Kael stared at the vortex Elian had just opened in the Veil Gate. It pulsed with a dark red glow, almost like dried blood, and the air around it had grown suddenly heavy, as if the whole world were holding its breath.
A wave of frustration and irritation was rising inside him: an echo of the Veil itself, crawling under his skin.
This was the Veil of Wrath, and he knew this battle would be different. Harsher. He had always tried to keep his anger in check, to stop it from taking over.
Here, that would be tested.
Anya stepped closer, her face tightened with caution. Her fingers closed briefly around Kael's wrist. "This Veil is the most direct of them all, Kael. It wants to make you angry. Provoke you, until you strike."
Kael clenched his fists, without even noticing.
"You'll feel the anger anyway," she went on, her eyes narrowing as she studied him. "The key is to stay its master. Channel it. Use it as fuel instead of poison. Don't fight anger with anger: the Ash's rage is blind, yours must have a purpose. Don't strike wildly."
Lyra stepped forward without a word, her fingers testing the air in front of the vortex as if searching for a seam, her silver eyes fixed on him. She didn't need to add anything: Kael read the same warning in her silence.
Kael nodded. As always before facing a Veil, he thought of his Dream Garden, almost like a ritual.
The flame at its center was now a small but sturdy brazier, and the golden roots had spread further, enriching the soil.
If the Veil of Wrath wanted to enrage him, he would make his anger into something useful.
He stepped into the vortex.
The air grabbed him with brutal force, as if an invisible fist had slammed directly into his chest.
Heat flooded around him, nothing like the warm, steady heat of his Dormant Flame: it had the wild, scorching fury of an uncontrolled blaze.
His ears filled with a deafening roar: metal twisting, stone shattering, screams of pure frustration and rage.
When he opened his eyes he was standing on ground that wouldn't stay still.
Around him stretched an endless battlefield, made of jagged slabs of cooled lava, black and sharp, crackling under every step. The sky was a dark, oppressive red, streaked with crimson lightning that, now and then, revealed a ruined landscape.
The air was thick with bitter smoke and the stinging smell of sulfur and burnt metal. Nothing there was alive.
Kael looked around, trying to make out shapes through the red glow.
The rocks hissed with hot steam, and an orange light seeped from the cracks in the ground, as if from the heart of a volcano. Anger boiled inside him, a blind fury that felt as if it wanted to tear him apart.
Every flash of lightning, every groan from the shifting ground fed it. It was the Ash's rage.
Then shapes began to rise from the lava stones: solid and threatening, very different from the transparent figures of the Veil of Loss.
They were creatures of dark rock and smoke, their eyes burning red with hatred. Their shapes were rough and unfinished, as if raw anger had given itself a body in a hurry.
These were the Demons of Wrath, projections of the Ash, answering to the deepest frustration inside him.
"Destroy! Burn! Tear apart!"
Their voices were a chorus of guttural roars, woven from the sounds of the battlefield. The Demons charged toward Kael, impossibly fast for their size, their arms stretching into sharp, blade-like claws.
Kael felt the primal urge to strike, to unleash his Dormant Flame with all his strength.
That was exactly what the Veil wanted.
But Anya's words echoed in his mind: Don't let it consume you. Channel it. Don't strike wildly.
His Dormant Flame churned in his chest, but Kael didn't let it explode. He focused, bending that fury into controlled heat, like a forge working metal.
He kept his eyes locked on the approaching Demons.
When the first one lunged at him, Kael did something unexpected: he slipped to the side, dodging the claw, and as the Demon passed him he brushed its shoulder.
His golden flame leapt from his palm to the dark rock. No explosion. The Demon froze. Its form flickered, and a pure, burning frustration flooded into Kael's mind.
It was the anger of something that wants to destroy and cannot: the fury of helplessness.
Kael recognized it before he understood it. It was the same fury that had closed his throat outside Elara's door, while the healers shook their heads.
He snatched his hand back and staggered, his head throbbing from the overload. His Dormant Flame held the flood back, just in time. The Demon turned with an even louder roar.
The second one charged him from the left. This time Kael held the contact a breath longer, long enough to feel where that anger was knotted, clenched like a fist around something lost.
With the third, he sensed the helplessness before he even touched it, like a smell in the air. His hand arrived already knowing where to land, and the Demon trembled, hesitated, took a step back.
Now Kael knew.
It wasn't about breaking anger. It was about finding its source and loosening its hold.
Then a figure rose from a crack at the center of the battlefield.
It was Solara's projection, in its most corrupted form: the living embodiment of the Ash's Wrath, her rage given shape by the Veil. Her figure was wrapped in a cloak of smoke and shadow, imposing, almost royal. Her eyes burned with a blazing red, filled with a primordial, endless fury.
"Anger is the only truth!" Her voice, a roar that echoed across the whole battlefield, was full of hatred. "Destruction is the only way! If you can't stop the pain, burn it. Burn everything!"
Solara raised her hands, and pillars of black fire rose from the lava ground.
This fire was cold, alien to everything Kael knew. It burned without consuming, leaving only emptiness behind.
