Dellos pressed deeper into the mountain's vein, the last sliver of daylight snuffed behind him as the world narrowed to a tunnel of living stone. Every breath tasted of old secrets, damp mineral, faint smoke, the bitter tang of memories long buried. The air was heavy, charged, as if it carried the ghosts of those who had wandered here before him. His hands slid along the slick, frost-bitten walls, blue veins of flame pulsing just beneath the surface, sometimes bright, sometimes receding, like a heartbeat too faint to trust.
He moved slowly, every footfall echoing in the dark, the soles of his boots scraping against dust that smelled of forgotten ash and the strange, metallic sweetness of ancient decay. The silence was not true silence. It was a hush, pregnant with old songs and half-spoken warnings. At the edge of hearing, sometimes, he thought he heard his son's laughter—the sound Luka had made when he'd first learned to leap the narrow ledges above the village, bold and bright and utterly unafraid. Dellos gripped the memory, refusing to let it drown beneath the mountain's weight.
The labyrinth was not a tunnel so much as a wound, cut, healed, and cut again, layers folding back on themselves in a spiral that bent light and reason. The stone under his hand was sometimes slick with condensation, sometimes crumbly and dry. Every so often, the blue veins glowed brighter, illuminating glyphs older than the Asiris themselves: spiral patterns, the stylised wings of the ancient Sky-Renders, the unmistakable helix of a double-helix DNA, carved into the wall by hands that were neither Volrok nor Asiran.
He passed chambers where the flame pulsed, casting wavering shadows. Here, the air was warm, humming with a music that was not music, a vibration in the bones, a reminder that all things remembered, even if the world forgot. In other passages, ash had drifted in from below, dulling the light and turning the air acrid. Dellos coughed, wiped a streak of soot from his brow, and pressed on.
Time had no meaning down here. He counted his steps, then lost count, then counted heartbeats instead—two, beating out of time, the gift and curse of his people. Hunger gnawed at him, thirst burned, but it was the ache for his son that drove him onward. Sometimes, when the pain sharpened, he would stop, lean his forehead against the living rock, and whisper Luka's name, as if the labyrinth itself might take pity and answer back.
And then, the world changed.
The passage widened abruptly, opening into a vaulted chamber shot through with pillars of translucent stone. Blue flame ran through each column like veins of living water, painting the vastness in a ghostly, electric glow. The air tasted ionised, sharp, as if lightning had split open the mountain's heart.
At the chamber's centre, something waited. Not a statue, not an altar, not a machine as Dellos understood machines, but a relic of a civilisation too old for memory, too strange for words. He stopped, breath shallow, every instinct warning him that this was a place meant for no living man.
The Rememberancer, although the name was not known to Dellos. Not yet.
It was shaped almost like a heart, though not quite, as if some otherworldly hand had sculpted it from stone and bone and living circuitry. Vines of crystal coiled around its hollowed core. The blue flame wound through it, suspended in a sphere so impossibly perfect it seemed to hover outside of time itself. Dellos could feel it before he heard it: a low, thrumming pulse, a resonance that made his bones ache and his teeth buzz. The song of something ancient and utterly alive.
He wanted to back away, to bow, to pray, but he only stood, transfixed. The object was covered in glyphs, unreadable, incomprehensible, yet they seemed to shift as he watched, flickering between patterns, spirals, shapes that felt half-familiar in the way of dreams. This was memory, yes, but memory too old and too wild for his tongue.
He reached out, half in fear, half in fascination, not even sure if he meant to touch it. His fingers brushed the orb of flame, just a careless graze, a stumble in the dark, and everything changed.
A shock, gentle but inexorable, ran up his arm. His vision spun. Light poured in.
A torrent of images seized him, uninvited:
Cities of impossible spires and bridges of bone and glass, cloud-wreathed, with vast winged shapes wheeling through the sky, a language of belonging and warning.
A council, their faces veiled in shifting light, neither Asiran nor Volrok, their voices raised in argument as the world outside trembled and burned.
