Azrana's skyline shimmered under the heat, the grand spires like blades against the bleeding horizon. Yet beneath its majestic surface, something old stirred—something more than memory, more than myth.
Liora stood at the edge of the temple chamber, staring into the flame that needed no air. The scholars called it the Heartfire now. It pulsed like a living thing, whispering in languages lost to the dunes.
"We shouldn't keep it here," Bael muttered beside her. "This city wasn't meant to hold something like that."
Liora didn't look at him. "Neither was any other."
---
The boy, Arel, had become a prophet overnight.
No one had trained him. No mystics whispered in his ear. But every time he closed his eyes, he saw the world as it was—and as it would be.
"Kael walks the underdust," he said one morning, eyes still fogged with sleep. "He guards something."
They gathered around him—Bael, Liora, Narek, and a few trusted captains. The weight of what they'd built hung heavy on their shoulders.
"What does he guard?" Liora asked.
The boy blinked.
"Us."
---
Far beneath Azrana, in tunnels forgotten by stone and time, something burned with a soft blue light. Kael's body had never been found after the fall. Some said he died beneath the city, crushed when the Emperor's relic collapsed the chamber.
But the dreams said otherwise.
And now, they began to believe.
Liora ordered an expedition—small, quiet, carefully chosen.
Bael led it.
---
The tunnels were deeper than they expected. Older. The very air tasted different—like breathing in ash and memory. Bael's torch flickered as if afraid of the dark itself.
Twice they saw things—figures at the edge of the light, shapes that dissolved when approached. Whispered voices in languages that hadn't been spoken since the first empire crumbled.
And then they found the gate.
A stone archway inscribed with the same runes as the Heartfire above. Closed, but warm to the touch.
Bael stepped forward. "He's in there."
"How do you know?" one of the soldiers asked.
Bael touched the stone. "Because I can feel him."
---
That night, the sky over Azrana cracked with red lightning. The Ashen Star flared, then pulsed—once, twice, a heartbeat echoing across the land.
And in every corner of the empire, old relics stirred.
Flames that shouldn't burn began to flicker.
Weapons lost in the desert shimmered faintly with heat.
And the earth whispered one name—
Kael.