The moment Selena and Dante's bodies turned to ash, something unexpected happened. The eternal flame that had guttered out inside them didn't disappear—it spread. Released from the constraint of physical form, freed from the need to sustain mortal flesh, it exploded outward in a wave of golden-crimson light that expanded with impossible speed.
It wasn't meant to happen this way. The Phoenix Pact was designed to bring them back when tyranny rose, not to unleash their essence across the world when they died from exhaustion. But the pact had been forged in desperate circumstances, written into reality by two people who barely understood what they were creating. And now, with both of them dying simultaneously, with the eternal flame released from both anchors at once, it was doing something neither of them had anticipated.
It was burning everything.