The comet, a spear of white fire, carving the sky open, unleashing an ocean of ash. The blue flame recoiling, twisting, the land itself screaming as memory tried to root itself against oblivion.
Children with eyes lit from within, marked by the fire, singing songs that healed stone, that braided memory into hope.
The Sogrens. The First. A race that bound their very DNA into the world's veins, a failsafe, a message for those yet to be born. "We leave you not a monument, but a second chance. Remember us, through the flame."
Dellos gasped, wrenched from the vision as if thrown from a great height. The taste of burning copper filled his mouth. The sound of his son's voice, impossible, aching, echoed in his mind: "Come find me, father. Come down to where the flame remembers."
He fell to his knees, breath shuddering. For a moment, he felt himself unravelling, becoming less a man than a vessel for song and sorrow. The flame's pulse steadied him. The vision faded, leaving him shaken, weeping, terribly alive. He stared at the heart of the machine, blinking away tears, and realised he did not know what to call it. He could not name it, not yet. It was too old, too sacred, too... alien. Whatever it was, it had recognised him. It had called him. He staggered to his feet, body trembling, and pressed a hand to his chest, where his twin hearts pounded, fierce and confused. He didn't understand, not fully. But he knew one thing: he was not alone, and neither was Luka.
And somewhere in the darkness ahead, answers waited, if he could survive the asking.
Dellos staggered away from the Rememberancer, not so much walking as drifting, his body echoing with aftershocks of vision and loss. Something inside him—a chord wound tight since Luka vanished—had snapped, but what replaced it was not emptiness. It was music. It was motion.
The flame was in him now, a living map beneath his skin. He felt it pulsing through the labyrinth walls, humming underfoot, running in molten threads overhead. If he closed his eyes, the darkness was no longer blind—it was alive with veins of blue, glowing softly, painting paths only he could see.
More than that, he heard it.
A low, thrumming note in the marrow, an old song made new. Not just sound, but feeling—sadness, longing, hope—woven into every vibration. At first, he thought it was the machine's doing, some curse or blessing. But as he moved deeper into the winding maze, it sharpened into something heartbreakingly familiar.
Luka.
His son's presence glimmered in the music, faint at first, then growing brighter with each step, as if the boy's spirit was both guiding him and calling out for rescue. Every time Dellos faltered, the flame's song surged, a reminder, a reassurance: this way, this way, this way. Every branch in the tunnel, every shadow and echo, the right direction revealed not by thought but by trust—by letting the flame fill the spaces where fear had lived.
It was not power. It was communion.
The labyrinth was still deadly, its paths winding, full of pitfalls and hunger and old sorrow—but Dellos was not lost. He was found. For the first time since Luka's disappearance, certainty cut through his grief: his son was alive. Not only alive, but waiting.
The farther he went, the more the music bled into his own heartbeat, into memory, into everything he was. There was no going back.
He could feel Luka in the flame, and he dared to hope, perhaps, Luka could feel him too.
Father and son, not just separated by darkness and stone, but joined by the very light that refused to die.
* * *
Reyland and Asyana at "The Mouth"
The fire was little more than a handful of blue sparks in the wind, but it was enough—enough to keep the night's teeth dull and the ancient chill at bay. Reyland sat cross-legged, hands folded in his lap, the lines of his face serene, almost boyish in the flicker. Across from him, Asyana sprawled with all the reckless confidence of a jumper, boot heels hooked on a rock, fingers idly twirling a length of kite cord.
They watched the Mouth: a gaping fissure of stone and shadow, its jagged granite teeth biting at the night sky, hungry and ancient. It was more than an entrance—it was a wound in the world, a secret place known only to the Navigators and a handful of elders whose memories ran deeper than the mountain's bones. Most believed the Labyrinth had no true exit, only traps and dead ends. But the Mouth, high on a hidden ledge above the clouds, was the exception. It was the oldest secret of the Children of the Sky, a hidden passageway said to be carved by the first Navigators, back when the world was young and full of fire. The route to the Mouth was a lesson passed in whispers and sky-maps, a knowledge earned, never given, and even then, only to those who could read the wind's language and trust the flame's memory.
