The wind had teeth.
It screamed down the razored cliffs of Mount Il'Serath, stripping flesh from stone and howling through broken temple spires like some ancient thing trying to forget its name. Ice rode the air like splinters of memory, biting through wool, skin, and soul. This was not wind that whispered—it keened, it remembered. The mountain had once held fire. Now it held only ghosts.
Nestled on the mountain's eastern shoulder, the Sanctuary of the Hollow Flame crouched like a carcass pecked hollow by time. Its arches had crumbled. Its bells had fallen silent. Once, it had been a place of worship—a place of pilgrimage. Now, only one soul remained within its frozen bones, clinging to breath and meaning.
The monk lay sprawled beneath a shattered mosaic of flame and godlight, blood frosting at the edges of his robes. The soul-lantern above him flickered dimly, guttering like a dying heartbeat. Light and shadow danced across the stone walls where he scrawled his final truths.
His fingers were broken. Skin peeled back to raw sinew. Each movement drew pain sharp enough to cut reason. But still, he wrote—not with ink, but with the blood from his own veins. The symbols carved into the stone were jagged, irregular. They were not runes. Not letters. Not even language.
They were memory, born before sound.
The Codex had spoken.
Seven nights now, the voices had curled inside his skull, cold and cruel and patient. Not the divine choir he once prayed for—but whispers. Like wind in coffin cracks. They told him of the end. Of the beginning. Of fire turned inward and gods swallowed by their own dreams. And of a name—one name, echoing across every prophecy and shadow and flickering vision.
Vaelric Thornvein.
The cursed one.
The Monk's body convulsed, blood wetting his tongue. Still, he pressed on. The glyphs burned faintly beneath his hand, responding to the old pact—the blood-oath between vessel and page. The mountain shuddered once, as if exhaling grief.
"Let it find him," the monk whispered, forehead pressed to stone slick with his own lifeblood. "Let the Flame remember. Let it burn again."
Then he went still.
A final breath curled from his lips, faded, and vanished.
And the glyphs pulsed—soft, slow, almost reverent—as if inhaling his death.
---
Far below the mountain, the fractured realm of Glaereval writhed beneath a wounded sky.
Storms stalked the heavens. Lightning bled across torn clouds in jagged veins of violet and gold. Thunder didn't roar—it moaned, low and hollow, like something ancient remembering pain. The land bore scars older than its kings—valleys swallowed whole, forests turned to bone, rivers thick with rust and silence. The world, once lush with magic, had soured.
In a ruin where once stood the emerald spires of House Thornvein, a bell tolled. Not for mass. Not for mourning.
But for prophecy.
---
Vaelric Thornvein hadn't slept in three days.
Sleep was a luxury, and luxury was for men without curses crawling under their skin.
He stood at the edge of the Hollowwood—a forest older than empires, filled with trees that didn't rot when they died. Instead, they petrified, turned to twisted shapes of obsidian and graybone. Branches jutted like antlers, dripping sap the color of molten glass. The air was thick with ash, and the trees whispered when the wind passed through.
Not leaves.
Memories.
The Hollowwood remembered. It remembered every flame, every wound, every name.
Vaelric breathed in slow, steady. His silver hair clung damply to his neck. The veins in his left arm glowed faintly beneath the skin—crimson, cursed, and ever-burning. His blade, known only as Mournglass, rested across his back, humming with silent warnings. Forged from black star-ore and etched with runes that shifted when watched too long, the sword was not a thing that slept either.
A raven shrieked overhead. It circled once, twice.
Then it spoke, in a voice like gravel and breath: "It begins."
Vaelric didn't flinch. "Everything always begins with blood."
He stepped into the Hollowwood.
Branches groaned underfoot. Sap hissed from wounded trunks. The wind carried echoes not his own—voices muttering forgotten names, the hush of prayers unsaid. It was not a place for comfort. It was a place for those who carried their ghosts on the outside.
He'd come here for silence.
Instead, he found her.
A child. No older than nine. Curled at the base of a tree slick with ash, wrapped in moss and dream-murmurs. Her hair was pale and unkempt, her limbs too thin. Around her neck hung a crystal shard on a blackened chain—pulsing faintly, in rhythm with her breath. A tether. A soul-bound relic.
He took a cautious step.
Her eyes snapped open.
Blue.
Startling, impossibly blue. Like stormlight under frost. And behind those eyes, something old peered out—something far too ancient for a child's frame.
"You're not supposed to be here," she said, voice clear and steady.
"Neither are you," Vaelric replied.
She sat up, blinking slowly. "You carry it."
He frowned. "Carry what?"
"The Hollow," she said, nose wrinkling. "I can smell it on your soul."
His blood ran colder than the wind. "Who told you that name?"
Her fingers brushed the crystal shard at her throat. "The Codex."
---
They sat beside a fire fed by bloodwood bark, crackling with green flame. Vaelric offered her dried meat, but she tossed it into the dark, uninterested. Instead, she chewed on a cluster of blackberries plucked from a vine that hadn't been there a moment before. Reality bent subtly around her. He noticed now—her shadow flickered wrong. Her presence echoed when she moved, like a memory in flesh.
Her name was Nyshara.
Moonborn, she claimed. Exiled from somewhere she wouldn't name. She spoke in riddles that felt like they'd been broken on purpose.
"The Codex woke," she said between mouthfuls. "Pages inked in flame and blood. A monk died to write the first one. He saw you. Saw all of it. The Ashwake. The Shroud. The Eye beneath the world."
Vaelric stared into the fire, jaw clenched. "I don't want prophecy."
"No one does," she replied with a grin too wide for her face. "But prophecy wants you."
He looked up. "And what does that mean?"
Nyshara blinked once, slow and somber. "The Hollow Flame wasn't a gift. It was a gate. And something's knocking."
---
That night, as the fire burned low and the forest sighed around him, Vaelric dreamed.
He stood atop a mountain of skulls. Not stone. Not memory. Actual skulls. Bleached and cracked and stacked to the horizon. Above, the sky was torn—split open like an old wound. Stars bled silver. The moons had turned their faces. And hanging in the air before him, spinning slowly, was a crown.
Not forged by hands.
Formed of golden bone and weeping flame. Each spike dripped with ash. It hovered like judgment, silent and watching.
Below him, stretched across the valley, a city lay drowned in shadow. Its towers curled like thorned roots, piercing the heavens. Bridges swayed over rivers of fire—and not a single voice rose in song. It was a city of silence. A city dreaming.
A city waiting.
Then he turned.
Behind him stood a figure cloaked in ruin and stormcloud. No face—only smoke, only eyes like cracks in the world. A crown rested upon its brow. A mirror of the one floating before him, but cracked down the center.
Its voice echoed like a temple bell rung at a funeral.
"You carry my wound," it said. "And so… you will carry my war."
Vaelric woke with a gasp, sweat cold on his skin.
The fire had burned down to embers.
And Nyshara was gone.
---
But her crystal shard remained, placed carefully beside him on the ash.
It pulsed with soft light, slow and steady.
Like a heart.
Like a key.
And from somewhere deeper in the Hollowwood, where the wind no longer reached and the trees leaned too close to one another, something answered its call.
---
The Codex of the Hollow Flame had been written once more.
And the world… had begun to burn again