The Fire of Wrath.
Kael dodged the pillars: slow, but massive. His Dormant Flame hammered in his chest.
"I feel your anger, Keeper!" Solara roared, summoning more pillars. "They dug through your memory and carved it into a wall. They send you here because they have no one else. And you thank them? Let it flow. Join me, and together we will burn this world of false dreams!"
Kael felt the pull of that rage. He knew it well. Solara's words were his own, thought on the worst nights and never spoken aloud: his dream carved into a banner without anyone asking his permission, Elian's voice saying we have no one else.
He could give in, let that fury merge with his own and unleash an eruption of Dormant Flame that would incinerate everything.
But that wasn't his way.
"No!" Kael shouted, dodging another pillar. "My anger is real. And it's mine: I decide where it goes. Burning pain only spreads it!"
He focused. He had never done this before: his fingers opened on their own, and a small golden sphere slipped from each, five emitters instead of one. The spheres hung in the air around him, pulsing with a controlled warmth, a kind of pressure.
The Demons of Wrath threw themselves at him again. Kael moved among them, agile, letting the spheres settle on their bodies. Each sphere pulsed, pouring in warmth, and each Demon it touched began to tremble: its dark form cracked, letting brief flashes of light through.
It was rage finding release in awareness instead of destruction.
A pillar of black fire grazed his shoulder. It hollowed instead of burning: for a moment Kael couldn't feel his left arm, or remember ever having one.
To make matters worse, the spheres around him flickered, as if that emptiness were calling them.
Kael reached for his fixed point, the flame at the center of his Dream Garden, and found it. His arm began to tingle, then to exist again. The spheres stopped flickering.
Solara roared and hurled a wave of black fire. "You cannot stop me! I am the world's Wrath!"
"You're a wound that's been burning for centuries," Kael answered, his voice steady.
As the golden spheres settled on the last Demon, the battlefield began to change. The lava cooled, the red lightning dimmed, the roar sank to a murmur. The Demons dissolved into small swirls of gray smoke that drifted away on the air.
Not shattered, but soothed.
Solara's form folded in on itself, wrapped in thicker smoke. She screamed, and the scream broke in her throat into a choked sound of pure frustration. Her black fire went out. Kael felt her power fray, like a rope losing one thread after another.
"You... can't... silence... anger..." she whispered, her voice raw and almost broken.
For an instant the red of her eyes dimmed to the color of a quiet ember. Solara looked at her empty hands as if she didn't remember raising them. Then the smoke closed over her, and her form withdrew.
The battlefield dissolved slowly, condensing into something new. The lava melted into a smooth, cold surface; the red sky faded into a deep blue, scattered with distant stars.
Under Kael's feet, the ground was solid and cool.
The smell of sulfur vanished, replaced by the clean, cold air of high mountains. In front of him shone a portal of pure ice, glowing with a crystalline light; beyond its surface he could glimpse a world of ice and silence.
It was the exit. The Veil of Wrath had been crossed.
Kael was exhausted, and yet a new energy was running through him. The anger was still there, but now it had a shape: it had become a source of iron determination, a controlled fire burning with purpose.
His mind felt clearer than ever.
He stepped through, and the cold gave him back to the Deep Foundations.
He landed on his feet. His legs held; his hands didn't, and kept trembling from the Veil's heat. Anya and Lyra rushed to him, relief on their faces.
"Kael!" Lyra cried. "You endured! Your flame was like a healing weapon!"
Anya came closer and looked at him for a long moment. "You shaped your anger into a tool, Kael. You didn't let it break you. That's a rare gift."
Kael looked down at his hands, which were finally growing still. His Dormant Flame was now a bright, steady flame, a hearth at the center of his chest. In his Dream Garden the flame had grown again, and the golden roots had spread into a dense network that covered almost all of the barren ground.
And in one small spot, right beside the flame, Kael saw something new.
A tiny green gem, pulsing faintly, like a promise of growth. It was the first sign of life. Kael couldn't look away, wondering what it might mean.
Master Elian approached. His old face was lined with weariness, but in his eyes was a light Kael had never seen there before.
Respect. Hope.
"You have passed the Veil of Wrath, Kael. And you eased a part of Solara's suffering, even if only for a moment. Learning not to be overwhelmed by anger is one thing. Easing Solara's own... no Keeper has ever managed that."
"Master," Kael said, "what comes next?"
"Next," Elian said, "is the one where you'll want to remember this conversation."
He pointed at the Veil Gate: the vortex had turned to ice and was blazing with a blinding white light.
"The Veil of Oblivion. You will face absolute emptiness: the absence of everything, the erasure of memory. Oblivion is silence. It is forgetting. It will be a test of silence, and the most dangerous one. And Solara will be there again, ready to make you forget everything, even your mission."
Kael stayed silent long enough to feel the weight of that word.
Forgetting.
It sounded more terrifying than any rage or madness. But the green gem in his Dream Garden kept pulsing.
Then a thought struck him: 'What if I really forgot? What if I forgot... everything?'
He fixed that green gem in his mind: its exact color, the rhythm of its pulse.