The rain had stopped hours ago.

Only the smell of burnt earth and steel remained.

Eiden knelt beside Mira, wiping the blood from her cheek. The glow beneath her skin had faded, leaving her pale and trembling.

Her breath was shallow, but steady. Alive.

He exhaled shakily and looked toward the clearing.

The Reclaimer’s armor still shimmered faintly where it had fallen — a shell without a body. No blood. No corpse. Just a trail of golden motes drifting into the mist.

It wasn’t victory. It was a warning.

---

He pressed a hand to his chest.

The veins of light still pulsed there, hot and restless. They had saved him during the fight — flaring with impossible power when the Reclaimer’s blade struck true.

But that power hadn’t felt like his.

It had felt like… someone else was breathing through him.

A whisper echoed faintly in his mind — not words, but emotion. A memory of a woman’s voice, soft and ancient.

 “Light does not forgive, Eiden Vale. It remembers.”

He shivered.

---

By dusk, Mira finally stirred.

Her eyes opened slowly, the faintest gold still flickering in their depths.

“Did we… make it?”

He smiled weakly. “Barely.”

She sat up, wincing. The fire crackled between them, casting long shadows on the walls of the cave.

“He was strong,” she murmured. “Stronger than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

 “He wasn’t human,” Eiden said. “He moved like something that remembered fighting before the world was born.”

Mira stared into the fire, silent for a while.

Then, softly:

 “Eiden… when I touched that light, I saw things. Not dreams — memories.”

 “Memories?”

 “A tower burning. A woman crying. The sky split in half… and a name.”

He leaned forward. “Whose name?”

She met his gaze. “Yours.”

Eiden froze. The flames flickered violently for a second — as if reacting.

 “Are you sure?” he whispered.

She nodded slowly. “It wasn’t you as you are now. But it was your face… older, different, like the world remembered you long before you were born.”

---

Silence hung heavy between them.

Eiden’s pulse throbbed with the echo of her words. He wanted to deny it — to call it a hallucination, a trick of the Lumen.

But deep inside, a truth stirred that terrified him more than any blade.

Maybe he had been here before.

Maybe this was all a circle, repeating.

---

Later that night, when Mira finally drifted into exhausted sleep, Eiden stepped outside the cave.

The stars above shimmered faintly through the fog — pale, distant, uncaring.

He clenched his fist, and the Lumenflame responded — gold light wrapping his arm like living fire.

For a moment, he saw reflections in that glow — faces, hundreds of them, whispering through the light. Some familiar. Some lost to time.

One face lingered — Solane’s.

Her eyes glowed like dawn.

 “The world remembers you because you never left it,” her voice whispered. “You burn in every age, Eiden Vale. But each time, you forget.”

His breath caught. “What am I?”

 “A remnant. A promise bound to the flame.”

The vision flickered, her form dissolving into embers.

 “But promises demand sacrifice. The girl carries the other half. When the two merge, the light will awaken — and the world will burn or begin again.”

Then she was gone.

Eiden stood alone in the dark, the fire on his arm dimming to a faint pulse.

---

Behind him, Mira whimpered in her sleep.

The faint gold lines across her wrist shimmered like constellations, connecting to the same pulse in Eiden’s veins.

Two lights.

One rhythm.

And far above the clouds, unseen by either of them, a colossal sigil of light formed in the night sky — a circle of runes slowly rotating.

Across the continent, those who could feel the Lumen stirred from sleep — priests, warriors, and monsters alike — all whispering the same thing:

---