Volume 2 – Inheritance of Fire
Chapter 1 – Echoes of Self
Part 3 - Shadows Between Realms
The spell circle didn't flicker this time.
It burned. Like a fire trying to keep me out.
Cold and sharp. Clean as a blade. Then the flame subsided from his side.
Ezra.
No staggering. No disorientation. No screams in the dark.
He opened his eyes beneath a low cavern, dust sliding from the hood of his cloak as if it had only just settled.
A candle burned in the corner, untouched by breeze. It cast shadows across stone-carved shelves filled with ledgers, knives, and scrolls sealed with seven layers of wax. Every surface was orderly. Lived-in. As though he had been here for years.
And maybe he had.
He sat up slowly, pressing his palms to the floor. Then the wall. Then the mark on his wrist — a faded scar in the shape of a sigil he hadn't seen since the dive.
Whispering Web.
This was one of his safehouses.
One of hundreds, possibly.
He didn't speak. Didn't move quickly.
Just waited.
Letting the silence tell him if the world was wrong.
He knew.
Before the scroll.
Before the mana pulses.
Before my name tried to press its way back into his mind.
He remembered.
Not in fragments, not in images.
He remembered the lab.
The dive. The room. The spell. The pain.
And then the shift.
He didn't need confirmation.
He just needed proof of method.
He activated the scry stone on the pedestal beside the bed. It obeyed him instantly.
Three lines of mana surged through the scriptwork on the table — red, blue, and silver.
Incomplete.
A fourth line appeared as he whispered a phrase I could almost hear but couldn't translate.
The stone pulsed once.
He closed his eyes, took a slow breath, and opened a sealed drawer built into the cave wall.
Inside: a folded parchment and a black ring.
He touched the parchment first. Unfolded it. Read it.
Then smiled.
My handwriting. My seal.
The message had reached him before I sent it.
Ezra's mind had never operated in straight lines.
Even in our world, he moved between moments like the future had already happened and the past hadn't quite settled.
Now he moved like someone who had been waiting for everyone else to catch up.
He donned the ring, placed the scry stone into a pouch at his belt, and walked out of the chamber into a passage carved by memory more than tools.
He stepped into a hallway dimly lit by flame runes and passed two guards who didn't see him.
Didn't register him.
He didn't hide.
He simply moved in silence so deep it swallowed recognition.
Outside, the mountain wind hit sharp and fast.
The peaks of the southern range stabbed upward through heavy cloudbanks like broken teeth.
Villages were burning in the distance.
Ezra didn't pause to watch.
He already knew which kingdom was collapsing — and how much coin he'd buried there in a false identity three years earlier.
He already knew which faction would fill the void.
He already had agents in place to control them.
My voice reached him — not through spell or vision, but through that same quiet resonance that had always linked us.
It wasn't a message. Not in language.
It was a presence.
And he answered.
Not in words. Not in alarm.
Just a nod.
And one thought pushed back toward me, razor-clear:
"I remember."
The spell circle flared black in Hollowreach.
Not with darkness — with clarity.
The mark of someone who never forgot who they were, no matter the world.
Ezra was coming.
And he wasn't coming unprepared.