Kairo awoke to burning lungs and a world painted in crimson.
The sky was gray above him, blurred by smoke and early morning mist. His body ached, and every joint screamed, every muscle shaking like he'd run through fire and ash. Which, he realized, he had.
He tried to sit up.
Pain answered him immediately. His ribs burned, likely cracked. His arms trembled, bruised, and scraped raw. And still… he was alive.
Barely.
"Easy," a voice said beside him.
Elya knelt at his side, bandaging his shoulder with quick, efficient movements. Her face was streaked with soot, her hair pulled back into a rough knot, and her eyes red from smoke and exhaustion.
"You were out for two days," she said. "Ryven wanted to call you dead. I didn't."
Kairo coughed. "...You always this stubborn?"
"I'm alive, aren't I?"
He managed a weak smile.
The memory hit him, "Draegor", the divine flames, the halberd screaming in his grip, the ground collapsing beneath them both.
"Did… he die?"
Elya didn't answer right away.
She glanced at the torn tent flap behind her.
"No one's seen the Purifier since the ridge fell. But we didn't recover a body. Just scorched crater rock and half of your chain blade embedded in it."
Kairo looked down.
The halberd sat beside him.
Its head was cracked. The central soul glass tip is dim, nearly black. The runes along the haft were dark again as if sleeping.
Whatever power he'd drawn on that night... it was gone now.
Or hiding.
Elya rose and moved to the flap. "You need to come see this."
Kairo followed, stiff but upright.
What he saw beyond the tent nearly made him collapse again.
Redgate was burning.
Not destroyed. Not overrun.
But purified.
Massive lines of script had been scorched into the surrounding hills, blinding white verses of the Eternal Writ. Entire sections of the forest had been turned into obsidian tablets carved with divine language.
In the center of the valley, where the Tribunal once staged its siege artillery, stood a spire of solid light, a flame made still.
It didn't flicker.
It sang.
The survivors whispered of it in terrified tones.
The Tribunal had left it there.
A divine brand.A warning.And maybe... a message
They called it the "Sun-Stake."
The spire of divine fire now stood at the very center of the ruined battlefield, taller than any tower in Redgate. It pierced the sky like a spear hurled by the gods, unmelting, unmoving, unbreakable.
It didn't radiate heat.
It radiated presence.
Ryven stood at the edge of the ridge with Elya and Kairo behind her, watching as several scouts attempted to approach the Sun-Stake.
The moment they crossed a certain invisible boundary, their bodies tensed. One scout dropped to his knees. Another vomited black bile. A third staggered backward, clutching his ears, screaming about "the voice in the syllables."
"That's the sixth group," Ryven muttered. "None of them made it closer than fifty paces."
Kairo narrowed his eyes.
To him, the Sun-Stake didn't look like light.
It looked like a wound or a tear in reality that hadn't yet finished bleeding.
And beneath its song, he could hear something else.
A whisper.
Faint. Repeating.
Like a name being chanted in reverse.
Later that day, the Redgate command post was in chaos.
The Writ-surge from the Sun-Stake had disabled half the keep's relics, including the ward stones and scrying mirrors. Communications with outer Concord cells were down. Anyone with divine runes tattooed on their body, clerics, oathbinders, oathbreakers, had gone into seizures or trance-like states.
Kairo sat on the edge of the war table, still pale from the aftershock of his battle. He watched the panic unfold around him in silence.
"They left that fire there for a reason," Elya said.
"Not just as a message," Ryven agreed. "As a claim."
Kairo's voice cut through: "It's a brand. A divine claim on the land. They're trying to turn Redgate into a Writ-locked zone."
Ryven looked at him sharply. "You sure?"
"I've seen it before," he said. "In a vision. Or maybe… a memory."
Elya frowned. "Where?"
"A city. Gone now. I don't remember its name. Just the silence. And the glow. Just like this."
Ryven crossed her arms. "If they brand this ground, we'll lose everything. Redgate was the last safe route to the Eastern Marsh."
"Then we stop them," Kairo said.
"Stop a flame that doesn't burn?" Ryven snapped. "That doesn't move? That's immune to magic, steel, and sanity?"
Kairo looked down at his halberd runes, still dead.
"I'll find a way."
That night, as the soldiers slept uneasily, a rider approached the gates of Redgate.
She wore veils of woven dustcloth, her hands wrapped in moon steel bands etched with shifting glyphs. Her mount, an eyeless beast shaped like a stag, did not breathe, yet it moved with grace.
The guards at the gate hesitated, weapons drawn.
The rider raised her hand.
From it came a calm voice, layered, echoing with power and distance:
"I bring no flame. I bring the answer to it."
And in her other hand, she held a blade of crystal so pure it reflected the Sun-Stake's light backward.
The rider dismounted in silence.
The eyeless stag-beast, smooth, shadowy, and unnervingly silent, stepped back into the mist. It faded into the tree line without sound or trail.
All eyes turned to the stranger.
Veils hung across her face like woven moonlight. Silver rings looped through her ears, nose, and even her collarbone, each etched with glyphs that shimmered and shifted as if alive.
Ryven drew her sword.
"Name. Allegiance. Purpose."
The veiled woman lowered her hood.
"Liris. Seer of the East reach Aetherborn. Bound to the Ashlight Accord. My purpose is him." She pointed directly at Kairo.
Everyone turned.
Kairo blinked. "Me?"
"You bear the fracture."
Ryven didn't lower her sword. "He bears a dozen bruises and a cracked rib. If you're here to finish him off, you'll have to go through all of us."
Liris didn't flinch.
"Redgate's fire is not divine. Not purely. It is laced with something older. The Tribunal channels their light through the Writ, yes, but what they placed here is more than script. It is a wound in the weave. And only one who is fractured can step through it."
Ryven scowled. "Speak sense."
Liris turned to Kairo again.
"You have died before, haven't you?"
Silence.
Elya shifted uncomfortably beside him.
Kairo didn't answer.
But the answer was written across his face.
Later, in the shattered map chamber, the flame of a single lantern danced across war plans no longer relevant.
Liris placed a crystal dagger on the table. It didn't reflect firelight, it refracted it, bending it into strange shapes.
"This is a shard of nullglass," she said. "Formed in the heart of an aether rift. It has one purpose: to cut through divine constructs."
Ryven leaned in. "We're supposed to stab a sunbeam?"
"No," Liris said calmly. "You're going to use it to cut a path through the Writ-glyphs around the flame. But only Kairo can walk through that path. He must carry it in hand."
Elya crossed her arms. "And what happens when he reaches the center?"
Liris looked directly at Kairo.
"He touches the core of the Sun-Stake. If he survives, it will reveal what the Tribunal buried there. If he doesn't…" She let the silence finish the sentence.
That night, Kairo stood at the edge of the boundary alone.
The nullglass dagger pulsed in his palm cool to the touch, yet filled with pressure like a storm waiting to scream.
The Sun-Stake hummed before him, uncaring, unblinking.
He looked back once.
Elya was watching.
She nodded.
He turned.
And stepped through the veil of scripture.