The wind had teeth.
It bit through Kaelen's wool cloak and rattled his bones as he trudged along the narrow mountain path, boots crunching on frost-covered stone. Snow flurried like ash from a dead fire, obscuring the sky and all the world below it. Behind him lay the dense pines of the Ardentwood; ahead, only cliffs and silence.
Three days ago, he would have laughed if someone told him he'd be crossing the Forgotten Peaks alone. Now, with only a sword, a pack of dried provisions, and a mystery folded in cracked parchment, he found himself doing just that.
The letter had appeared on his windowsill with the morning frost. No courier, no owl, no sound. Just… there. Waiting. He had nearly tossed it into the hearth, thinking it a prank. But something in the seal had stopped him — a black sun pierced by a silver spear. He had seen it once in a forbidden book beneath the village chapel, a symbol dismissed as "heretical nonsense" by the High Priest. Yet it tugged at something in him, something buried deep and nameless.
The words inside were few, but they were enough to upend everything:
Kaelen of Thornmere,
Find the Ember. Follow the wind.
The blood remembers.
— V.
He didn't know what the Ember was. He didn't know who "V" was. But when he showed the letter to his mother, her face turned pale. Her lips moved, but no sound came. Then, with a trembling hand, she reached beneath the floorboards and gave him an old sword wrapped in a burial cloth — the one she had always forbidden him to touch.
"It was your father's," she had whispered. "He died for that sigil."
Kaelen hadn't known his father. Only the stories. A guardsman, brave and honest. Lost during a border skirmish when Kaelen was barely two summers old. That was the tale — the lie — he'd grown up with. But the truth was colder. Stranger.
Now he was here, on a path few dared walk, drawn by a ghost and a promise.
He reached the crest of the ridge just as the wind shifted. The snow eased, revealing the jagged spines of the mountains like the ribs of some ancient god, half-buried in time. And there — perched on an outcrop not fifty feet ahead — was the stormcrow.
It was massive, larger than any bird Kaelen had seen, with wings spread like a black sail against the gray sky. Its feathers shimmered with a violet sheen, as though lightning lived within them. Around its neck hung a chain, and at the end of that chain — an ember, glowing faintly in the cold.
Kaelen stopped, heart pounding.
The stormcrow turned its head slowly and looked directly at him. Its eyes were silver. Not the color of metal, but moonlight on water — ancient, unknowable.
Then it spoke.
"Kaelen of Thornmere," it rasped, its voice layered and otherworldly. "You have come."
Kaelen's mouth went dry. "What… are you?"
The stormcrow stepped forward, claws clicking against the stone. "I am the Wind's Eye. The last of the First Flock. I speak now because the Ember listens."
"The Ember?" Kaelen's gaze dropped to the glowing stone.
"The heart of the flame that was stolen," the crow said. "It calls to your blood. Your line is not forgotten, though the world has buried it."
Kaelen took a step closer, the warmth from the ember brushing his skin. "Why me?"
"Because your father turned away from the fire. And because you will not."
The ember flared suddenly, casting a circle of golden light. In it, Kaelen saw a vision — a spire rising from a sea of fire, a gate forged from bones, a girl with eyes like stars holding a blade that whispered when it moved. He stumbled back, the image burning behind his eyes.
"What was that?" he gasped.
"A memory," the stormcrow said. "Or a prophecy. Sometimes they are the same."
Kaelen looked at the ember. It pulsed like a heart. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Follow the wind," the crow said. "It will guide you to the Nine Crowns — the gifts of the ancient kings. Only with them can the Tower be reached."
Kaelen frowned. "And what's in the Tower?"
"The truth," the crow said. "Of your name. Of your blood. Of the war that never ended."
A pause. Then the bird's wings beat once — a thunderclap against the silence.
"I have held the Ember long enough," it said. "It belongs to you now."
Kaelen stepped forward as the stormcrow lowered its head. The chain slipped free, and ember dropped into his hands. The moment his fingers closed around it, a warmth shot through him — not heat, but something deeper. Memory. Power.
He looked up, ready to ask more — but the stormcrow was already gone, vanishing into the mist like smoke on wind.
Only the ember remained.