The morning light filtered weakly through the cracked domes of the refuge.

Eiden sat cross-legged on the cold stone, his arm still faintly glowing beneath the wrappings Eira had tied around it. The hum of the underground monastery was different here — not silence, but a quiet filled with whispers, the turning of old pages, the drip of sacred water from a spring that never ran dry.

It felt… ancient.

Alive.

Like the walls remembered something.

Mira slept nearby, her breathing soft and even. For the first time in days, there was no smoke in the air — no horns, no screams. Only the pulse of gold beneath Eiden’s skin and the weight of questions too large to ignore.

 "What am I becoming?"

Footsteps echoed across the chamber.

It was Elder Kaen — a tall, silver-haired monk whose eyes carried the kind of calm only those who’d survived too much could possess. He placed a worn scroll before Eiden, its seal half-broken and marked with a sun split in two.

“The Broken Creed,” Kaen said softly. “The last teaching of the Lumen Order before it fell.”

Eiden unrolled it. The parchment was thin, edges flaked with gold dust that shimmered faintly in the air.

Lines of old script danced across the surface — words that seemed to burn and fade as he read them.

"Light was never meant to save the world."

It was meant to remember it.

But when memory became pride, the sun broke itself.

Eiden’s brows furrowed. “What does that mean?”

Kaen studied him, then knelt beside the spring. “The Lumen believed light came from the gods — pure and eternal. But after the War of Ascension, two beliefs divided them.”

He raised two fingers.

“One side claimed that light was divine — a gift to rule and judge. The other believed it was human — something born from mercy, from those who dared to heal rather than destroy.”

Eira entered quietly, carrying a small bowl of steaming herbs.

“And the gods chose the first.”

Her tone was bitter.

Kaen nodded. “And so they created the Empire of Radiance — what your enemies now call the Imperium. Those who followed mercy were branded heretics. The gods named their belief the Broken Sun Creed.”

Eiden stared at the parchment, the words blurring.

"Mercy is the first thing light devours."

He remembered Solane’s voice — those same words from the realm of burning feathers.

“Why tell me this?” he asked quietly.

Kaen’s eyes softened. “Because you bear both sides, boy. The divine fire — and the human mercy. You are the first since the Sundering to hold the true Lumenflame, not bound to either creed.”

Eira set the herbs beside him. “That’s why the Empire fears you. You’re living proof that the gods’ order can break.”

The air trembled faintly. The golden runes on Eiden’s arm pulsed once — responding to the truth, or rejecting it. He wasn’t sure which.

“Then what happens if I follow this… Broken Sun Creed?”

Kaen smiled faintly. “Then you’ll do what no god ever dared — you’ll burn for the sake of others, not yourself.”

The words struck him harder than any blade.

He looked down at his reflection in the spring — eyes glowing faintly gold. For the first time, he saw not just his light… but the shadow that followed it.

---

That night, when the candles dimmed, Eiden couldn’t sleep.

He stood beneath the underground sky window — a narrow shaft through which faint moonlight spilled, pale and fractured.

The world outside still burned. But in that single beam of cold light, he felt something new stirring inside him.

A choice.

A dangerous, impossible choice.

"Follow the gods’ light — or carry the broken one into darkness."

And far above, unseen by mortal eyes, the stars shifted — aligning for the first time in centuries.

The Heretic Sun had begun to rise.

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