---
**Chapter Fifteen: When the Circle Moves**
We left the city beneath the flame before sunrise.
Its ruins still echoed with whispers—of a father turned myth, of promises bent by fire. I didn't say goodbye to the memory of him. Not yet. Not until I understood what part of him was truth… and what part I'd have to destroy.
Kaelen was quiet as we climbed back through the fissures. The Watcher walked ahead, but every few steps, he touched the hilt of his blade like it was a prayer.
At the surface, the sky was split in two—one side blooming with morning light, the other bruised with stormclouds.
"What now?" I asked.
The Watcher turned to me. "Now you run toward the danger instead of away from it."
He handed me a slip of parchment—old, burned around the edges.
A map.
"This is where the Revenant Circle gathers," he said. "They won't wait the full seven days."
Kaelen stepped beside me, frowning. "They're already hunting across the flame routes. We need allies."
"Then we make them," I said.
We spent the next two days weaving through half-dead villages and forgotten paths—seeking those who still bore old flame-marks in secret, who remembered my mother, who feared my father. Some refused to help. Others hid their power.
But not all.
We found three willing: a blind seer who dreamed in fire and salt, a boy who could speak to stone, and a twinsoul—two voices in one body, bound by broken spellcraft. Each one had waited for something, or *someone*, to stand against the Circle.
They chose me.
On the third night, as we camped near the edge of the Ember Barrens, the sky cracked open—not with thunder.
With flame.
A red arc blazed from horizon to horizon, and from it, a dozen shapes stepped through.
Their cloaks bled smoke. Their eyes glowed like wounded suns.
The Revenant Circle had arrived.
And they were smiling.
---