Before Dellos had descended, Reyland had traced the path in the dust, showing him where the veins of blue flame would run thickest, how to listen for the faint singing in the stone, how to keep faith even when every sense screamed to turn back. He had pressed a bone-carved token into Dellos's hand, Navigator's luck, he'd called it, a charm against forgetting.
"You'll find the chamber where the flame runs deepest," Reyland had said, his voice quiet but sure. "When you do, follow the current north and up. Trust the wind, trust the memory. The path will take you to the Mouth. I'll be waiting with Asyana."
He'd clasped Dellos's shoulder in the way of brothers, not of soldiers. "Don't let the mountain keep you. No matter what you see."
Now, Reyland sat cross-legged beside the blue fire, eyes fixed on the black maw above. Every so often, his fingers brushed the token he wore at his throat, a silent tether to Dellos below.
Asyana broke the silence first, of course.
"Think he's made it past the first turn, or is he just sitting down there, hugging a wall and crying into his beard?"
Reyland gave a slow, soft smile—so rare you could count them. "Dellos doesn't cry. He broods. There's a difference."
Asyana snorted, tossing her braid back. "Brooding's just weeping with extra steps, bird-boy. Don't tell me you've never wanted to take the shortcut."
He looked into the flame, considering. "I have doubts, Asyana. But I walk through them, not around."
She grinned, mischief sparking in her eyes. "See, that's your problem. Me, I leap over doubts and pray I don't land on my face."
"For you, I think, even falling is flying."
She cocked her head, mock-injured. "You callin' me reckless, Reyland?"
"I'm saying you make chaos into an art. There's courage in that. Or madness."
She picked up a pebble and tossed it into the fire, where it hissed, sending a curl of blue up into the dark. "Maybe both. The world needs a little madness. Someone's gotta stir the air when it gets too heavy."
He looked at her now, eyes clear and cold as the dawn. "And what do you need, Asyana?"
The question, gentle but sharp, found its mark. She hesitated—a crack in her bravado. Then she shrugged, playing it off. "I need the wind in my lungs, a sky that isn't full of rules, and maybe...maybe someone to keep watch while I'm being an idiot."
A silence stretched. Only the fire's breath, the distant hum of the mountain's blood.
Reyland reached for a twig, prodded the coals. "You're not an idiot. Just alive in ways the rest of us have forgotten."
She laughed, but quieter now, softer at the edges. "You get too poetic, they'll start calling you a jumper."
He finally smiled, real and bright, a rare bloom. "Maybe I'll try it, one day. Leap without knowing where I'll land."
She met his gaze, all her usual armour flickering in the firelight. "Maybe I'll try landing for once. See what all the fuss is about."
They sat that way, two sides of the same storm, waiting for the mountain to open its throat and return what had been taken. The Mouth gaped, ancient and expectant. And the world spun a little closer to the truth.
But Reyland's eyes never stilled, not truly. The others called it "the Sight," but for him it was a blessing with the teeth of a curse. Even sitting cross-legged by the blue fire, his gaze flickered, mapping the wind, reading the shifting shadows, charting currents only he could see. He felt every subtle change in the mountain's breath, every tremor in the dark.
Tonight, something else pressed in. He'd felt it since they'd made camp by the Mouth, a subtle prickling at the back of his mind, as if the wind carried whispers too quiet for language. At first, he'd told himself it was only nerves. Shadows, playing tricks. But now, as the hours stretched and the flame burned lower, the feeling sharpened.
They were being watched.
Not by a person. Not by any beast he knew. The sensation was older, hungrier, a presence at the edge of knowing, drawn by the blue fire's pulse. It circled just beyond the reach of the light, patient, nameless, waiting.
He scanned the shadows again, fingers tightening around the token at his throat.
Asyana must've felt it too; she shifted restlessly, her bravado a little thinner now. But when she finally spoke, it was in her usual tone, bright as flint.
