Volume 2 – Inheritance of Fire
Chapter 1 – Echoes of Self
Part 4 - The Saint of Hollowlight
The light changed when Naomi stirred.
Not in Hollowreach.
In me.
The spell circle didn't flare or pulse like before. It breathed. Soft and steady. Like prayer spoken under the hush of falling stars.
Her thread didn't ignite. It warmed.
Far south, across the desert plains and ash valleys, a procession of flame-walkers moved in silence. Lanterns swayed between them on long poles made of hollow-bone and braided silk. The scent of crushed thyme and river dust drifted behind them like incense.
At the center of the procession stood a woman cloaked in pearl-wrapped linen, face shadowed by a circlet of sun-metal and veil of dust-gauze. She did not speak. The others did not speak to her. They simply followed.
When she lifted her hand, they knelt.
When she stopped walking, the desert obeyed.
She didn't know her name was Naomi.
Not yet.
They called her Seraphyne.
Oracle of the Hollowlight.
Living conduit of the Radiant Voice.
She moved through visions, not memory. Her dreams were dense with smoke and symbols. Her thoughts arrived in layers — half of them foreign, the other half eternal.
But underneath it all, the soul remembered.
And in stillness, she listened.
That morning, at the edge of a wind-carved cliff, she stood barefoot in the sand.
Her followers remained behind the rock face, lighting prayers and stringing sacred beads between wooden poles as the sun reached the zenith.
She looked west — toward a mountain she didn't remember, and a name she couldn't place.
Her chest ached.
Not from sickness.
From absence.
She fell to her knees beside a shattered outcrop.
Not to pray.
To remember.
The wind rose.
It carried with it a voice.
Not spoken aloud. Not heard.
Felt.
Caelan.
The name rang through her bones like a bell struck too long ago to still echo, yet echoing anyway.
She placed her hand to her chest.
The crystal laced into her circlet pulsed once.
Then again.
A third time, slower.
She closed her eyes and whispered a response she didn't understand, yet meant with everything in her:
"I know you."
Not as a title. Not as a memory.
As truth.
That night, the flame-walkers held their vigil, expecting her to remain within the circle of light as always.
But she stood outside it.
Gazing north.
In Hollowreach, the spell circle filled with golden warmth.
I didn't hear her voice.
But I felt her decision.
She was coming.
Not to reunite.
To fulfill something she had always sensed was incomplete.
All four had answered.
One by one.
Not with clarity.
But with belief.
And that was enough.