The sky had bled itself dry.

  Rain fell in hushed sheets over the Lantern Grave, washing away blood, ash, and fragments of memory left behind. Trees stood like sentinels draped in mourning, their bark slick with moonlight and sorrow.

  Zhao Wei stood alone in the remnants of battle.

  Around her, silence bloomed.

  The Messenger’s body had vanished whether carried off by his own or dissolved by whatever twisted blessing the Creed bestowed on their dead, she didn’t know. What remained were broken blades, smoldering sigils, and the faint outline scorched into the stone where her spirit beast had erupted into the world.

  That shape still lingered in her mind, too vast, too ancient. The others had seen only a silhouette.

  She had seen the eyes.

  They were hers.

  A storm curled beneath her ribs as she exhaled, fingers trembling. Not with fear. With the weight of knowing what she had done.

  What she had become.

  A quiet voice broke through the curtain of rain. “Zhao Wei…”

  Feng Ren.

  He stepped carefully around a collapsed shrine, his clothes soaked, eyes scanning her face for fractures he couldn’t name.

  “You did it,” he said.

  “No.” She didn’t look at him. “I opened something I may never close again.”

  Feng Ren’s jaw tensed. “They’ll talk about this, you know. The Creed will send more. Stronger.”

  “Let them.”

  “You’re not invincible.”

  She turned to face him then, soaked through, face pale and eyes sharp with something not quite anger.

  “I died once. What they should fear is what I learned after.”

  For a heartbeat, silence. Then Feng Ren nodded. “We need to move. The Ember scattered three safe houses, but only two signals came back.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Her fists clenched. “Who didn’t return?”

  “Bai,” he said, voice low.

  Zhao Wei’s heart dropped.

  The Ember’s safehouse was buried beneath a ruined kiln in the ghost district so forgotten even maps refused to mention it. When Zhao Wei and Feng Ren arrived, the scent of scorched ink clung to the air.

  Inside, Mira (the healer-turned-saboteur) was wrapping a young girl’s arm in silver-thread gauze. The walls were packed with scrolls, explosives, and maps inked in blood and charcoal.

  “Only three made it here,” Mira said, not looking up. “Bai’s trail ended at the Hollow Bridge. There’s no sign of him.”

  Zhao Wei felt something sharp twist in her stomach. Not panic. Not grief.

  Guilt.

  “He tripped on a root,” she whispered, almost to herself. “He wasn’t ready.”

  Feng Ren leaned against the wall. “None of us are ready. That’s the point.”

  A heavy silence pressed in.

  Mira finally looked up. “There’s more. Word’s spreading. The Creed knows you summoned something. They’re calling it… ‘the Hollow Flame.’”

  Zhao Wei blinked.

  “That’s not what it was,” she said quietly.

  Mira’s gaze was cautious. “Then what was it?”

  Zhao Wei didn’t answer.

  Because the truth felt dangerous. Because even speaking it aloud might wake it again.

  Instead, she walked to the map table and pressed a hand against the inked lines, routes, cities, old strongholds once hers in another life.

  “We move,” she said. “No more shadows. If they think they know me, we prove them wrong.”

  “Where to?” Mira asked.

  Zhao Wei’s eyes glinted.

  “To the Whispering Forge.”

  Feng Ren choked. “That place is cursed.”

  “Good,” Zhao Wei replied. “Then we’ll fit right in.”

  Far from the Ember’s hideout, beneath the obsidian spires of the Creed’s Sanctum, a council gathered.

  Twelve seated. Faces masked. Each carried a different emblem of power, bloodsteel knives, bone runes, rings carved from ashstone.

  At the center, the High Voice of the Creed stood before a basin of black flame, where visions rippled like oil on water.

  “She called it,” one murmured.

  “Not possible,” said another. “The Hollow Flame was lost centuries ago.”

  “Not lost,” corrected a third. “Sealed. By her former self.”

  The High Voice’s hand hovered above the flame. “What has returned to the world… is not Hollow Flame.”

  “What is it, then?”

  The High Voice didn’t answer immediately.

  Instead, they touched the fire.

  And the fire whispered back.

  When they turned to the council again, the shadows seemed deeper.

  “She carries a spirit fractured from the natural order,” the Voice said. “Bound in death. Reforged in vengeance.”

  They paused.

  “She is no longer a child of prophecy.”

  The others leaned forward.

  “She is becoming the prophecy.”

  Far below, in the cells carved from the mountain’s bone, a small figure shivered in chains. His glasses were gone. His satchel torn. Ink smeared across his cheek.

  Bai lifted his head slowly, nose bleeding, bruises blooming along his ribs.

  Across from him, a tall figure in Creed robes stood with a cruel smile.

  “Tell me about Zhao Wei,” the figure said.

  Bai coughed and grinned through cracked lips.

  “I’d rather eat this rock.”

  The figure raised a hand, fingers glowing with rune-fire.

  Bai narrowed his eyes.

  Then whispered, “She’s coming for me, you know.”

  The man laughed.

  But somewhere behind that laugh…

  Was the sound of fear.