Chapter 4: When Threads Begin to Burn
Location: Vyreflare Academy, Midmorning
The notice was delivered over breakfast.
Damian was still halfway through a piece of charcoal-baked bread when the scroll flared violet in front of him. It hovered, pulsed once, and burned open.
"Field Pairing Assignment: Cromwell, Damian. Varnhilde, Aeyra.
Objective: Soul-anomaly retrieval – Eastern Ember Spine."
Damian blinked. Aeyra, seated opposite, raised an eyebrow over her teacup.
"Congratulations," she said, "we're officially inconvenient together."
"You didn't volunteer for this?"
"I barely consent to mornings."
Their spirits flared in quiet tandem. A ripple of tension passed between them—not hostility. Recognition.
The kind you feel when you realize the stranger beside you might actually keep pace.
Two hours later, they hiked through a ravine of cooled obsidian channels—where soulflame flowers curled away from contact and the wind felt like it remembered war.
Damian led in silence. Aeyra occasionally prodded rocks with her boot, less curious than bored.
"So. Your spirit speak in poetry or existential dread?"
"Yes," Damian replied.
"Mine just tells me I'm making bad choices and then makes me prove it wrong."
"Sounds about right."
They crested a ridge and saw it: a deep gouge in the rock, lined with glowing dust.
A convergence burn. Recent.
Their target wasn't a beast. It was a soul echo—the remnant of a spirit-born event gone wrong.
"This one's moving," Aeyra murmured.
"Then we move faster."
Location: Western Crestline, Daybreak
Seren stood on the edge of a skyblade ravine, watching a merchant caravan beneath him get attacked by rogue soul-touched hounds.
He didn't have to help.
But the storm in his spine told him he should.
"If we die doing this, it's your fault," he muttered.
"You won't die," his spirit Thundrelis replied, "but you will sweat. And possibly limp."
With a grin, Seren dropped like lightning—literally.
He landed on the first beast's back, split its soulfield with a spin, and sent shock-pulse bursts through the others before the guards even blinked.
"You're insane," one merchant gasped.
"Certified," Seren said, "but affordable."
As the winds died, he felt a pulse in the back of his mind.
Damian's flame. Again. Closer now.
And not alone.
Location: Khar'Zuun Expanse, Deep Cavern Grove
Beneath the sands, the shadows knew her name.
Nyelle Thorne stood ankle-deep in the marrow swamp, surrounded by whispering vines and blind moss-eaters. Her spirit had not yet fully taken shape.
But tonight, it would.
She touched the cracked seed in her palm.
It pulsed once—then burst open in a spiral of gray-bloom roots.
From it emerged Umbravine, her Soul Spirit—half-woman, half-plant, crowned with hollow antlers and eyes that wept oil.
"I have waited," it whispered.
"You remember the silence."
Nyelle didn't cry. Not anymore.
"I do."
Somewhere far away, she felt fire awaken.
She did not recognize it.
But it recognized her.
The anomaly flared before they reached it.
A burst of distorted flame-shade peeled the cliffside open.
A form emerged—like a spirit that had begun to take shape and lost its reason halfway through. It snarled, not from hunger, but from pain.
"It's not bound," Damian said.
"Then we either kill it," Aeyra said, "or calm it before it remembers how."
They fought in perfect silence.
Aeyra bound its mind-thread with a flick of her fingers, dreamlight pulsing from her irises. Damian stepped in and scorched its feet with nullfire anchors, then pulled Veyzara's resonance around its body like a net made of dusk.
It collapsed—still alive, still burning.
"You know," Aeyra said, panting, "you could have led with the net."
"You needed the warmup."
"Next time, I lead."
"That's adorable."
As they walked back, Aeyra slowed.
"There was a second echo in that basin. Did you feel it?"
Damian nodded. "It left before we got there."
"It didn't feel like a beast."
"It felt like a door."
They didn't speak again until they saw the academy spires.
But both of them knew:
Something had started watching.
And it had already passed them by.