900 years Ago.
The sky above Vaelor had turned the color of a dying wound. Smoke rolled across the horizon in thick, choking waves, swallowing the last light of dusk. King Aedryx Drenovar stood upon the broken ridge of Halvorn Field and watched his army burn.
Not retreating. Not surrendering.
Burning.
The enemy banners of the Nine Host fluttered through the haze below black iron sigils, bone-threaded standards, symbols of gods who had long abandoned men. Their soldiers moved like a tightening ring of steel around what remained of Aedryx's forces. The First Burning War had lasted twelve years. Twelve years of siege, starvation, betrayal. And now it ended here.
With him.
Aedryx removed his helm slowly. His hair clung damp against his temple, streaked with ash and blood. He had been called invincible once. The Unifier. The Flame of the West. Titles meant nothing when your men screamed in terror.
A rider approached through the smoke, dismounted, and fell to one knee. "Your Grace," the man rasped. "The western flank has collapsed. General Rhyvos is dead. The northern ridge belongs to the Host."
"How long?" Aedryx asked.
The rider did not answer immediately. He did not need to.
The king nodded once. "Take whoever you can and flee south."
"My king"
"That is not a suggestion."
The rider hesitated, then bowed his head and fled back into chaos.
Aedryx turned toward the shattered valley below. Somewhere beyond those hills lay the future of his bloodline, his pregnant queen hidden in a monastery fortress. If he fell today, so did everything he had built.
And yet… he could feel it.
The war had never been entirely mortal.
For years there had been whispers. Entire battalions consumed overnight by unseen flame. Rivers boiling without heat. Enemy soldiers screaming that the earth itself breathed fire beneath their feet.
The priests called it divine wrath.
The enemy called it weapon.
Aedryx knew it was neither.
He had seen the fissure.
Three nights ago, during the blood-moon eclipse, the ground had cracked open beneath Halvorn's eastern trench. Not from siege engines. Not from catapult stone. From below.
A glow pulsed through the fracture like a heartbeat.
Alive.
He felt it again now. Beneath his boots. A vibration too deep to be earthquake, too deliberate to be accident.
The earth was not breaking.
It was waking.
Aedryx descended from the ridge and walked alone toward the valley's center, ignoring the clash of steel around him. Arrows hissed past. Men collided and died. No one noticed their king walking into the heart of annihilation.
The fissure lay ahead, half-hidden by smoke. A jagged wound in the soil, wide enough to swallow a tower. And from within it, light.
Not yellow. Not red.
White-hot.
It did not flicker like flame.
It breathed.
Aedryx stopped at the edge. The heat did not scorch him. It pressed against his skin like recognition.
"You are real," he murmured.
The battlefield noise seemed to dim. As though the world leaned closer.
Then the voice came.
Not through air.
Through bone.
You seek victory.
Aedryx did not fall to his knees. He had not knelt to gods; he would not kneel now. "I seek dominion."
Dominion requires sacrifice.
He almost laughed. "Look around you."
Not theirs. Yours.
The light surged upward within the fissure, forming no shape, yet suggesting one. Vast. Coiled. Endless.
Bind me, it whispered. And your enemies will turn to ash before dawn.
Aedryx's jaw tightened. "And the cost?"
Silence.
Then:
Your blood shall carry me.
The king's pulse thundered in his ears. "For how long?"
As long as your line endures.
The meaning settled slowly. "You would live within my heirs."
I would awaken within them.
Aedryx thought of his unborn child. Of a dynasty stretching centuries. Of cities united under one banner instead of nine fractured tyrannies.
He also thought of madness.
Of fire in human veins.
"You will not consume them."
Only if they are weak.
The honesty of it chilled him more than deceit would have.
Below the ridge, the Nine Host advanced. Trumpets sounded. The final charge began.
Time collapsed.
If he refused, he would die here. His queen would be hunted. His child executed. Vaelor would fracture into endless war.
If he accepted.
He did not know.
But he had never been a cautious man.
Aedryx Drenovar drew his sword. The steel reflected white flame. Without breaking eye contact with the living light, he dragged the blade across his palm. Blood spilled into the fissure.
The reaction was immediate.
The earth roared.
Not cracked. Not shifted.
Roared.
