CHAPTER 114: CHAPTER 114 - WOUNDS OF FIRE

The wind shifted again.

But this time, it did not carry with it the scent of ash, nor the heavy silence of a battlefield before the storm. It carried voices—distant, muffled, tucked just beyond the veil of trees. Caliste stood still, the map folded tightly in his grip, the warmth of the sigil against his palm less like heat and more like breath—alive, insistent.

The trees whispered overhead, leaves brushing against one another like tongues shaping forgotten words. He turned slowly, not out of caution, but reverence. Whatever had begun with that scroll, with the glyph from a life lived long ago, was pulling him east—not by threat, not by fear, but by memory’s unshakable tether.

He walked.

Not with haste. Not yet.

The path through the woods was uneven, littered with stone and tangled roots, but his stride was sure. The weight of his past pressed lightly behind each step, not like chains, but like a cloak worn too long to forget. Every branch that swayed, every crow that shifted high above the canopy, felt like some quiet herald of a past that refused to stay buried.

And in that stillness, his mind returned to the woman with the scroll.

To the words she’d spoken, delivered not as prophecy, but statement.

"You burned the lie."

She hadn’t said which one. She hadn’t needed to.

There had been too many.

❖

The trees thinned by midday.

And when they opened to reveal a ridge of crumbling stone and low fog, Caliste paused only briefly to drink from a stream and trace the glyph on the parchment again with his fingertip. The ink wasn’t ink—it was old blood, dried into pigment. Human, probably. Ancient. The lines had sunk so deep into the parchment it might have been etched by heat or magic or something older than both.

His fingers moved to his sword—not to draw it, but to feel the metal, the pattern of the sigil etched into its guard. The sword of memory, the woman had called it. Not a name he’d chosen. Not even one he liked.

But the blade remembered.

And in times like these, it remembered better than he could.

The landscape was beginning to change.

Grasses gave way to harsher rock, and the path narrowed, cutting between wind-scoured hills like an old scar running through the land’s skin. There were no signs of habitation. No trails. No fire pits. No broken stones or old bones.

Just the map.

And the heat of the ash-sigil, still pulsing like a slow heart in his grip.

❖

By the time the sun lowered, bleeding gold through the veil of cloud, he had reached the place marked on the scroll.

It was... unassuming.

A cleft in the rock.

No grand gate. No altar. No guardian beast sleeping beneath runes.

Just a narrow split between two jagged walls, just wide enough for a man to pass through sideways.

He held the map to the fading light again. The glyph burned gold where it met the sun.

There was no mistaking it.

This was the place.

He stepped forward—and felt it at once.

Not wind.

Not magic.

Not sound.

But pressure.

As if the air within that cleft had been waiting—pressurized over centuries, waiting for the right soul to pass and break its long, aching silence. His foot hit stone. Cool, smooth, worn down by time but untouched by weather.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the noise of the world cut off completely.

Silence fell like water.

Thick.

Complete.

Holy.

Caliste turned slowly, adjusting to the dark. A corridor stretched ahead, chiseled not by human hands but by something else—magic, time, or something more ancient and alive. The stone walls pulsed faintly with veins of dull crimson, like blood vessels frozen in amber.

He didn’t hesitate.

There was no point.

If this was a trap, it was one forged generations ago—and if it was meant for him, it would find him either way.

So he walked.

Deeper.

Farther.

Until the passage widened into a chamber.

And there, waiting, untouched by dust or decay, stood a single obelisk.

At its base, a pedestal.

Upon the pedestal: a blade.

Not as long as his current one. No sigil. No ornamentation.

But when he stepped closer, he felt it—not power, not threat, but recognition.

This blade had known him.

Not in this life.

But long before.

The air changed again.

Behind him.

He turned.

And a voice echoed—not from the passage, but from the chamber’s very walls.

"You’ve come late. But not too late."

He didn’t see the speaker. He didn’t need to.

He knew that voice.

Not from this world.

Not from this life.

But from the war that ended it.

"Show yourself," Caliste said quietly.

The shadows peeled away.

Not a man.

Not quite.

A figure made of shade and coal, humanoid in shape, but shifting constantly—as if forged from the same ash that had sealed the scroll.

"You bound us once," the figure said. "You broke the chain of silence with fire."

Caliste stepped forward. "And you’re still speaking in riddles."

The shade didn’t smile. "You knew this place. Even before the scroll reached you. You felt it."

Caliste nodded.

Because it was true.

He didn’t know the map, but his body had. His bones had.

The glyph wasn’t just a memory.

It was a fragment of home.

"Why now?" Caliste asked.

