The world had no color when Evelyn awoke—only gray haze and fractured light. The fire had died, its embers gone to dust. Torren was awake already, sharpening a short blade beside the edge of the ruined windmill. He didn't look up.
"You spoke in your sleep," he said. "Didn't understand the words."
Evelyn rose slowly, fingers still curled around the cloth-wrapped core. Its hum had dulled overnight, but the heat hadn't faded. It rested now like a second heartbeat.
"I saw a gate," she whispered.
Torren finally looked up.
"Another dream?"
She shook her head. "A memory."
His jaw tensed. "Not yours."
"No," Evelyn admitted. "The core's."
The westward path took them through old mining roads, half-swallowed by the dunes. At the third rise, they saw it.
Not a ruin. Not a structure.
A fracture in the world.
The canyon split open like a wound carved by flame. And within the stone walls of that wound, something shimmered—flat, translucent, vertical. Like a mirror, but darker.
Like cooled glass pulled from a forge.
"Emberglass," Evelyn breathed.
She'd read the word in her mother's old texts, never spoken aloud. A substance created by flamewrought energies in the earliest battles of the Hollow Age—where magic had melted stone, soul, and silence into one.
"No Guild has ever confirmed finding one intact," Torren muttered.
They descended slowly. Careful.
The gate—if it was a gate—waited for them in the canyon's belly. Surrounded by half-buried totems and rings of scorched earth, long since fossilized.
When they got close, Evelyn reached out her hand.
The emberglass pulsed in response. Faintly. Like something breathing on the other side.
Torren set his hand on her shoulder. "Are you sure?"
"No," she said.
"Will that stop you?"
"No."
She pressed her palm to the surface.
The world folded.
Not violently. Not even quickly. Just turned, as if reality itself had blinked.
The canyon fell away. Torren vanished from her side. There was only heat—terrible, beautiful heat—and light, and the echo of a song sung through glass.
She stood in a great chamber carved of black stone, under a sky of molten gold. No stars. Only fireflies of memory, drifting.
In the center of the space stood a figure.
Tall. Burned. Cloaked in chains and silence.
Not a man. Not a woman. Something between. Something once human.
Its mouth did not move, but Evelyn heard the words like smoke:
"You carry the broken flame."
She stepped forward. "What is this place?"
"A scar left by your ancestors. A gate to remembrance. You are not the first. You will not be the last."
The core in her hand pulsed again. The crack down its surface glowed.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A seed. A warning. A prison."
The figure raised a hand. From the emberglass gate behind it, images flared—cities drowning in flame, skies choked with bones, beings made of burning thought.
And in each vision, a girl. Not always Evelyn. But always with her eyes.
"You remember them," she whispered.
The figure nodded. "We remember all of them."
She came back gasping.
Torren caught her before she hit the stone.
He didn't speak. Just steadied her.
Evelyn looked back at the emberglass gate.
Still. Silent. Cold.
But inside her, something had changed.
The whispers were louder now. And not all of them were hers.
Torren helped her sit. "Did it say anything?"
She nodded. "It remembers."
"Remembers what?"
"Everyone," Evelyn said. "Everyone like me."
That night, Evelyn didn't sleep.
She sat by the fire, the core between her palms, and listened to the flames whisper names she didn't know.
Names that sounded like hers.
Names that burned.