The sky cracked with fire as the Accord reached Blackthorn's gates.
Twelve banners flew. Twelve voices chanted the rites of sealing. Twelve oaths shimmered in the air, ready to bind the Thirteenth Flame once and for all.
But Rowan didn't run.
He stood at the apex of the ruined tower, the Founding Chronicle open before him. Lyra and Avery flanked his sides, every spell in their veins aching to be unleashed.
The wind carried the voices of the Accord—an old chant, one that echoed like judgment:
We, the Twelve, speak with one name.
We, the Twelve, seal what should not be.
Let the fire return to ash. Let the memory fade.
Rowan raised the Chronicle high. "Then hear the Thirteenth," he roared, his voice booming with ancient fire. "The name you tried to erase was never yours to burn."
The wind turned. The air shimmered.
From the pages of the Chronicle, spectral images burst forth—thirteen founders, standing side by side, robes blazing with color, power, and defiance. And in the center, the one with Rowan's face. Younger. Older. Timeless.
Ashraem.
The Accord forces faltered, eyes wide, as the First Flame stepped forward through memory itself.
Rowan's hand burned. The sigil on his palm began to spin, unlocking something buried deeper than any spell or curse.
"I know what the Last Pact was," Rowan whispered. "It wasn't to destroy the Thirteenth. It was to hide it—until the world was ready to remember."
And the world was remembering now.
The spectral founders raised their wands. The pages of the Chronicle turned to fire and scattered to the wind. The truth had been released.
But then—a scream.
Avery jerked back. Blood on his hands. A blade of pure silence lodged in his side.
From the shadows behind the thrones of memory, a cloaked figure emerged.
Calwyn.
But not Calwyn.
The cloak she wore bore a thirteenth sigil… twisted, blackened.
Lyra's voice cracked. "You were one of us."
Calwyn's face was cold. "I am one of you. I never left. I just knew better than to let fire burn wild again."
She raised her blade.
"I am the Oathbreaker. The one who made the Last Pact."
Time cracked.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
As Calwyn's blade struck the Chronicle's ashes, the air tore in two. Around Rowan, the world split—moments peeling away like pages from a book.
He saw the past.
He saw the future.
He saw himself dying.
He saw himself winning.
He saw a thousand versions of Blackthorn—some where it stood glorious, others where it was rubble. And in each, the Thirteenth House rose, fell, or never existed at all.
Lyra's hand locked around his wrist. "Choose one," she whispered. "Before we lose them all."
But Rowan looked at Calwyn. At the Oathbreaker. And he realized—
"She's not trying to kill us," he said. "She's trying to seal time. To lock the world in a version where we never returned."
And if she succeeded, none of this would matter.
The Chronicle.
The Flame.
Their names.
They'd vanish.
Again.
So Rowan did the unthinkable.
He called the flame backward.
Fire surged into the tear. Into the memories. Into every lost version of the Thirteenth that had ever been.
And the last thing he said before time sealed around him—
"I remember all of you. And that's enough."
There was no thunder when Rowan disappeared.
No explosion. No scream.
Just silence—so profound, it echoed.
Blackthorn stood still. The sky burned violet, then calmed. Time sealed its wound without protest, leaving behind a world slightly… wrong.
Lyra staggered to her knees in the dust, breath ragged, eyes wide. "Where is he?"
Avery was silent. He still clutched his wound, but his gaze was distant. Haunted.
No one remembered Rowan.
Not the students, not the Accord, not the halls of the academy that once throbbed with his fire. His name had been pulled from the stone. His footsteps erased from the corridors.
Even the Chronicle—what remained of it —had no mention of the Thirteenth.
But Lyra remembered.
She held a fragment of the sigil, burned into her palm like a phantom scar. Every night since, her dreams burned blue.
She knew.
And deep underground, in the dust-sealed vault of echoes, something whispered behind the walls:
"He is not gone. He is just… unplaced."
—-
Blackthorn crowned a new student that term. A quiet, sharp-eyed girl from the outer provinces. No records. No family.
She was sorted into House of Ink.
But when the Sorting Flame touched her, it sputtered once—and flickered blue.
Only Lyra saw it.
Only Lyra felt the wrongness of it.
The girl's name was Rhoan.
And she didn't know who Rowan Vale was.
But sometimes, when no one watched, she'd hold her hand out toward candlelight… and the flame would bow toward her.
—
Avery wandered the graveyards of the first founders, half-drunk on healing elixirs and grief. He whispered a name he couldn't forget, even though the world demanded he should.
Rowan.
There was no headstone. No record. But Avery carved one anyway, into the back of an old stone with no name:
To the one who burned and remembered.
We won't forget, even if magic does.
That night, when the sky cracked again—and it did crack, subtly, like a book creaking open—Avery saw a boy in the mirror.
Not his reflection.
Just a flicker.
And a voice in his head that said:
"The flame remembers me.
And so do you.
That's enough."
—
In the center of the Thirteenth House, a sealed door unlocked itself.
No spell was cast.
No wand was raised.
It simply… opened.
Lyra stood before it, alone.