"Because the man you seek," the shade said, "has begun undoing the seal."

Caliste froze.

The scroll had felt urgent—but it hadn’t told him why.

Now he knew.

"Alek."

The shade inclined its head.

"He has found fragments of the past. He wears them not to remember, but to command. And if he opens what you sealed, the old wars will bleed forward."

Caliste moved toward the pedestal.

His fingers brushed the hilt of the smaller blade.

It was cold.

Then warm.

Then alive.

"You mean to say," he murmured, "he’s unlocking something even I wanted forgotten?"

The shade’s voice softened.

"Not forgotten. Hidden. For a reason."

Caliste gripped the blade.

The weight felt... right.

Not like an addition.

But like a returning piece of himself.

"I will stop him," he said.

The shade didn’t answer.

It only began to fade.

As it did, Caliste’s vision shifted—not the room, but his perception of it. Glyphs appeared along the walls, etched in fading red, like veins of language only visible in the wake of purpose. They weren’t instructions. They were oaths.

His oaths.

And one among them burned brighter than the others.

"If ever I fall—let me rise in shadow, not to rule, but to correct."

He stood there a long time.

Long enough for the shade to vanish.

Long enough for the blade to pulse once, then settle.

Long enough to know that the next step would not be toward safety or rest or understanding.

It would be toward fire.

Toward Alek.

Toward a war that had already begun.

He slid the old blade into a loop at his side and turned back toward the cleft in the stone.

Outside, the stars were gathering.

And behind his ribs, the pull grew stronger.

Not just of duty.

But of unfinished blood.

There were no roads here.

No worn paths to follow, no carved stones left behind by villagers or merchants or wayfarers. Only the untouched undergrowth, brambles curled like sleeping snakes and roots that rose and fell in defiance of logic, thick as limbs and braided with moss. The trees loomed like ancient judges, their branches so high they blurred into mist and gloom, their leaves whispering secrets no man alive had earned the right to hear.

Caliste moved carefully.

Each step was deliberate, boot slicing through tall grass, cloak catching on thorns he no longer bothered to untangle. He had long since given up on haste; there was no outrunning whatever force had summoned him with that scroll. The sigil in his pack pulsed faintly against his back, a subtle thrum of warmth that came and went, as though matching the rhythm of a heart that wasn’t his.

Alek’s territory—or what remained of it—lay just beyond the ridgeline ahead.

He didn’t know what he’d find there.

He wasn’t sure he was meant to know.

But the truth was threaded into every quiet thing now—the way birds went silent when he passed, the way even the breeze seemed to pause when he touched the seal’s edge. Something had been awoken. Not just in the world. But in him.

He crested the rise just as the sun split the horizon.

And what he saw made him stop short.

Ruins.

Not the kind time builds with erosion and neglect, but ruins born of fire and violence. Blackened stone, jagged timber, shattered altars buried beneath broken banners. The wind carried the scent of old ash and blood long dried. He stood above it all, watching the broken carcass of a once-proud fortress melt into morning.

Alek had once ruled here.

Not as a tyrant—no, his mask was subtler than that—but as a paragon. A supposed defender of order, a man the world was told to trust.

Fleur had trusted him.

Still did.

And that thought carved something sharp into Caliste’s chest.

He descended the slope slowly.

A rusted gate, long torn from its hinges, marked the boundary between the outer courtyard and the inner sanctum. He stepped over the wreckage of statues—some of gods, some of men—and walked into the hollowed remnants of the keep, his boots echoing against stone burned brittle by power beyond mortal ken.

There were no bodies.

No bones, no remnants of battle.

Only silence.

And a kind of grief that had soaked into the earth itself.

Caliste let his fingers trail along the soot-black wall.

There were markings—burned into the rock, not carved—symbols from a language older than the Kingdoms. Some looked familiar, others utterly alien, but together they formed a kind of memory, a locked recollection he couldn’t quite unravel.

Until he found the chamber.

It was buried beneath the ruined tower, behind a false altar.

He hadn’t been looking for it, not truly. But his feet brought him there, and his hands moved before thought could catch up. The sigil in his satchel grew hot, painfully so, and when he touched the wall, the stone rippled like water and dissolved into smoke.

He stepped through.

And entered the true heart of the keep.

It wasn’t large.

Just a circular room carved from obsidian and veined with glowing blue light, the kind that whispered of runes and restraint. In the center stood a single pedestal—and atop it, a crystal vial suspended in midair, spinning so slowly it might’ve been still. The liquid inside shimmered with a light not of this world, silver and gold and something deeper, like starlight folded in on itself.

He didn’t move toward it.

Not yet.