"You're doing it again," she said, nudging his knee with her boot. "That thing with your eyes makes you look like you're trying to see through the world."
He gave a faint, humourless smile. "Maybe I am. Or maybe something's trying to see through us."
She snorted. "Good luck to it. Not much to see in here except a Navigator who can't relax and a Jumper about to die of boredom."
Reyland's gaze lingered on the Mouth's jagged silhouette, all black teeth and ancient hunger. "Stay close to the fire, Asyana. Just in case."
A chill crept up her spine, not from the cold, but from the way his voice had changed, softer and sharper all at once. For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. The wind rattled the stones, carrying with it the memory of a world before names, and in the hush, even Asyana's laughter sounded like a dare.
* * *
The Navigator's Rite – Reyland and the Aelion Spire
In the old days, before ash and exile, a Navigator was not chosen by blood, nor by rank, but by the wind itself. Reyland remembered the night of his Rite, a storm-split sky, the taste of rain sharp as regret, and a thousand feet below, the lightless chasm known as the Breath's Edge.
He was seventeen, trembling but unbroken, led by silent elders to the Forge of Air, a cave so high the wind wailed through it like a lost soul. In the centre stood a pedestal of cold obsidian, the Aelion Spire resting atop it like a line drawn through worlds.
They spoke not a word. Reyland was to listen.
He heard nothing at first. Only the howl of the storm, the beat of his frightened heart. But then, subtle, insistent, a thread of song, not of music, but of memory, hope, and the ache of a thousand lost navigators who had stood there before him. The Spire hummed. The flame within it flared blue, brighter than the stars above. When he reached for it, he bled. The glass cut his palm, and the wind licked the blood away. The Spire drank, accepted, and awakened. In that moment, Reyland was no longer merely a boy. The wind was his to read, the sky his to command. He saw the world as it moved, not as it stood. The Aelion Spire had chosen him, and his soul would never be silent again.
The Jumper's Rite – Asyana and the Riven Lash
The Jumper's path was madness, no map, no mercy. Asyana's memory was a blur of motion and terror, of leaping from ledge to ledge across the Pillars of Night, with nothing but the mountain's wrath beneath her and the shouts of onlookers above.
At the summit, she faced the old Shaper, a woman with hands like roots and eyes bright as lightning.
"Jump."
No warning, no time for fear.
She did. She fell, wind tearing at her lungs. But the flame did not let her die. It caught her, spun her, threw her into the heart of a waiting storm where the Riven Lash, coiled and sleeping, waited like a serpent. To claim it, Asyana had to face herself. All her rage, her grief, her boundless, burning will. The Lash tasted her fear, her desire, her untamed spirit, and found it worthy. It wrapped itself around her wrist, searing a band of living fire into her skin. When she landed, alive and reborn, the Riven Lash was part of her, and she was part of the mountain's wildness.
Together, they would never bow.
No weapon forged by hand alone. Each was awakened by sacrifice, blood, breath, and bone. Each carried echoes of every bearer who had wielded it before, and every failure, every triumph, every death.
When Reyland touched the Spire now, it remembered. When Asyana cracked the Lash against stone, it sang her name.
In firelight by the Mouth, they were not merely warriors; they were living conduits of ancient promise, chosen not by blood, but by the will of a world that had seen too much loss and demanded something more.
But for every champion, there are those left behind by the flame—the Forsaken.
Once, they had been Asirians, bearers of the sacred fire, singers of light. But some flames guttered. Some spirits broke. Now they are husks, haunted by hunger, desperate for warmth they cannot reclaim. They wander the shadowed places, drawn by life's pulse, their touch a promise of oblivion. They do not speak. They do not remember. They only take and leave only ash behind.
Tonight, the wind shifts. The Forsaken are near.
The night split open, a breathless moment stretched thin as wire.
First, a ripple in the fog, then movement. Shadows, shapes, the smell of char and rot. The Forsaken came crawling from the fissures, bone-thin, eyes burning with hollow blue fire, their forms flickering like broken ghosts.
