The storm had passed.
Where once the Sea of Glass was cracked and whispering with echoes of a forgotten age, it now stood as a radiant mirror—its surface alive with glowing patterns, runes dancing beneath the crystal like veins of memory come awake. The Breach was gone, the sky whole again. But the silence that followed was not peace.
It was anticipation.
Duncan stood at the edge of the reborn sea, ash swirling around his boots. Beside him, the First Beast let out a long, rumbling breath—not a roar, but something more like reverence.
"They'll come now," the beast said. "Kings. Warlords. Priests. They've all felt it. The fire you gave back."
Duncan said nothing. He could already feel it too—a ripple through the mana-fields of the land, a tremor in the blood of every wild beast and flame-marked warrior across the continent.
The old gates had opened once more.
But not to seal.
To march.
Word Spreads Like Fire
The news traveled faster than any envoy.
All across the fractured kingdoms, flame-touched relics lit themselves without fuel. Beastlords who had long since forsaken the Dominion's cause felt a call in their bones. Even in the distant cities of High Ash, where the Dominion's central archives lay buried in dust, the crystal pillars flared to life after centuries of silence.
In the shattered wilds of Western Gharrun, a lance corps hunting bonepanthers halted mid-charge as their weapons burst into heat—not from use, but recognition.
In the flooded ruins of Vel-Mire, blind monks raised their heads to the sky, weeping flames down their cheeks.
Even the exiled clans—the ones who'd abandoned fire altogether—felt it.
He had returned the pact.
But in doing so, Duncan had painted a target across his back.
The Army with No Banners
It began small.
A wandering beast-tamer from the Outer Wastes, accompanied by a giant six-legged white bear, arrived at the Sea of Glass within three days. She knelt without a word.
Then came the survivors of the Blackened Order, bearing fire-lances and hollow eyes. They spoke no allegiance, but they took up positions along the cliffs.
Within a week, hundreds had arrived. Then thousands.
Some came for answers.
Some came for power.
Some simply came because they had felt something ancient awaken inside them—and they wanted to follow the one who had awakened it.
Duncan did not call them soldiers.
They were not oathbound.
They were beastborne.
Men and women marked by the wild and the flame, not by politics or propaganda.
And they would march for him.
The Ghost-General Returns
Then came the one Duncan did not expect.
A shadow beneath a tattered red banner.
A rider with a black helm and two scimitars etched in serpent runes.
General Mora Vale.
The Ghost-General.
Once the Dominion's most feared strategist—presumed dead after the Siege of Vraek Hollow—she now rode alone, flanked only by a mute scaled beast with three eyes.
When she dismounted, she stared at Duncan with the eyes of someone who'd once tried to burn the truth out of herself.
"You lit the Sea of Glass," she said. "You sealed the Breach."
Duncan nodded.
"Then you've started a war you don't yet understand."
"Then help me understand it," he replied.
Mora Vale tilted her head.
"I swore I'd never follow fire again," she said. "But maybe fire never needed my permission."
She dropped to one knee.
Behind her, a hundred more arrived.
Memory Made Steel
From the depths of the monolith, Duncan called forth the Emberrunes again.
This time, they did not form a blade.
They wove themselves into banners.
Into armor.
Into purpose.
Blacksmiths across the gathered ranks found their tools responding to touch, forming weapons etched with living fire. Not refined Dominion metal—but beast-forged flamegear, crude yet elegant, bonded with the blood of those who wielded them.
The First Beast circled the gathering, low and watchful.
It did not speak.
But its presence burned into every heart: follow the firebearer or be consumed by the flame of forgetting.
The Path Ahead
Mora Vale stood beside Duncan as the Beastborne gathered in ranks—not drilled like soldiers, but aligned by instinct.
"Where do we march?" she asked.
Duncan stared westward, toward the obsidian ridgelines of the Ironwilds.
"There's another vault," he said. "One deeper than this one. One my father died trying to breach."
"The Heart of the Flame?"
Duncan nodded. "It's where the Dominion was born."
"And where it must end?"
"No," he said, eyes glowing faintly with emberlight. "Where it must begin again."