The Redborn walked through smoke and silence, her bare feet leaving no prints in the ash. Trees loomed like statues of forgotten gods, their bark blistered and blackened where fire had kissed them. Yet nothing touched her. The wind, the flame, the forest—they watched, but did not intervene.
She was not of them, but she was not foreign either.
She was something else.
Something the world had buried—and feared to unearth.
Beneath her skin, her blood whispered in pulses, no longer random thumps in her veins but a pattern. A rhythm. Almost a song. When she closed her eyes, it sang of cities turned to rust, oceans red with memory, and names long swallowed by time.
She did not understand the words.
But she understood the weight.
Far ahead, bells tolled again—closer this time. A steady triplet of notes, repeated and low, like a death knell. She crested a hill of burnt pine and found its source.
A caravan.
Dozens of wagons, caged and creaking, stretched along a broken trail that cut through the forest's edge. Each wagon bore the symbol of the Church of Pure Flame—a sun within a flame, painted in white on red canvas. Bound within them were people—men, women, even children—shackled in scorched iron.
Her breath caught.
They were prisoners.
Slaves.
Sacrifices.
The guards were robed in sun-stitched cloaks, most armed with fire-forged halberds or staves crowned in flame. One bore a gauntlet inscribed with runes glowing faintly gold—like the priest's gem before it shattered.
She crouched low, hiding in the shadows of a scorched boulder. Her mind pulsed with instinct: Leave them. You are hunted. You are not ready.
But the pull in her chest twisted.
Justice.
She didn't remember where the feeling came from—but it hurt to ignore.
She pressed her palm to the earth.
The blood stirred.
But not in rage this time.
In listening.
She closed her eyes and heard their hearts—dozens of them. Fast, anxious, heavy. Hope suffocating beneath fear. In the farthest cage, a girl no older than ten clutched a carved bone pendant and whispered prayers that tasted of soot and sorrow.
Something inside the Redborn snapped.
She rose from her hiding place, tall and unflinching, the shadows recoiling around her like dogs before an alpha. She walked onto the trail.
A guard spotted her.
"You! Stop!"
Another turned. "Who approaches the Chosen Flame?"
She didn't answer.
The blood hummed louder.
Two guards stepped forward, weapons drawn. Their gauntlets flared and flame coiled in their palms.
"I said STOP!"
Still, she said nothing.
The first bolt of fire flew—a ribbon of golden heat that sliced the air.
She didn't dodge.
The fire curved around her, whined like a wounded thing, and sputtered into smoke.
The guards hesitated. One stammered: "Witch... she feeds on it..."
"Kill her!" barked a third, now drawing a sigiled sword.
She exhaled.
Then moved.
The blood surged, rising from the trail like tendrils—liquid but sharpened, glinting like rubies in torchlight. It did not touch the prisoners. It did not spill freely.
It chose.
Guards screamed as their weapons were yanked from their hands, melted, or turned against them. A halberd cleaved its wielder's chest. A staff exploded in molten shards. Runes died in sparks.
She walked through them like stormclouds across a battlefield. Unstoppable. Indifferent.
By the time she reached the cages, only one remained standing—a captain clad in crimson armor, his helm shaped like a lion's head. His weapon, a flanged mace inscribed in Old Flame-Script, pulsed with the Church's stolen power.
"You think yourself holy, bloodspawn?" he sneered. "You think justice is yours to wield?"
She met his gaze.
"No," she said. "But I bleed for it."
He swung.
She didn't block.
The blow connected—
—and shattered.
The mace split in half as it struck her arm, blood erupting outward in a pulse of force that threw the captain twenty paces. He crashed against a wagon wheel and didn't rise.
She turned to the cages.
The prisoners stared at her in stunned silence.
The girl with the bone pendant looked up.
"Are you... a saint?" she asked, voice barely more than breath.
The Redborn crouched, breaking the cage's lock with a single squeeze of her glowing hand.
"No," she said softly. "I think I'm what comes after saints."
The people stepped out slowly, uncertain, blinking into smoke and freedom.
In the distance, firebells rang once more—more urgent now.
They would be coming.
She turned north.
There, the land darkened. Black cliffs rose from the forest's end. On the horizon, like a wound in the sky, stood a jagged spire—half-flesh, half-stone. It pulsed red.
The blood called her again.