Reyland stood, tall and still, the Aelion Spire in his hand humming with awakening. The spear was not mere metal; it was memory and fire, a tuning fork struck against the world's old song. His eyes, so often gentle, now burned an impossible blue. His face was shadowed, sharp, edged by the glow of his own becoming.
"Hold the line," he murmured, voice like iron hammered in flame.
Asyana grinned, wild, reckless, the Riven Lash already uncoiling in her fist. She moved before the Forsaken struck, vanishing into the night's shroud. One moment she crouched beside the fire; the next, she was air, then shadow, then a blur of grace and fury behind the enemy's flank.
The Forsaken hit like a storm, no voice, no hesitation, only hunger. The first wave came at Reyland, leaping, shrieking, claws extended.
He didn't dodge. He met them.
The Spire swept in a wide arc, singing as it cleaved through mist and flesh alike, the flame trailing in swirling ribbons. Where the spear struck, Forsaken burst in cold blue fire, unravelling back into ash and memory.
A Forsaken leapt onto his back, jaw wide as oblivion. Reyland's hand snapped behind him, seizing the thing by the throat—he spun, crushed, drove the Spire through its chest, and it howled itself into nothing.
A dozen more swarmed. Reyland became the storm's centre, unmoving, untouchable, a bastion of living flame. Each strike was pure, deliberate. Every movement was a memory burned into sinew and soul.
But Asyana, she was chaos made flesh.
She darted through the melee, the Riven Lash cracking, wrapping around necks, legs, torsos. Where it struck, Forsaken faltered, spasmed, fell. She danced on a stone, then over the fire, then above them all, landing silent as a falling leaf behind their rear ranks. She was never where the Forsaken looked. She was always the dagger at their backs, the whisper in their bones.
A Forsaken lunged, she vanished, reappearing to slap its head clean from its shoulders with a flick of the Lash, then leapt high, vaulting over Reyland to land in the thick of the second wave.
Her laughter echoed, sharp and bright as breaking glass.
Together, they wove destruction.
Reyland, immovable and blinding.
Asyana, untouchable and wild.
Wave after wave fell. Still, the Forsaken came, relentless, their hunger a tide against the shore of the living. But the Spire never dulled, the Lash never faltered. If the Forsaken were mist, they met the wind and fire that could not be quenched.
At the centre of chaos, Reyland and Asyana locked eyes, a wordless vow. She vanished, striking from the shadows. He stood, the world breaking upon him. And in the end, when the last of the Forsaken dissolved to ash, the silence that fell was heavy, almost holy. Reyland exhaled, steam rising from his skin. Asyana landed lightly at his side, spinning the Riven Lash into a coil, grinning through blood and flame.
"Next time," she panted, "let's pick a fight with something real."
Reyland only smiled, the blue fading from his eyes.
Above, the Mouth waited, silent, watching, as if even the mountain itself was changed by what it had witnessed.
* * *
Back in the Sky-Render's cave, time lost its meaning.
Luka sat, arms wrapped around his knees, and listened as the Sky-Render fed. Each time the beast drank from the blue flame, light shimmered along its bones, its wounds knitting in slow, radiant threads. The glow painted the air in impossible colours, cerulean and silver, memory and dream. Luka watched, spellbound, until his own eyelids grew heavy. He dozed, drifting in and out of consciousness, slipping between the world of stone and the world beneath the skin. Sometimes, in that in-between, he felt the Sky-Render's mind brush his, a language of hunger and memory, of warning and invitation. Images flickered: the beast alone on a shattered peak, cradling broken eggs; the mountain burning with comet-fire; other children, flame-marked, their eyes wide with hope or terror. The Sky-Render's loneliness gnawed at him, a pain deeper than teeth or claws.
When he woke fully, the cave had changed. The flame in the walls was brighter now, the lines of memory thicker, branching into fractal veins that pulsed with music he could nearly hear. The Sky-Render had settled closer, still wary, still dignified, but no longer hiding in the darkness. It lay coiled like a serpent, head lifted, watching Luka with a gaze as heavy as fate.
