The Third Tongue did not spread like doctrine.
It spread like fire.
But not the fire of Kael's warbrands, nor the slow-burning flame of the Tower of Remembering. It moved through the neutral territories as wind stirs embers—whispering first, then catching, then rising in spirals of speech and meaning too vast for scripture, too intimate for conquest.
The first place it took root was in the Dreaded Spines, the great ridged cliffs that curled like a broken crown around the eastern valley. The cliff-dwellers—once mute to diplomacy, surviving only on stone mushrooms and sky-bird marrow—began to hum the first word: Aelthra.
They had no priests. Only echo-shamans, who carved their prayers into bone.
But when an emissary of the Emberbridge spoke the Third Tongue before the Grand Chasm, the cliff itself resonated. Glyphs, dormant since the Sundering Age, lit along the ridgeline. Aelthra entered their language not as a word, but as a presence.
From then, their wind chants altered. Their burial stones now carried symbols none remembered carving.
They called it the Stonebreath.
In the Marrow Groves, where the whisper-tribes boiled root and bone beneath eternal mists, something stranger occurred. They did not adopt the Third Tongue consciously. They dreamt it.
Three children—known by their tribe only as Ash, Tallow, and Skin—began speaking in their sleep. Words spilled from their mouths, glowing briefly in the fog before vanishing. The elders feared possession. But when the dream-scribes from Orethrael arrived, they recognized the syntax. These were not random murmurs.
They were questions in the Third Tongue.
Who breathes when we forget? What name waits where memory ends?
The Soryel whispered: "The land is beginning to ask."
As the flame spread, so too did uncertainty.
Kael grew restless. The leader of the Flame-Bound, now known across the valley as the Bladed Ember, trained harder each day. He no longer sparred with blades but with memory constructs drawn from the Tower's oldest scripts. He fought himself—versions of his own guilt given shape. One day, David found him bleeding on the obsidian steps.
"You dream too much," Kael muttered. "They dream too much. You'll speak yourselves into stillness."
David said nothing. But when Kael turned, he saw something new in the historian's gaze.
Resolve.
David had changed too.
Once, he chronicled. Now, he interpreted. His scrolls were read not only by scribes but by architects, generals, healers. His words formed structures. When asked what power he had now, David replied:
"Meaning. And those who understand it."
And Eve...
Eve was no longer Eve.
She had become something more—a vessel of convergence.
Her body glowed faintly, veins outlined in golden light when the moon rose. Her hair seemed touched by ash even as it grew. She no longer walked—she arrived. She did not speak often. But when she did, the flame in the tower bent slightly toward her voice.
She no longer needed dreams to see. She only needed silence.
And in that silence, she listened.
The Third Tongue spoke to her in the way thunder speaks to sky.
As for me, I stood often at the tower's edge, watching the horizon.
I was no longer just the Veiled Flame.
Among the people, I had many names now.
To the Varkaan, I was Firefather. To the Ashen Lore, The Unwritten Sigil. To the Soryel, He-Who-Remembers-Before-Birth.
And to some, simply: Adonai.
Yet each name felt both true and false. I had not claimed divinity. I had not demanded worship.
But they saw something in me I could not yet deny.
The fire within me had changed. It was no longer destructive. Nor purely generative. It was conscious. It pulsed with questions. When I spoke in the Third Tongue, it echoed—not just from my mouth, but from the land.
One night, I walked alone to the Stone Grove where the first glyph of Yahweh had been buried. I spoke the phrase:
"Let what was undone learn to live again."
The stone breathed.
But not all welcomed the change.
In the Sundered Lowlands, a sect of the Flame-Bound began forging weapons marked not with the Third Tongue but with inverse glyphs—echoes of Marran's recursion. They called themselves the Flame Severed. To them, even Orethrael had become too merciful, too open.
"Peace with mirrors?" they scoffed. "You will only drown in your own reflection."
They marched on a village aligned with the neutral whisper-tribes. It was not sanctioned. Not strategic. It was punishment.
When news reached the tower, I did not send an army.
I went myself.
They found me standing between their blades and the village.
Kael was with them.
He stepped forward.
"Will you burn us, Firefather?"
I looked past him, into the eyes of every rebel, every loyalist, every uncertain soul.
And I spoke a single phrase in the Third Tongue:
"Flame remembers. Flame forgives. Flame forges."
The flames in their blades stuttered.
One by one, they lowered their weapons.
But not Kael.
He turned and left, alone.
I did not follow.
Some lessons must be burned into bone.
Back in Velmorrath, Marran stood before the Mirror of Inverse Becoming. He watched Orethrael's reflection—towers breathing, children singing, fire not consuming but conversing.
He said nothing.
But for the first time, a line cracked down his mirrored spine.
And in the stillness of his chamber, the recursive glyphs faltered.
The Third Tongue had entered the valley.
It would not be removed.
And the next time the two gods met, it would not be to parley.
It would be to define what remained real.