Ancient. And angry.
He pressed his palm to the soil.
Nothing. No heartbeat like in the garden. No whisper like the old trees. Only a hum, low and deep, like the growl of something waking.
He didn't wake Elira. Not yet.
Instead, he walked toward the edge of the forest where the Thornfields gave way to older trees, twisted by time and war. His boots crunched over dead leaves, his breath forming pale clouds in the chill. He stepped over a fallen log and froze.
The clearing ahead was wrong.
The ground had split open, not by storm or natural wear—but by force. Roots had been torn apart from below, and the soil festered like something sick. At the center, a blackened hole yawned wide, pulsing with heatless shadow. From it, a voice crawled.
"Ashbound..."
Caelen staggered back. The curse flared violently, the pain not from the living, but from the land itself. Grief, suffocating and ancient. Older than the Temple. Older than the gods.
He fell to one knee, breath ragged. "What are you?"
The voice was not one, but many. A chorus of the buried.
"We are the forgotten. The broken kindness. The ones your world left behind."
A form began to rise from the pit—skeletal, vine-wrapped, crowned in bone. Its chest glowed faintly where a heart should have been. But there was no heartbeat.
Only emptiness.
Caelen gritted his teeth, rising to meet it. "I don't fear you."
"You should."
The form reached out, touching his curse—not to wound, but to read. It recoiled, hissing.
"You carry too much... You burn. You love. You suffer. Like he did."
Caelen's scar pulsed. "Who?"
"The first Ashbound."
The world shuddered.
Suddenly the forest was filled with movement—shadows coiling between trees, whispers rising in pitch. Caelen turned and ran, pain biting at his chest. The Weeping Blade, still near Elira, began to scream.
He burst into the camp, breathless. "Elira!"
She was already awake, sword in hand, eyes wide with dread. "I felt it. What is it?"
He didn't hesitate. "Something older than Eredan-Mir. Buried grief, unhealed. It's waking. And it remembers me."
She moved beside him, steady and fierce. "Then let's make it remember why we survived."
The Thornfields trembled behind them, and the roots of the past cracked open.
But they stood together—Ashbound and Fire-hearted.
Ready for what waited in the dark.