The first strike came in the Dustlands.
A once-silent region of red sand and skeletal ruins, the Dustlands were home to only wind, echoes, and scattered survivors—until the Ashbound descended like ghosts. Villages vanished overnight. Flame-touched soil turned black and brittle, as if memory itself had been scorched from it.
Ember and her companions arrived days too late.
What they found was not just destruction—it was erasure. Sigils had been burned into the earth with such precision that even Eryssa, fluent in ten lost languages, shivered when she deciphered them.
"Not a warning," she whispered. "A claim."
"They're marking territory," Orin growled. "Like they plan to divide the world before it even begins to resist."
Lysra summoned an illusion of the region from her memory stones—old maps layered with new anomalies. "This is systematic. They're cutting ley lines. Severing flameflow routes. If they succeed, the Core itself could become unstable again."
Ember clenched her fists. "They're not just after power—they want to unmake the flame's connection to life."
As they ventured deeper into the Dustlands, they found a single survivor—a boy no older than ten, eyes wide with terror and lips burned by ash-silence. He could not speak, but he drew with charcoal. Circles. Spirals. A black star with a line through it.
Eryssa gasped. "That's Maerith's seal. He saw her."
And so, the hunt began.
Ember stood atop a ruined spire at sunset, eyes fixed toward the next horizon. "They're not hiding," she said. "They want us to follow. Good."
She turned to her allies, the Core humming in her chest.
"Because this time, we bring the flame to them."