The girl vanished into the trees as silently as she'd come, her amber eyes lingering like afterimages in the dark. No footsteps. No parting words. Just a slow fade into shadow and smoke. Even after she was gone, the clearing throbbed with lingering heat, like the earth itself had tasted fire and hadn’t yet decided how to respond.

The silence felt alive. As if the world had inhaled her power and now held its breath, waiting.

Kazi stood rooted in place; the air heavy on her skin. Her thoughts were a storm; questions crashing against each other, the weight of the visions and flame still smoldering beneath her ribs. The mark under her sleeve pulsed gently, a quiet thrum that wasn’t there before.

It felt… awake.

“What the hell just happened?” she asked, her voice thin in the stillness. She didn’t expect an answer. She just needed to break the silence before it swallowed her whole.

Rhazir stepped up beside her, his eyes still fixed on the place where the girl had stood, where reality had bent. “You were initiated.”

“Into what?” Kazi asked, turning to him. “She didn’t explain anything.”

“She didn’t need to,” he said. “That was the Ember Line’s ancestral fire. She was its vessel. A messenger. Maybe even… a memory.”

Kazi blinked. “A memory?”

“Not all elemental spirits walk in flesh and blood,” Rhazir said. “Sometimes, what we meet are echoes; shadows left behind by those who once bore the flame. Your mark can draw them out.”

Kazi felt her breath catch as fragments of the vision shown returned; flashes of cities consumed in fire, a woman’s scream echoing through molten stone, the burning gate.

“Wait? She wasn’t real?”

“Oh, she was real,” Rhazir said softly. “Just not from now. You felt it when she touched you, didn’t you? Those visions?”

Kazi nodded slowly. “They felt like someone else’s memories… but also like mine. Like I’d lived them in a dream I forgot.”

“She passed you memory fire,” he explained. “That’s how the Ember Line teaches. Not with words. But with feeling and heat. It burns the lesson into your bones.”

Kazi wrapped her arms around herself, trying to shake the ghost of a volcano’s roar. “So, what now? I get a vision, a magical trial by fire, and suddenly I’m enlightened?”

“Not quite,” Rhazir said with a tired smile. “But you’re further along than most. Some never reach the ancestral point. You did. And she came.”

Kazi turned back toward the charred stone pillar at the clearing’s center. It shimmered faintly now. No longer blackened and cold but veined with light. Soft amber lines glowed beneath the surface, pulsing with the same rhythm as her mark.

She stepped toward it, drawn without thought, like the stone called her by name.

“Careful,” Rhazir warned, but made no move to stop her.

Kazi laid her hand on the pillar.

Warmth bloomed beneath her fingers, not heat, but a living warmth, like touching the skin of another person. The veins of amber brightened. Symbols stirred across the surface, emerging from the stone in glowing lines that spread outward, interlocking in a vast, unseen web.

They mapped paths. Not roads, but resonances, echoes of other places like this.

Other Marks of Azibo. More power.

She gasped and took a step back, eyes wide. “It’s… it’s showing me where to go.”

Rhazir moved closer, his gaze sharpening. “That shouldn’t happen unless… unless the flame’s accepted you.”

Kazi shook her head, overwhelmed. “I didn’t ask to be accepted.”

“That’s the thing about elemental magic,” he said. “It doesn’t care what you ask. It responds to need. And right now, the mark believes you’re ready to carry more.”

She stared at the glowing web, one pulse brighter than the rest, deep in a mountainous region, far beyond the city walls.

“There’s another,” she whispered.

Rhazir nodded. “The next mark, Mark of Azibo.”

Kazi clenched her jaw, fire sparking behind her eyes.

“Then we’re going to find them,” she said, her voice steady.

Rhazir raised an eyebrow. “You sound sure.”

“I am,” she said. “Because if they’re anything like me, they don’t know what’s coming.”