Below Caelum – 8 Years Ago
The darkness was alive.
It shifted. It breathed. It whispered.
Noah staggered forward, barefoot, blood dripping from his temple. Every step echoed against ancient stone. The crude torch in his hand cast a flickering circle of light, illuminating walls carved with forgotten runes — some scorched, others smeared with handprints of ash.
His fractured arm hung limp against his chest. Each breath came shallow. But he kept moving.
Because the silence behind him wasn’t empty.
It watched.
He didn’t know how long he’d been down here — hours, days, lifetimes? Hunger gnawed at him. The torch was nearly gone. His lips were cracked, his throat raw.
When the torch finally died with a soft hiss, the dark pressed against his skin like cold cloth.
Noah fell to his knees. His palm scraped something jagged — stone shaped like a blade. He picked it up by instinct, dragging it across his arm. Blood trickled down.
He smeared it onto the wall. Onto the runes.
Nothing.
“Please…” he croaked. “Please, I don’t want to die here…”
The stone in front of him — obsidian, tall as a door — remained still. But a single glyph pulsed once.
A heartbeat of light.
Then a voice, low and wrong and intimate, spilled into his mind:
“To enter, you must give what you cannot take back.”
Noah froze. “What does that mean?”
“A sacrifice of self. A name. A memory. A tether.”
He backed away from the wall, fear returning. “No.”
“The door remembers nothing. It opens only to those who forget.”
He pressed his hands to his ears, shaking. “NO!”
But then the memories came, uninvited.
His sister’s face — dirt on her cheeks, the ribbon in her hair. Her laugh. Her voice the day before they died:
“Promise me you’ll always remember me.”
The torch had died. His body was weak. But that memory — it was warmth. Light. The last thing untouched by fire.
And the voice asked for it.
The Decision
He screamed, lashing out against the wall, the floor, himself.
“TAKE ANYTHING ELSE! TAKE MY ARM, MY BLOOD—”
But the glyphs stayed dark.
Tears carved lines in the ash on his cheeks.
And finally, slowly, he whispered her name.
“Liora…”
The wall trembled.
“Forget it,” the voice commanded. “Let it fade.”
He resisted.
“Do this, and I open. Or die here in the dark.”
He sat still for what felt like hours.
Then, in a voice stripped of everything but pain, he spoke:
“I... I don’t remember.”
At that exact moment, the glyphs ignited — glowing bright with ember-light, like fire trapped in glass. The obsidian stone split down the middle with a hiss.
Noah blinked.
He could no longer picture her face.
He tried. Harder.
What color were her eyes?
He didn’t know.
He sobbed, but not like a boy. Like something broken. Like a hole in the world crying out for what had been torn from it.
The Gate Opens
Beyond the door lay a spiraling stairway, descending into the earth. Ancient murals lined the walls — twisted, haunting.
Figures bent over altars. People clutching their heads as memories unraveled into flame. Eyes blank. Faces erased.
He stumbled forward, clutching his ribs.
The stairs led to a great circular chamber. In the center, an altar. Upon it, a shallow basin filled with something blacker than ink — liquid ash.
Above it: a single phrase etched in gold.
“Power is the fire of what is lost.”
Noah approached. His reflection flickered in the surface.
The voice returned, quieter now, deeper. Inside him.
“Place your hand into what you’ve become.”
He obeyed.
The Ash Arts Awaken
The liquid wasn’t cold.
It was memory.
It wrapped around his hand, crawling up his arm. It filled his mind with whispers — not in words, but in feelings: rage, sorrow, silence, sacrifice.
His body convulsed. Veins burned. His chest felt like it was splitting open.
When he pulled his hand free, a mark had seared itself into his palm — a spiral of ash coiled around a single rune.
The first glyph.
He collapsed to his knees.
And he laughed. Mad. Bitter.
“I forgot my sister… for this.”
The mark glowed faintly.
A memory gone.
A power gained.
The First Flame
He stood, stumbling.
The voice spoke one last time:
“Burn enough of your past… and you will burn the world.”
Noah didn’t smile.
He turned from the altar and walked into the deep.
“If I must become ash to bury the light, then so be it.”
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