The rain had not stopped in three days. It fell in slow relentless sheets soaking everything from the slate rooftops to the rag-covered children curled in doorways. The sky hung low and gray like a dying breath stretched over the slums of Terracore.
Caelen Dusk sat beneath a half-collapsed awning its wooden ribs broken and moldy. The wind kept blowing droplets into his face but he ignored it. His cloak was thin and tattered barely more than a curtain and it clung to him like second skin. He held a bruised apple in his hands turning it over slowly.
He was not hungry for himself.
Beside him huddled a little girl with wide eyes and a cough that rattled her whole chest. Her lips were chapped and her hands stained with dirt. Her name was Talli though no one else remembered that. She was just another orphan like him invisible to the world beyond the slums.
He passed her the apple and she clutched it as if it were gold.
"Eat" he said quietly.
She nodded and bit into it her eyes closing as juice ran down her chin.
Caelen leaned back against the stone wall. He exhaled slowly letting the rain drown out the sounds of the city. Horses clopped by on polished streets above the hill. The nobles had no idea what it was like down here. They would never understand what it meant to go to sleep hungry or to wake up colder than before.
He was sixteen and already tired of survival.
But today something was different. Beneath the ache in his belly and the cold in his bones there was a heat. A warmth that had no right being there. His fingers tingled and his heartbeat felt out of sync with the rest of the world.
Earlier that day he had found something.
It was buried beneath a crumbling wall at the edge of the old ruins. The ground had given way while he chased a squirrel through the brush and he fell into a pocket of forgotten stone. Dust had filled his nose and his elbows had scraped across jagged rock but when he opened his eyes he saw it
A single ember. Glowing. Floating.
It hovered just above a cracked pedestal of obsidian. Ancient carvings laced the room curling into patterns he could not understand. The ember pulsed with faint light as if waiting.
He had reached out without thinking.
The moment his skin touched the ember time stopped.
He saw a mountain burning. Cities falling. A shadow standing amidst a wall of flame. He heard screaming chanting and then silence broken only by a whisper.
"The Flame remembers."
When he came to the ember was gone and the chamber around him had begun to collapse. He barely escaped before the ceiling fell in behind him. Dust and smoke chased him up the slope and into the rain.
Now he sat still trembling slightly but not from fear.
From power.
He looked down at his palm. It was warm. Not just warm but steaming. Tiny tendrils of vapor curled from his skin disappearing into the rain. He closed his fist and the heat subsided but the presence remained. It was not like the magic he had heard nobles boast about. This felt ancient raw alive.
He had never had magic. The tests said he had no affinity. Magic ran in bloodlines and only the noble houses possessed strong elements. Earth magic for the Stonecloaks. Wind for the Aetherians. Water for the Hydran elite. Lightning for the Stormspire royals.
Fire was gone.
Purged a century ago after the Ember Rebellion. Every fire-wielder had been hunted burned or banished. The Flameborne they were called. Heretics. Destroyers.
Extinct.
Except now Caelen knew that was a lie.
He was living proof.
He closed his eyes. The ember's light still danced behind his eyelids. His breath came slower steadier as he tried to make sense of what it meant.
Was he cursed? Was he chosen?
A sharp clatter snapped his attention back. Boots. Heavy ones. Soldiers.
He ducked further beneath the awning and pulled Talli closer. She was already asleep the apple finished and her breathing shallow.
Two city guards passed by torches hissing in the rain. Their armor gleamed with enchantment runes etched in silver. One of them paused glancing toward the alley. Caelen held his breath.
"Thought I saw something" the guard muttered.
His partner shrugged. "Just rats. Let's go. The nobles don't pay us to babysit the gutters."
They moved on leaving only flickering light in their wake.
Caelen waited until he could no longer hear them then exhaled softly.
He needed to leave the slums. Now.
If the guards had seen the steam from his hands if someone had followed him from the ruins if anyone suspected what he was becoming it would not be long before he was hunted too.
But where could he go
No papers no coin no name that mattered.
And yet the ember in his chest pulsed once more like a heartbeat.
Something inside him whispered again this time not words but direction. A pull. North. Toward the towers of Aetheron. The place where the nobles trained. The place where the world learned to wield the elements.
He laughed under his breath.
What would a gutter orphan like him do in the most elite magic academy in the continent?
But then again what else did he have?
Rain and ash.
And a flame that refused to die.
He stood slowly gathering Talli in his arms. She was light as a bundle of rags. He would leave her with the old weaver woman who sometimes took in children for food scraps. Safer there.
As he stepped into the rain he felt the heat in his chest rise once more not painful just steady. Just ready.
He did not know what he would become or what this power meant but he knew one thing.
He would not burn quietly.
Not anymore.