The second tower was completed before the frost.
Where the first had risen over Halor's Cross, silent and looming—a monument to dominion—this new tower was erected in the ghost-town of Orless. Built from stone fused with black resin and scorched bone, it stood taller than the first, its peak vanishing into the grey sky like a nail driven into heaven. It was called The First Tongue.
Inside it, they said, Marran kept the Black Ledger.
Every edict. Every sacrifice. Every betrayal.
An archive of obedience, inked in blood and bound with flame.
The surrounding town, once barely more than scattered huts, had been reshaped into a kind of sacred bureaucracy. The faithful arrived to register their bloodlines, swear oaths, baptize their children in ash-water. Those who failed to comply were erased—not by blade or fire, but by parchment: their names voided, their homes reassigned, their families reclassified as faithless units.
It was not death that Marran brought.
It was unbeing.
In Naaren's Fold, we watched.
Not because we were afraid. But because we were learning.
We had our own systems now—the Assembly of Three Voices met twice a week beneath the old aqueduct. Traders had their own seals. New scriptural coins were minted bearing my image on one side, and the flame-triad on the other: the sword of Kael, the quill of David, and the open hand of Eve.
Yet it was not enough.
Marran's domain had reached the southern tributaries. Our scouts returned with the burnt sigils of the Flame-Bound strung around their necks, a warning.
I said nothing for days.
But something inside me stirred. The fire I carried—was it mine? Or had I only ever been its vessel? When I breathed, I no longer exhaled warmth, but something like light made heavy.
At dusk, I walked into the grove east of the Fold, alone.
And there, I called it.
I do not know the word I spoke. Only that it came from my marrow.
The trees bent. The sky thinned. And fire came—not as flame, but as a memory made real. It poured from my hands, not burning, not searing, but blooming. Red-gold petals of it, dancing through the grove, igniting nothing.
Not yet.
Then I thought of Marran.
Of The First Tongue.
Of the Black Ledger and its bloodbound cruelty.
And the fire changed.
It darkened. It spun. It tasted of grief and judgment. Trees nearby withered to ash. Birds fell from branches. The soil blackened beneath my feet.
My knees buckled.
The fire had responded.
Not to command.
To emotion.
I staggered back to the Fold with cracked feet and bleeding hands. David met me by the gate. He took one look at my face and nodded.
"It's begun, hasn't it?" he asked.
"Yes," I whispered.
Eve awoke screaming that night.
"A third tower will rise," she said in the tongue of her dreams. "Not theirs. Ours."
The next morning, the Assembly gathered in full.
Kael stood with Serit and two Flame-Bound who had returned from a skirmish. David brought the archivists. Eve came barefoot, hair still damp with vision-sweat.
I stood before them.
And I lifted my hand.
Flame unfurled like a banner.
But it did not burn.
Instead, it gathered above us into a crown of light. It shimmered with the weight of memory. Faces flickered inside it—those lost to war, those who had doubted and believed and died anyway. Children. Soldiers. Priests.
The fire did not speak.
But they listened.
Kael knelt. For the first time, not in war, but in awe.
David wept.
Eve smiled with knowing sorrow.
"The third tower must not be built from stone," she said. "It must be made of remembrance."
I understood then.
Marran wrote his doctrine into law.
We would write ours into the soul.
Three days later, we began.
Not with builders, but with pilgrims. Not with bricks, but with stories.
The Tower of the Remembering Flame would rise from the center of Naaren's Fold. Every citizen would offer one memory to its making—spoken, carved, painted, whispered. Every layer of the tower would contain the truths of our people: not dogma, not commands, but echoes of what we refused to forget.
In its heart, I placed my first gift:
A flame held in a glass bowl—unlit.
I would not ignite it.
Not until we were ready.
Somewhere far west, Marran must have felt it—the resistance, the quiet refusal.
His emissaries arrived within a week.
Three of them.
All faceless, robes drawn tight, eyes burned shut.
They stood before the tower-in-progress and spoke with mouths that had no tongues:
"You mimic what you cannot match. Fire is not for remembering. It is for consuming."
I stepped forward.
The fire within me moved.
And this time, I did not hold it back.
My voice rang not in volume but in presence.
"Flame that forgets is only hunger. Flame that remembers becomes light."
And I let them see.
I opened my hands, and from them poured flame—not to kill, not to burn, but to reveal. The emissaries shrieked as their own shadows turned against them, memory flooding back in blinding rushes—faces they had forgotten, oaths they had betrayed, homes they had helped destroy.
They fled.
And the people saw.
Not just the fire.
But me.
Not only god.
Not only prophet.
But judge.
And I feared what that meant.
Because the fire would not stop changing.
Because now it dreamed with me.
And it would not always dream of mercy.
In the weeks that followed, Eve began to change.
Her visions grew more frequent, but she no longer spoke them in broken riddles. Now they came as melodies, resonant and structured, sung in the Flame-Tongue. She wandered less and knelt more. When people came to her, they no longer asked for wisdom. They brought offerings—candle-wax idols, songs of mourning, names of the dead.
She began to prophesy events before they occurred. A mudslide near the northern hill. A child born with eyes that glowed in twilight. The defection of a high priest from Marran's camp, long before the man himself arrived, ragged and weeping.
She spoke less as herself, and more as a vessel.
It was David who first named it.
"She's becoming an oracle," he said. "Not merely touched by the divine. She is being rewritten by it."
And I knew he feared what might follow.
Kael had changed too.
He no longer argued at the council. He trained his Flame-Bound in silence. His voice came only during prayer or battle drills. And they, in turn, had grown strange. Their eyes glowed faintly in firelight. They no longer bled easily. They moved as if each had a second heartbeat—one mortal, one forged.
From Eve, came the light of vision.
From Kael, the flame of battle.
And from David, came doctrine—burning ink, living memory. He gathered followers who began etching entire philosophies into their skin, chanting liturgies in reflective cadence. His voice stirred winds. Some claimed he could bring dead plants to blossom with only a word, if that word was remembered.
They were no longer just prophets.
They were becoming something more.
And their followers began to shift with them.
Slowly, our people separated. Not in belief, but in essence.
Kael's Flame-Bound became the Varkaan—flesh-tempered warriors who felt no cold, who walked through fire as kin. Scarce in number, deadly in conviction.
David's Circle gave rise to the Ashen Lore—long-lived, pale-skinned archivists who recalled not just the past, but the intent behind it. Their memory was ancestral and real.
And Eve's mystics became the Soryel—dream-shaped beings who walked between sleep and waking, whose voices could bend light and whose prophecies seeded truth.
These were no longer cults.
They were races.
Not born. But made.
And I was the crucible that forged them.
Together, we laid the foundation of our realm.
We called it Orethrael—The Kingdom of Fire Remembered.
Not for glory.
But because it would have to survive.
The third tower rose slowly, but it burned with a fire no wind could extinguish.
And beyond the valley, Marran moved again.
Soon, it would no longer be emissaries he sent.
It would be legions.
And we would have to choose whether to preserve the flame.
Or let it consume us all.