The Ashlands were where the world forgot how to grow.
Once a forest of myth, they'd burned during the First Collapse—left charred, cursed, and forever smoldering. Trees stood like petrified skeletons. The ground hissed with buried heat, and nothing natural lived there… but many unnatural things did.
It was here that Eryssa led Ember and Orin.
Not to hide.
To find someone.
The Gale-Wardens called him the Ash-Seer. The last Oracle who hadn't burned out. A man who'd once walked into flame and came out changed—blind in sight, but seared with vision.
They found him deep in a crater of obsidian glass, surrounded by bone totems and slow-drifting sparks that fell like dying stars.
He was waiting.
"You bring the Afterflame," he said, even before they spoke.
Ember flinched. "You know what I am?"
"I know what hunts you."
The Ash-Seer's face was cracked from old burns. His eyes, milky white, did not blink. "You are not born of flesh alone. You are the echo of a wish made by a dying star. The Flamebound Court created you… and now fears what you might become."
Eryssa stepped forward. "Can she be protected?"
"No," he said. "She must be tempered."
Orin frowned. "You mean trained?"
"I mean reforged," the Ash-Seer said. "In the fire that made her. And for that, we need something lost since the Age of Pillars."
He held out his hand, and the sparks clustered there began to swirl, forming the shape of a sigil. Three interlocking flames—one gold, one violet, one void-black.
"The Triad Flame."
Orin's breath caught. "But that's just a legend."
The Ash-Seer smiled for the first time. "Legends are merely truths that survived too long."
Ember stepped closer. The sigil glowed when she neared it.
"What happens if I find this flame?" she asked.
The Ash-Seer's voice turned low, reverent.
"Then the world will burn rightly again."