There was no sky.
Only light. Endless, burning light.

Kael drifted in a sea of colorless flame, weightless and unanchored. Time didn’t exist here—only heat, and memory. Voices echoed from every direction, ancient and layered, speaking in a language that seemed half thought, half heartbeat.

We are the first fire.
We gave warmth to a frozen world. We gave power, and they forgot the cost.

Kael reached out, and his hand dissolved into sparks. The fire didn’t burn him—it knew him. He felt it searching his mind, pulling apart his past like pages from an open book. Scenes from his life flickered through the light: his mother tending the old reactor lamps, the explosion that swallowed the city, the first moment he woke in the crater surrounded by silence.

“You’re showing me my past,” he whispered.

Not yours, the voices answered. Ours.

The light shifted. He stood on the surface of another world—one that looked like Earth before the wars, but alive with color and energy. Great cities floated on rivers of molten glass. Towers rose into the clouds, their foundations made of Pyronite veins that pulsed like living arteries.

People walked among them—humans, but different. Their skin shimmered faintly with heat, their eyes carrying small flickers of flame. They weren’t afraid of fire; they were fire, shaped into form.

“The first Resonants,” Kael breathed.

He saw them channeling fire through their bodies, building, healing, creating. But then the light darkened. A new energy appeared—cold, metallic, empty. Machines rose from the ground, drawing the fire out of the world, compressing it into reactors.

The fire screamed. Cities crumbled. Oceans boiled. The sky cracked open.

Kael fell to his knees as visions poured through him—millennia of war and rebirth. He saw the moment the last of the Firekin sealed their essence into a single sphere of living energy: the Flame Core. One of them looked directly at him, a woman with eyes like molten gold.

We left our heart behind, she said. So one day, when the world forgets warmth, it will remember again.

Kael’s chest burned. His veins glowed brighter, mirroring the sphere’s light. “Why me?” he whispered. “Why give it to me?”

The woman smiled faintly. Because you listened.

The light fractured. The memories collapsed into a single point of brilliance. Kael felt himself pulled backward, falling through layers of fire, through centuries, through his own heartbeat.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on a metal floor, the world shaking violently. Lira was beside him, shouting his name. The air reeked of smoke and ozone.

“Kael! Wake up!”

He blinked, the echoes still ringing in his head. “The Flame Core… it remembers everything.”

She grabbed his shoulders. “We have to move! The containment chamber’s collapsing!”

Dareth stood across the room, one arm shattered, his armor cracked open, blue flame leaking from within. He stared at Kael—not with hatred, but something closer to disbelief. “You touched the Core,” he said. “You merged with it.”

Kael rose unsteadily. The ground beneath him glowed red. “No. It merged with me.”

The entire fortress groaned as fissures spread across the walls. Pyronite crystals shattered, releasing streams of molten energy. The Core’s sphere floated above them, now pulsating violently.

Lira screamed over the noise. “If it goes critical, it’ll vaporize the whole district!”

Kael closed his eyes, feeling the pulse within him align with the rhythm of the Core. He remembered the voice—We left our heart behind.

He stepped toward the sphere. “Then it’s time to return it.”

Flames wrapped around him as he extended his hand. The energy connected instantly. The Core’s wild light stabilized, folding inward like a star calming after centuries of chaos. Dareth shielded his face, shouting something lost to the roar.

Kael felt pain, yes, but not destruction—it was recognition, reunion. For a moment, everything in the world breathed in unison: the city, the ruins, the sky above.

And then, silence.