The valley had not always belonged to Orethrael and Velmorrath. Long before the flame-borne kingdom rose and Marran's black doctrine marched across the land, the pulse of this place was guarded by a people who walked beside silence: the Aythrel.
They were not a nation in the way we understood nations. They built no towers, passed no laws, claimed no throne. Their strength lay in their stillness—keepers of breath, listeners of wind, seers of balance. Tall, lithe, white-eyed and silver-veined, the Aythrel lived in the high roots of the mountains, in stone-cradle groves where the clouds broke to bathe their glades in constant twilight.
To speak with an Aythrel was to hear the valley echo.
And for centuries, they did not choose sides.
Until Marran came.
News reached us on the ninth dusk following the First Stand. Varkaan scouts returned from the eastern ridge, their tongues scorched not by fire, but by frost—struck silent by what they had seen. The Aythrel had closed their mountain passes. Entire ridge-paths collapsed by ritual, forests reshaped to resemble great ribs curling over hidden groves. A vast circle of black banners—fireless and windless—marked the outer perimeter of what had been the sacred Grove of Stormroots.
No messenger was permitted entry.
Serit, who led the Varkaan patrol, had carved into his blade a single word spoken in parting by the Aythrel they encountered:
"Judgment."
In Council, this word stirred dread.
"Judgment from whom?" asked David. "From Marran? From the Aythrel themselves? Or from something older?"
It was Eve who answered, her voice cracked from vision.
"Not from Marran. Not entirely. From a voice that sings beneath his skin."
And then she collapsed.
While Eve dreamt, I journeyed east. Not as the Veiled Flame, not as Adonai—but alone, cloaked, my fire suppressed to embers. I crossed the Wyrmstream and walked into the rising storm.
The Aythrel met me at the edge of the grove. They did not bar my path. They simply stood, ten of them, their spears buried upright in soil still humming with power. Among them was Vaeril, once a voice of balance, now adorned in jetstone armor marked by the Glyph of the Hollowed Flame—a sign of the forsaken.
She spoke.
"He showed us the First Thought."
I asked nothing. I only waited.
Vaeril raised a hand, and light rippled from her palm—light that was not flame, nor memory, nor vision. It pulsed in broken cadence, as if speaking in a language older than perception. Then I saw it:
A fragment of the Yahweh Schema, unearthed beneath the Hollow Archive. Not a relic, but a living glyph, fractured, pulsing with broken logic. Marran had found it. And twisted it.
He had not created a new god.
He had learned to corrupt the old one.
Vaeril spoke again.
"Yahweh was not a deity. He was a recursion of belief. A mechanism of divine order. Marran has peeled him open. He has seen the root of power beneath the flame."
"You believe him?" I asked.
"No," she whispered. "But I understand him. And understanding is the beginning of allegiance."
Then she opened her palm again.
And I saw Marran.
Not his body. But his imprint. His soul etched into divine syntax. He stood in a throne of rotating mirrors, each one reflecting a different history—a universe rewritten. In his hand, he held not a sword, but a flame that breathed backwards—unmaking what was before it burned. And behind him: thousands, maybe millions, marked by the Aythrel's glyphs, eyes dark with purpose, mouths sealed.
He had become the inverse of Yahweh—not the god who causes existence.
But the god who causes its undoing.
I returned to Orethrael changed.
We held Council. The Tower of the Remembering Flame trembled as I spoke:
"Marran does not merely offer conquest. He offers understanding. He is peeling back the bones of creation and offering others a chance to become its new architects."
David paled. "Then our flame must do more than remember. It must resist rewriting."
Kael stepped forward. "Then let us carve our truth into the flesh of the world. Let no valley forget its spine."
Eve woke mid-meeting.
"The glyphs can be healed," she said.
And she held up a shard.
A Yahweh fragment. But hers glowed not with unmaking—but with becoming. It pulsed in rhythm with the Tower.
That night, we began the Inscription of the Third Tongue—a collective ritual meant to rebind the old glyphs not to Yahweh's machine, nor Marran's void, but to something new.
To Orethrael itself.
A nation not ruled by belief, but by remembered becoming.
The Aythrel were not lost.
They were wounded.
And through fire, through flame-song and inkblood, we would one day make them whole again.
But not before Marran marched again.
And not before the first of the Mirror Cities appeared on the horizon.