Inside was the sigil—drawn in flame, hanging midair, flickering like it waited for a name.
A name the world forgot.
A name only she still spoke.
"Rowan Vale," she said softly.
And the fire surged toward her, wrapping around her chest like a second heartbeat.
-
The fire in Lyra's chest did not burn.
It remembered.
Every flicker, every beat pulsed with echoes—not of destruction, but of someone who once stood where time fractured. Someone who had wielded the Thirteenth Flame not to destroy, but to preserve.
She pressed her palm against the sigil suspended in air. It rippled, not with heat, but with memory. Visions surged through her mind: Rowan standing atop the tower, defying the Accord; Rowan laughing in the common room; Rowan whispering, "We carve ourselves into memory."
And then… nothing.
His thread in the world had been clipped.
But not cut.
Not yet.
Lyra turned as the fire formed words along the walls of the Thirteenth House, ancient and flickering: The Heir Remains. Find the Flame's Hollow.
"Flame's Hollow," she murmured. "It's not a place, is it? It's a person."
And suddenly she knew—Rhoan. The new girl who bore Rowan's flame in her bones without knowing why.
Rhoan woke to fire on her windowsill.
Not burning. Not dangerous. Just… watching.
She didn't scream. She didn't even flinch. Somewhere in her gut, it felt right.
Lyra found her in the Archives Tower, thumbing through books she wasn't supposed to read—books about the founding, the thirteen wands, and spells no longer taught.
"You feel it, don't you?" Lyra asked.
Rhoan met her gaze. "I feel… like I'm standing in someone else's life."
"You are," Lyra said softly. "But that life was taken. Stolen. And you were made to wear its ashes."
Rhoan's brow furrowed. "Why me?"
Lyra's voice shook. "Because the world couldn't hold both of you. So it tried to forget him by making you."
That night, Lyra lit thirteen candles around the sigil chamber and placed the Chronicle's last page—salvaged from the wreckage—at the center.
Rhoan stood across from her, hesitant.
"You're not summoning him," Rhoan whispered. "You're summoning yourself."
Lyra blinked. "What?"
"You're the last person who remembers. And memory is power."
The fire flared.
And in the flame, for the first time, Rowan spoke.
"Lyra."
Not from the sigil. Not from the walls.
From Rhoan.
Her voice—his voice—merged. One soul tethered to two bodies. One memory split across realities.
Lyra wept.
"You're still here," she whispered.
Rhoan's eyes burned blue. "But not for long. The Oathbreaker is coming."
The Oathbreaker returned not through doors, but through cracks—between thoughts, through forgotten dreams, along the seams of stories no one remembered writing.
Blackthorn's sky turned the color of rusted blood as she arrived.
Rhoan fell to her knees in the sigil chamber, gasping as the fire inside her began to writhe—splitting, fracturing, trying to flee her body.
"She's pulling him out of me," she whispered. "Piece by piece."
Lyra raised her wand. "Not if I stop her."
But Calwyn—twisted, silent, more shadow than woman now—stood already within the circle. "You can't save someone who's already been unmade."
"I remember him," Lyra growled.
"And that's exactly what I've come to burn," Calwyn said.
She raised her blackened blade and brought it down—
—but it struck not flame, not flesh, but memory.
Because Lyra stepped forward, unflinching, her palm blazing with the sigil.
"You think erasing him will silence the Thirteenth," she said. "But you never understood what Rowan became."
The ground split. The circle flared.
And from Rhoan's scream, from Lyra's memory, from the Chronicle's last breath—
Rowan emerged.
Not a ghost.
Not a flame.
But Rowan Vale—whole, wounded, but burning brighter than before.
He stood between Lyra and Calwyn, barefoot in a circle of fire, the Thirteenth Mark glowing on his chest like a second heart.
"Hello, Calwyn," he said, voice quiet and sharp as glass. "Still trying to write the ending?"
She staggered back. "You… you're an echo. That's all."
"No," he said. "I'm a memory that refused to die. And now I've become something more."
Rhoan gasped, falling backward as the fire left her—cleanly, gently. She was no longer his vessel.
Rowan knelt beside her. "Thank you," he whispered.
Then he stood, facing Calwyn. "You called yourself Oathbreaker. But you were something else once."
"I was the Sealer," she hissed. "The one who ended the war."
"No," Rowan said, stepping forward, the fire parting for him. "You were the coward who chose forgetting over healing."
The chamber could not contain what came next.
Calwyn raised her blade.
Rowan raised his hand.
And every name the world had forgotten burned back into the air.
The thirteen founders.
The first pact.
The erased.
The betrayed.
The lost.
The Thirteenth Flame surged—not as a weapon, but as a remembering.
Walls cracked. Towers groaned. Time writhed.
And as Calwyn lunged, Rowan caught her blade between his palms—fire licking the edges, memory searing steel.
"I will not forget," he whispered.
And the blade turned to ash.
Calwyn fell.
Not dead.
Just… still.
Empty.
Forgotten by her own magic.
Rowan turned to Lyra, breathless. "We're not done."
"No," she said. "We're just beginning."