The firmament shall forget the shape of unity.
The sun shall depart in silence, barefoot upon dusk.”
“When the red remembers its grief,
The brightest thread, meant to bind what broken,
will shatter.”
Alaric frowned, the book heavy in his hands.
Page after page, line after line. Each more cryptic than the last. The verses bled into one another, untamed and uninterested in being understood. Some read like riddles. Others like threats. Some were just… wrong. Linguistically mangled, almost feral.
And then, near the end, he found it.
A page that looked newer—less yellowed, the ink still carrying a faint sheen in the flickering light.
“The heir of the stars shall walk unseen,
A flame once drowned, yet not extinguished.
The last tether, unaware it spins the loom.”
Alaric’s breath caught.
His eyes flicked back over the lines, re-reading them as if a second pass might remove the shape they’d taken in his mind.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
And yet…
It was the old Varantian rendering of the tale of the Drowned Flame—Esharion, God of Secrets, Knowledge, and Sacrifice.
He drowned in silence, and in his death, the world learned to speak.
When the Triad rebelled, it was Esharion who tried to mend the damage. He had warned the others, reaching for balance while they tore it apart. And when the Sundering began—when the world cracked beneath the weight of ambition—it wasEsharion who stood alone against the unraveling. The gods and their titans descended in those final moments, desperate to contain the rupture the Void Tear had left behind. They held the magic, sealed it, shaped it into vessels and bindings.
And then they vanished.
All but Esharion.
It was he who remained, holding the threads together when the others could not. He anchored the remnants of what had once been divine. He swallowed the raw, fractured magic and with it, he was gone. The only god who gave his immortality so that humanity might begin again.
And yet there was no shrine to him. No statue, no festival day.
The old story said he would return when the time came—return not as a god, but in his Echo.
The Drowned Flame.
This was real.Real.
Not a rumor, not one of Cedric’s tavern tales or some scholar’s tattered notes from the Arqaetti.
He flipped the pages too fast, then backtracked, trying to catch his breath. He needed time. He needed to read the entire book and then the walls if he had to. His grandfather had been right—there were secrets here. And Alaric had just stumbled face-first into one that smelled of gods and rust and truth. He would love it here.
He stared at the book for a moment, mouth dry.
Then—