Fire erupted upward, not wild, not chaotic, but controlled,spiraling around him like a crown of living sunlight. The battlefield froze. Soldiers from both armies turned as the valley became noon-bright.
The voice deepened.
The pact is sealed.
The flames did not burn him. They entered him.
Through his wound.
Through his veins.
Agony unlike any blade tore through his body. His vision went white. He felt his heart ignite,each beat striking like a forge hammer. For a moment he thought he would die.
Then the pain became strength.
He stood taller.
Below him, the advancing lines of the Nine Host hesitated.
Aedryx raised his sword.
And the world obeyed.
A wall of white fire surged across the valley floor. It did not spread randomly. It chose targets. Iron armor liquefied. Shields turned to glowing slag. Flesh vanished without smoke. The screams lasted seconds before becoming silence.
The fire moved with purpose.
Within minutes, the Nine Host ceased to exist.
Only ash drifted across Halvorn Field.
Aedryx lowered his blade. The flames receded into him like inhaled breath. The fissure sealed behind him, leaving only scorched stone.
The surviving remnants of his army stared in horror and worship.
Their king stood untouched at the center of a charred wasteland.
He felt the presence settle deep within his blood. Quiet. Patient.
Waiting.
Your dominion begins, the voice whispered.
Aedryx looked toward the southern horizon, where his queen carried the future.
"What have I done?" he asked the empty air.
No answer came.
Only warmth beneath his skin.
And far below the earth. The night that followed Halvorn Field was unlike any before. The stars above Vaelor seemed dim, as if the sky itself feared what had been unleashed. Aedryx Drenovar rode alone through the smoking remnants of the battlefield, his armor scorched black, his cloak shredded. The heat that had surged through him earlier had not fully receded. It throbbed in his veins, a constant reminder that the pact was no longer abstract, he carried it now, a living, waiting fire.
The remnants of the Nine Host had fled in terror. Some would never return to their homes,their villages would bear the scent of burned flesh for decades. Yet, strangely, it was not victory that weighed on him, but the realization of what he had bound to his bloodline. He had seen the fire obey him, controlled it like an extension of his will, but even that control felt fragile. One misstep, one moment of weakness, and the flames could turn on him. On his heirs. On Vaelor itself.
He stopped near a stream, its water blackened by ash, and knelt to wash the blood from his hands. Each droplet sizzled and hissed as it touched the stones. For the first time, he felt fear, not for himself, but for the child yet to come. The future of the empire, the dynasty, rested in a womb he could not protect with armies or walls. The Ember Sovereign had agreed to serve him, but in doing so, it had also chosen him, and through him, all who would follow.
A rustle behind him made him tense. He turned sharply, drawing his sword, but it was only Serelia, his queen, cloaked in the dark, eyes wide with both awe and horror.
"You survived," she whispered.
"I had no choice," he said, voice hoarse. "The fire… it answers only to me now. And it waits."
She glanced toward the southern ridge, where their hidden caravan waited. "The child"
Aedryx's gaze hardened. "The child will carry it too. Every firstborn will carry the ember. That is the price of our empire."
Serelia faltered. "And if they cannot control it?"
Aedryx's hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. "Then the world burns. That is the pact. That is the power we sought."
For a moment, neither spoke. The distant cries of surviving soldiers echoed faintly through the valley. The air smelled of iron and ash. The fire within him pulsed faintly, almost as if sensing the unease in those around him.
"I will protect the child," Serelia said finally, her voice trembling, but firm. "I will shield them from the eyes that would see them destroyed, and from the men who fear the power they carry."
Aedryx nodded, a slow, solemn movement. "You must. The Ember Sovereign is patient. It waits through centuries if necessary. And one day… it will awaken fully in our line."
He looked at the sky, blackened and scorched by distant flames, and whispered to himself: "May it awaken in the strong. Not the weak. Not the foolish."
Then he mounted his horse. The battlefield behind him was silent now, but Vaelor itself felt changed, as though the land remembered the first burning. The pact had been sealed. The dynasty had been cursed. And from this night onward, every ember in his veins would carry both dominion and doom.
As they rode south, a faint glow lingered under Aedryx's skin, a reminder of the entity slumbering within him, waiting for the line to continue. And somewhere, far below the continent, the Ember Sovereign pulsed, its patience eternal, its fire ready to awaken again.