Luka stood, wavering but unafraid. "What do you want from me?" he asked, voice trembling, but not weak. The Sky-Render's tail thudded softly against the stone. It raised its head, exhaled a cloud of blue-tinted breath, and opened its jaws. A sound emerged—not a roar, not a word, but a tone. Deep, vibrating, almost a song. It reverberated through the chamber, up Luka's spine, into his chest, until his heart pounded in time with it.
The flame in Luka's wounds flared, sudden pain, then clarity. Images cascaded through his mind:
A time before exile: Sky-Renders soared in flocks, their wings bright as dawn, the keepers of flame and memory.
A breaking: The comet's fall, the ash choking the flame, the herd starving, scattering, hunted by fear.
A prophecy: A child marked by blue fire, who would restore what was lost, feed the old hunger, and return song to the mountain.
Luka staggered, breath sharp. He reached for the wall, gripping stone slick with memory. He felt the Sky-Render's need—a hunger not just for flame, but for belonging, for the bond lost when the world was broken.
He saw and knew what was required. With hands that trembled, Luka pressed his palm to the wall, willing the flame to answer, to rise. Blue fire danced up his arm, crackling over the welts left by the Sky-Render's claws. The pain was sharp, but beneath it, a pulse of ancient joy. He stepped forward, heart drumming, and the Sky-Render did the same, their eyes meeting, breath mingling, flames merging in the air between them. Something passed between them, a promise, a piece of soul traded for a piece of survival.
The Sky-Render lowered its head, nudging Luka's chest, a gesture at once reverent and wild. The flames on the wall surged brighter, casting wild shadows that spun around them both. In that instant, Luka felt it: the mountain's memory, the bloodline of Sogrens, the endless yearning of exiles and survivors. He was not just Luka, not just lost, he was the bridge. The one who carried both wound and healing.
And the Sky-Render, for the first time in centuries, was not alone.
A shudder ran through the lair, a warning, a summoning. The flames dimmed, and the air grew cold. Luka felt the mountain shift, as if something outside, something old and forgotten, had noticed the change and was coming to test it. The Sky-Render rose, wings mantling, eyes bright with challenge. It looked to Luka like a silent command in its gaze. Whatever trial waited in the tunnels ahead, they would face it together.
But with the changing of the cave, with the Sky-Render's wary acceptance and the wild new tether forged between them, Luka felt a second presence awaken. Not the hollow threat of hunger or the hush of forgotten things, but something intimate, fierce, and familiar. A vibration in the blue flame, a heartbeat, two heartbeats, echoing through the stone, threading through memory and marrow.
His father. Dellos.
Luka froze, every sense straining. He pressed his hand to the nearest vein of flame, closing his eyes. In the darkness, the world blurred away, leaving only the song, the flame, and that unmistakable thrum of family. He felt Dellos as surely as if his father had called his name: the way the older man moved through tunnels, the sharp urgency in his thoughts, the love braided with terror, every heartbeat a message pulsing through fire and stone.
Luka remembered childhood hands learning to shape fire, the quiet pride in Dellos's voice, the weight of a father's promise: I will always find you, no matter the dark. Now, that promise was more than memory. It was a living current. Every wall Luka touched whispered of his father's searching, every flicker of blue flame showed him Dellos's shadow slipping through the labyrinth's bone-bright halls. They were bound now, not only by blood and story, but by the living flame itself, two voices in a cosmic song that refused to be silenced. He staggered back from the wall, blinking tears. The Sky-Render cocked its head, golden eyes narrowed, as if it too sensed the trembling note of reunion weaving through the mountain.
Luka smiled, small, fragile, but real.
"I know you're coming, father," he whispered, voice barely more than a breath lost in the shifting fire. "I feel you. I'm here."
And somewhere, far below or high above, Dellos felt it too. The path was opening, the call growing clearer, a beacon of hope, burning blue against the world's relentless night.
But the mountain was not yet done with its tests. For every pulse of hope, something darker pressed closer. The bond of flame would be forged not in safety, but in the trial to come.