The wind howled through the Valley of Threads, carrying smoke, ash, and the last notes of a lament Amira hadn't meant to sing aloud. Her blade was dull, her lantern empty. She hadn't slept in days—not since the second site fell, and Taru sent no word.
Not since she felt Elias vanish like a cut string from the tapestry of her mind.
But now, here at the base of the Temple Ashfall, something stirred.
A pull she couldn't explain. Not from flame or whisper.
But from blood.
She climbed alone, every step marked with etchings from those who had once ascended and never returned. The walls whispered in tongues older than prophecy—some called her She-Who-Seeks, others, The Unbound Flame.
She didn't correct them.
She had come to find Elias. To find Taru. And to finish what they had all begun.
But at the summit, what she found was not reunion—
It was a crown.
Forged of bone and obsidian, it hovered above a dais of broken names—each engraved on shards of forgotten lanterns. The flame inside the crown flickered blue-white.
Elias's light.
But twisted.
Tethered to something darker.
She reached out, and the moment her fingers grazed the crown, visions exploded through her.
A tower of flame, black as void, rising in the east.
Taru, kneeling beside a ruined blossom, his hands bleeding salt.
Elias, standing before a figure in gold and shadow, his face etched with sorrow.
And at the center of it all—
A mask.
White. Unmarked. But watching.
And beneath it, the true architect of the Broken Flame:
"We were the first to hold the fire.
The first to burn.
But you chose to forget us.
So now—we will burn the world into memory."
Amira dropped to her knees as the vision shattered.
The crown pulsed once… then split in two.
One half blazed with Elias's hollow light.
The other bled ink-black smoke.
And in that moment, Amira understood:
This was no longer a war of flame and shadow.
It was a war between those who remember the dead, and those who demand to be remembered—no matter the cost.
She took both halves of the crown.
She fused them with her lantern.
And when she stood again, a new kind of light rose behind her—neither sacred nor cursed.
A light of reckoning.
She turned west.
Toward the broken coast where the final site still flickered.
Toward Taru.
Toward Elias.
Toward the end.