The wounds Kael left behind did not bleed.
They smoldered.
Orethrael, once a single breath shared among dreamers, warriors, and fire-priests, now echoed with whispers of division. No towers fell. No cities burned. But something in the tower's pulse faltered. The unity forged by the Third Tongue had proven fragile. And fragility, in the minds of the newly ambitious, was opportunity.
The Council reconvened.
Its silence was heavier than debate.
Kael had returned, repentant and hollow-eyed. Yet his rebellion had kindled doubt in places even the Flame could not reach. In the wake of his fall, three factions emerged more visibly, now no longer sects bound by theology, but clans—each rooted in the races reshaped by the Third Tongue.
The Varkaan—called the Emberblooded—gathered under the newly formed Crucible Clan. They claimed the flame's strength should guide Orethrael—not the councils of debate, but a sovereign flamebearer chosen by merit, firecraft, and battle-tested devotion. To them, Kael was not traitor, but a martyr for a more ordered Orethrael. Their leader, Tharne of the Iron Pyre, wore Kael's discarded sigils in silent tribute. Tharne, once Kael's second in command, bore arms scarred by glyph-burns and a heart hardened by decades of silent wars. His voice was iron, always measured, always striking.
Where Kael had led with passion, Tharne led with patience—and ambition. He established fire-forging schools in the outer wards and wrote a new discipline called the Flame Code, a doctrine that fused martial ethics with ancient glyph warfare. "The flame is will," he told his followers. "And will must be tempered or it consumes itself."
Tharne's influence grew fast. Varkaan smiths and warriors began to wear his markings openly. His inner circle, known as the Pyreborn, began taking council without oversight from Orethrael's main tower.
The Soryel, dream-born and twilight-touched, shaped the Veilspinners, a secretive alliance that met beneath the roots of the Tower. They did not want rule, but guidance through dreaming paths—visions that only Eve now walked fully. Yet some questioned her growing distance. They whispered that dreams must be harvested before they rot, and began recording alternate futures—some of which showed Orethrael broken beneath its own enlightenment.
Their new voice was Myel Rethil, a Soryel poet who spoke only in riddles and shadowplays. No one knew her true face. Her followers wore veils, moved in pairs, and saw all events as strands in a woven future. Myel believed dreams were not prophecy, but currency. Whoever controlled the dreaming controlled the decisions of tomorrow.
Beneath the dreaming roots, she formed a council of dreamweavers who began trading "dream fragments" among the cities—a system of premonition and negotiation that baffled outsiders but enthralled the tribes of the eastern marches. To them, the Veilspinners became mythic, oracular—a force that seemed to guide events before they occurred.
And to Myel, control was clearest in the moment just before awakening.
The Ashen Lore, ancient chroniclers and shapers of memory, formed the Lit Archive, a clan devoted to preserving the Third Tongue in its purest, most static form. Led by the tri-inked scholar Virel Damar, they believed change itself was the enemy. They sought codification of truth. Bureaucracy. Hierarchies of knowledge. Order to prevent the chaos of Kael's flames and Eve's ephemeral revelations.
Virel Damar was not a soldier, not a seer, but a man who wrote like the gods bled ink. He carried a quill carved from the feather of a mountain-born night eagle and spoke with the calm of someone who already knew the answer. Under his guidance, the Archive began constructing what he called The Axis Codex—a definitive, unchangeable interpretation of the Third Tongue.
He recruited not fighters, but administrators, archivists, copy-scribes, and memory-bound elders who feared the chaos of unbounded faith. They created registries of who could speak the Third Tongue and how. They banned derivative glyphs. And soon, a quiet order emerged—one where all speech was recorded, debated, defined.
To Virel, the flame was not divine. It was a language. And language, without rules, was madness.
Three clans.
Three visions.
The Council, once a ring of equals, now saw seats unfilled. Some members did not attend. Some had died. Some now pledged loyalty elsewhere.
And beneath the Tower's heart, the flame that once burned steady flickered.
I walked among the people again.
Not as a prophet.
As a listener.
In Emberbridge, smiths shaped weapons with votes in mind, not just war. They asked me, "Who rules, Adonai? The fire, or the voice?"
In the Grove of Whispered Sky, where once silence carried truth, I heard arguments spoken not in the Third Tongue, but in shouts, in symbols, in grief. Children began to be named not for virtues, but for clans.
A rift had begun.
Not wide enough to fracture the tower.
But deep enough to make it lean.
David summoned the clans to speak.
He stood not at the head of the Council but at its center.
He wore no crown. No flame.
Only the First Chronicle, bound in living bark, hung across his chest.
"You wish for rule," he said. "You wish to shape Orethrael into the image of your strength, your vision, your truth."
He turned slowly, eyes tired but fierce.
"I ask you only this: Do you remember why we built this tower?"
Tharne stepped forward. "We built it to survive Yahweh. To survive Marran. But survival must be strong."
Virel Damar's voice cut like a scalpel. "We built it to remember. To inscribe meaning into chaos. We cannot let meaning drift."
And one of Myel's silent veiled delegates whispered, "We built it to dream."
David looked to me.
I answered with the only truth I could speak:
"We built it not to rule. We built it to become."
The hall fell quiet.
Still, beneath words, action stirred.
The Crucible Clan began organizing militias for "internal stabilization." Veilspinners sent whispers across the neutral territories, weaving alliances with silent tribes. And the Lit Archive began rewriting laws in secret—a new codex of authority that placed the Archive's word above all others.
Even Eve grew distant. When she spoke now, her voice shimmered with prophecy so dense it felt less like speech and more like gravity. Her visions spiraled into realms that defied geometry. She no longer saw one Orethrael—but many, all possible, all unreal, all waiting.
"Three branches from the same root," she said once in trance. "Only one bears fruit. The others choke the flame."
No one knew what that meant.
Not even her.
And still, beyond the valley, Velmorrath watched.
Marran did not strike.
He waited.
As the flame trembled.
As unity turned to strategy.
As the tower leaned, ever so slightly.
Toward crown.