The fire sang again that night—not in crackles or warmth, but in names whispered between flickers.
Evelyn sat cross-legged by the coals, the core resting in her lap. It pulsed like a second heart, steady and low. She hadn't moved in hours.
Torren watched from a short distance, wary. He had grown used to her silences—but not to this stillness. This… listening.
He spoke cautiously. "You've been like that since the gate. Since the emberglass."
Evelyn didn't respond immediately. Her eyes were fixed on the flame.
"They're not just dreams," she said finally. "Not memories either. The fire… it remembers people. Like me."
Torren didn't answer. What could he say?
She continued, voice softer. "It gave me names last night. I can't forget them. I don't want to forget them."
He stepped closer, crouched by the fire's edge. "Say one."
She looked up at him. "You wouldn't understand it."
"Try me."
Evelyn blinked, then opened her mouth—and the name came out wrong. Not misspoken, but… altered. The way fire alters wood, or sorrow alters a face. A song sung through smoke.
"Aelitha. Daughter of Cinders. Flame-Bound Third."
Torren flinched.
"I felt her," Evelyn said. "She died alone. On a hill made of screaming stone. But she—she burned through the sky before she fell."
"And the fire told you that?"
"No," she whispered. "She did."
They resumed travel at dawn, crossing the emberglass canyon and the fossilized scar of what may once have been a battlefield. Evelyn was different now—quieter, more focused. Torren noticed it in the way she scanned the horizon, in how she held the core not like a burden… but like a vow.
At midday, they passed a stone obelisk blackened by time and heat. It hummed faintly as Evelyn approached. She placed her palm on it—and again, the core responded. A flicker. A word.
"Selyra."
She didn't speak it aloud this time. The name didn't belong to her. But it mattered.
They stopped at dusk beneath a jagged arch of stone called Hollowtooth Ridge. Torren tried making camp, but Evelyn kept walking, following a rhythm only she seemed to hear.
"Evelyn—"
"I need to find the last one," she called back.
"The last what?"
But she was already climbing.
At the ridge's peak, the wind howled. She stood alone, eyes closed.
And then she sang.
A low, wordless note—drawn from her chest like breath from a dying flame. The melody wasn't hers. It had been someone else's, long ago.
It echoed through the stone and the air and the silence itself bent around it.
Torren reached the peak just as it ended.
He didn't speak.
She turned to him, tears on her cheeks. "That was her name."
"Whose?"
"I don't know," Evelyn said. "But the fire does. It carried her."
She knelt, digging her fingers into the earth. Not frantically—reverently. When she stood, she left behind a stone marked with a curl of ash and a line of soot. Nothing elaborate.
Just a name.
"The fire remembers."
Later that night, they sat in silence. The stars were dim above them. The wind carried no scent.
Torren leaned toward her. "What if the names become too much?"
"They already are."
"Then why keep listening?"
Evelyn's hand tightened on the core. "Because they deserve to be remembered. Even if I burn with them."
He didn't argue.
When they slept, the fire flickered.
And one more name—just one—came softly through the coals, barely loud enough to hear.
"Evelyn."
But it wasn't spoken to her.
It was spoken about her.
As if someone else in the flames had begun to remember her.