We stayed longer than intended.
Naaren's Fold, as the villagers called it, was hardly more than ruin stitched together with stubbornness. But beneath the soot and broken stone, something endured. Not hope—hope was a luxury. What endured here was more primal.
Belief.
Even after Marran's fall, they still gathered. They brought scraps of food to our fire. They whispered prayers not quite coherent, pressing bone charms and ash-smudged sigils into Eve's hands. They stared at me not with fear or reverence, but the hungry silence of people who had nothing left to believe in… except perhaps me.
I had not asked for their devotion.
But they gave it anyway.
And devotion, I was learning, was not a gift.
It was a chain.
Marran's church—its interior gutted and scorched—was repurposed within a day. The villagers called it the House of Flame-Walked Truth, a name that twisted on the tongue. At first I objected, but David said nothing, only watched as the stained cloth banners were taken down and replaced by crude carvings of my likeness.
"This is how it starts," he muttered. "A whisper. A symbol. Then a story. Then a name no longer yours."
He was right.
But I let them do it.
Not because I wanted worship, but because I saw the alternative in their eyes—despair too deep to endure.
It was on the second night that we met Mikal, a woman with half a face and a voice like stone.
She approached me while I tended to Eve, who had fallen sick from the village's brackish water. Her skin glowed faintly with fever, but her breath was steady. I was cooling her forehead when the woman knelt beside us.
"You should take her to the well," Mikal said. "The real one. Not the poisoned pit Marran used."
"There's another?" I asked.
She nodded. The left side of her face was scarred, burned in a way that suggested she had once been punished by flame and survived it.
"I helped build this village," she said. "Before Marran. Before the church. I remember when this place was nothing but three families and the bones of cattle."
David, listening nearby, approached slowly. "Why didn't you stop him?"
"I tried," Mikal said simply. "But madness wears the mask of conviction. And Marran wore it well."
She looked at me without awe. Without reverence.
"I don't care who you were. I care what you do now."
"I'm not sure yet."
"Then decide fast. People are already writing hymns."
The next morning, David began preaching.
Not loudly. Not publicly. Just to a few villagers gathered around the old firepit near the central square. He didn't call it preaching—he said he was explaining. Teaching. But his voice carried, and soon others were listening.
He did not speak of Yahweh.
He spoke of me.
But not the murals. Not the fire or the myths.
He spoke of what he had seen—of the flower blooming from scorched stone. Of a god who hesitated. A god who remembered pain. A god who asked nothing.
"It is not power that makes divinity," David said. "It is what one does with it. Flame can burn. Or it can light a path."
It was the first sermon of what would later be called the Ash Doctrine.
I listened in silence.
I did not correct him.
That same evening, Eve recovered.
Her fever broke with a single touch of my hand—not because I healed her, but because the fire within me responded to her pain with a strange, quiet tenderness. As if it chose life this time.
She woke slowly, and stared at me with tired, questioning eyes.
"Do you remember everything now?" she asked.
"Not everything," I said.
"But enough to be… someone?"
"I don't know who that someone is yet."
Eve thought for a moment.
"I don't think gods are supposed to say that."
I laughed, and she smiled.
Later that night, a stranger arrived.
Not from the village, but from beyond the hills—a rider cloaked in bone-pale fabric, face hidden behind a carved wooden mask. The villagers did not stop him; in fact, they parted as if expecting his arrival.
He dismounted and stood before me in the firelight.
"I am called Thayn," he said. "Of the Ashwheel Monastery."
David's head snapped toward him. "You're supposed to be dead."
Thayn chuckled behind his mask. "Aren't we all?"
He turned to me. "You've begun something, flame-walker. Whether you meant to or not. And those who remember the Old Tongues are watching."
"Are they friends?"
"No," Thayn said. "They're waiting."
"For what?"
"For you to decide whether to become a god, or a warning."
In the days that followed, Naaren's Fold became more than a village.
It became a story.
Runners carried word to other outposts. That the Flame Reborn had returned—not in wrath, but walking, speaking, mourning.
And with that story came followers.
A woman who claimed to have dreamed of my return every night since her children died. A mute man who carried a burnt book of scripture, pages rewritten by hand in blood. A child who touched my arm and cried, not because she believed, but because she remembered me—somehow, from before she was born.
Mikal warned me.
"Faith grows like a fire. And like a fire, it eats what feeds it."
But I let them come.
Because if I turned them away, Marran would not be the last false prophet.
The fire had chosen me.
So I would shape it, before someone else did.
On the seventh day, I carved something into the wall of the ruined church with my own hand.
Not a symbol.
A sentence.
"The flame does not demand. It remembers."
David stared at it a long while.
And then beneath it, he wrote:
"And what it remembers, it makes new."