The first lesson was silence.

Eira had told him that before she left him by the spring, her tone firm but strangely sad.

“Don’t try to control it. Just listen. The light remembers things you’ve forgotten.”

Eiden knelt beside the water. The glow beneath his skin had quieted to a soft hum, the golden runes on his arm fading and returning in rhythm with his breath. The spring reflected him dimly — his own eyes looking back, but every time the surface rippled, his reflection… changed.

Sometimes it smiled when he didn’t.

Sometimes the eyes burned too brightly.

He forced his breathing steady.

"The light remembers."

He closed his eyes, and the world began to shift.

---

At first, it was only darkness — vast and endless, as if he stood inside his own heartbeat. Then the air rippled with sound, and voices began to rise from the void.

Whispers. Cries. Pleas.

Each voice echoed a fragment of something he didn’t want to remember — flames, faces, the echo of prayers unanswered. And then he saw him.

A man stood before him in the void, cloaked in light so pure it almost burned to look at. His hair was white, his eyes molten gold — but colder, crueler. The runes along his arms were carved into his flesh, not glowing like Eiden’s, but bleeding light.

“Who are you?” Eiden asked.

The man tilted his head, expression unreadable.

“I am what you begged the stars to forget.”

Eiden stepped back, his pulse racing. The air shimmered between them — one heartbeat, two, and then a flicker of memory surged behind the man’s eyes.

A throne of fire.

A city of light burning.

Millions kneeling before a god who wept as he condemned them.

“You destroyed them,” Eiden whispered. “You— you’re me.”

The man smiled faintly — a smile filled with grief and contempt in equal measure.

“No. I am what your mercy becomes when it dies.”

The void trembled. The light around the man cracked, spilling tendrils of gold that wrapped around Eiden’s chest like chains. Pain seared through him — not from his body, but his soul.

“Stop—!”

“You carry the Heretic Sun, Eiden Vale,” the voice thundered. “But the first Heretic was me. I burned heaven itself for the sake of mercy — and the gods cursed my soul to remember.”

The chains tightened. The runes on Eiden’s arm ignited, blindingly bright. His veins pulsed with unbearable heat.

“And now,” the echo whispered, “you will finish what I began.”

---

He gasped awake, falling forward against the cold stone. The spring’s water rippled violently, the golden light beneath his skin flickering uncontrollably.

Eira rushed in, blade in hand. “Eiden! What happened?”

He looked up at her, trembling. His eyes still glowed faintly with that divine gold — but there was something else now, something older hiding behind them.

“I saw him,” he whispered. “The one who came before me.”

Eira froze. “…You saw the First Heretic?”

He nodded slowly. “He said mercy killed the gods.”

The room fell silent. The light from his arm dimmed, leaving faint trails in the air.

Eira exhaled shakily. “Then your training has truly begun.”

---

That night, while the rest of the refuge slept, Eiden sat alone by the fire, staring into the flame.

Every flicker showed him pieces of that vision — cities of light, gods dying, a man with his face standing in the heart of a burning world.

"You carry mercy like a wound… but mercy is the first thing light devours."

His reflection in the fire smiled faintly back at him — not mockingly, but knowingly.

Eiden’s hand closed around his chest, feeling the pulse of the light beneath his ribs.

“I won’t let your curse become mine,” he whispered.

“I’ll find another way.”

The flame answered with a low hum — almost like laughter, almost like warning.

And far above the refuge, in the imperial citadel, the mirrors of the Oracle cracked for the first time in a century.

The gods had begun to stir.

---