The village bell tolled.

Three times. A ritual summons.

The people of Gravehollow gathered in silence at the plaza. Faces blank. Eyes hollow. The Red Vigil had returned.

Auren watched from the chapel’s crumbling balcony, cloak wrapped around him like a warning. Lyra stood beside him, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the crowd.

“They’ve chosen a child,” she whispered. “I saw the mark.”

His jaw clenched. “Age?”

“Ten. Maybe eleven.”

Auren’s grip tightened around the shard of his old blade—what little remained of his past life. His hand trembled, but not with fear. With recognition.

He had seen this before. Dozens of times. Different robes, different tongues, same ritual.

He descended the stairs.

The villagers parted when he approached. Not in reverence. In confusion.

Auren strode to the center, where the Friar stood, arms raised in benediction, crimson candlelight flickering across his features.

The child knelt before him, head bowed, trembling.

“The flame requires offering,” Vaelric intoned. “The heavens demand—”

“They demand nothing,” Auren interrupted.

Gasps rippled. The crowd flinched. Even the wind seemed to pause.

Vaelric turned slowly. “You overstep.”

“No,” Auren said, voice low. “I return.”

He raised the blade shard. It pulsed—a heartbeat of heat, of light, of judgment.

And then—the flame came.

Not fire. Not entirely. But something older. Righteous. Uncontainable.

A golden-red glow bled from Auren’s skin, threading into the fragment. The air cracked. The ground shuddered. And the blade—grew.

Not into steel, but into justice itself.

The crowd dropped to their knees.

Auren’s eyes burned gold as lines of karma flared across the ground—trails of light that crawled toward every villager, wrapping around them like spectral chains. Each thread pulsed with their deeds—some dim, some blinding with blood.

The Friar’s thread was black. Corroded. Weighed down by the screams of the forgotten.

Auren’s voice echoed—not from his mouth, but from his soul.

“Your sins are not burned away by sacrifice.
They are measured.
And I am the scale.”

He lifted the golden blade.

The villagers screamed.

But he did not strike.

He turned the blade, and the light retracted. The threads faded.

“Let this child walk free,” he said quietly. “Let your fear taste mercy—for now.”

He turned, took the child’s hand, and walked into the rising dawn.

From the chapel balcony, Lyra smiled faintly.

Below, Vaelric watched in silence. Then he whispered to the wind.

“The Karmic Flame awakens… and the Judge begins to stir.”

Far to the north, something ancient shifted in its tomb.

“From blood and silence,
a flame awakens not to burn—
but to remember.”
                         — Karmic Hymn, First Flame Verse