Not all who inherit power understand its weight. And not all who lose it forget its taste.
The city of Haldriven burns.
Once a luminous port known for its skyglass towers and canals carved with sigils, it now drowns under fire and salt. The War-Tide has come—legions of rogue mages, twisted beasts, and mercenary legions unified under a single banner: a black sun weeping flame.
At the front stands Tharion Vex, the Hollow Heir.
Clad in obsidian armor that flows like smoke, wielding a chained glaive forged from a dragon's spine, Tharion walks through the city like a vengeful wraith. His eyes burn with stolen starfire, yet hollow behind the blaze.
"This was meant to be mine," he growls, standing at the summit of the city's shattered cathedral. "The shard, the fire, the world. It was promised."
But the flame rejected him.
And it chose Kael.
So now, he will unmake the world that denied him.
Kael, Lia, and Ihlon arrive at Haldriven's outskirts a day too late.
Smoke spirals into the heavens. Refugees flee in droves, eyes wide with trauma, speaking of a man who sets the sea on fire with a glance.
Kael steps through ash. His very presence turns it to glass.
He meets a survivor—a girl clutching a pendant shaped like a sun.
"He called himself the Hollow Flame," she whispers. "He asked us to kneel. When we didn't, he... he made the rain scream."
Kael's knuckles tighten.
This is the cost of delay.
This is the consequence of his awakening.
Later that night, Kael finds a broken tower near the edge of the bay, overlooking the city's carcass.
There, he sees it: a chained construct made of divine bone and arcane circuitry—a forgotten guardian of the old world.
It speaks in broken words:
"He… took the sigil core… He will open the Gate of Grithar. He seeks… your fire."
Kael remembers the name: Grithar—a gate buried beneath the world, said to connect to the Antechamber of Gods, the place from which the Nameless One first fell.
If Tharion opens it, he'll do more than reclaim a shard.
He'll release a cosmic parasite, imprisoned since the First Sundering.
Kael knows now: Tharion doesn't want justice.
He wants annihilation—and to be worshipped in the ruin left behind.
The confrontation is swift.
Kael stands alone in the city square, Shards circling his body like flaming moons.
Tharion appears from the smoke.
They speak without raising their voices—two forces, once human, now reshaped by divine intent.
Tharion: "You stole what was mine."
Kael: "I reclaimed what was never yours to begin with."
The fight is not a duel, but a war in miniature.
Kael hurls a blade of frozen flame—light from a dead star condensed into weaponry.
Tharion bends space with hate, unleashing echoes of ancient betrayals.
Buildings fold. The sky blinks. A memory of a god's scream shatters time for three heartbeats.
Lia and Ihlon hold back Tharion's legions.
Kael and Tharion tear the sky asunder.
Then—
A tie.
Both wounded. Both breathing ragged. Both burning.
Tharion retreats, but not before branding Kael with a glyph of voidfire.
"We are not finished," he whispers. "You are a flame. I am the emptiness it leaves behind."
In the aftermath, Kael stands over Haldriven's broken skyline.
He sees what his indecision has wrought.
And he swears:
"I won't run from what I am. And I won't let him write the end of this story."
He reaches within himself—and summons the Godflame, not as a weapon, but as a promise.
A beacon forms in the sky: a flame-wrought sigil visible from every corner of the continent.
An invitation.
A declaration.
The War of Flame and Void has begun.