Ashmark sang.
Not in harmony, not in tune, but in truth. Every voice was different. Every story unique. The war was not over, but it had shifted. The fires that once demanded obedience now flickered in curiosity, doubt, and change.
And change, Kaelin had learned, was the hardest thing to fight.
The golden shard pulsed with quiet light in her palm. The dusk shard rested beside it, its silence now a comfort instead of a threat. No other flame tried to rise—not from memory, not from silence, not from shadow.
But something stirred in the west.
A messenger arrived from the borderlands with eyes full of questions and voice full of riddles. He carried no mark of flame, only a small token etched with a spiral.
"There’s a place beyond the Memory Wilds," he said. "A void where even the flame w
