Chapter One – Dreamfire

The air was thick with smoke and song.
Nyra stood barefoot at the center of the ritual chamber, her heels resting in shallow grooves worn into the stone by generations of feet before hers. The floor was cold—not lifeless—cold like bone, cold like memory. Beneath it, or within it, something stirred.

She wore a robe of bare cloth, unadorned and colorless. In her left hand she held a breathstone, etched with a symbol only she could see. In her right, a low-burning flame cupped in a dish of carved obsidian. Between them, suspended from a cord, was the stone medallion she had recovered from the ash fields—a relic long lost, or long meant for her.

The chamber itself was a hollow carved into the living rock of the sanctuary’s oldest spine—part shrine, part scar. No lights but the flames. No windows but the Breath.

Above, the domed ceiling disappeared into shadow. The only illumination came from the central altar: a low circular brazier, its fire flickering in time with the voices around her. Not natural flame—too quiet, too precise. This fire listened. It moved with intention, not wind.

Around her, five cloaked figures formed a pentacle, silent sentries in layered robes. Each wore their naming sigil—some embroidered across the chest, others pinned in silver or painted in flame-dye. They were Keepers, but not all elders.

The youngest among them stood with a nervous stillness, fists clenched beneath ceremonial cuffs. A pale blur of feathers clung to their shoulder—Noon, the young stormcrow familiar—who gave a low, unsettled squawk and then went silent again. Wisp’s robe was as plain as Nyra’s, but they stood in the circle, not at its center. An anomaly. A witness in waiting.

Another Keeper’s breath hitched on every third word of the chant. Zhen, of course. Even cloaked, her glittering rings caught the firelight like distant stars. She always left a little glamour in the sacred.

Only one figure remained completely still, posture straight, veil flickering slightly from the heat.

Mother Veska.

Their chanting rose in spirals now, low and rhythmic, a pulse of sound that curled like smoke around the edges of Nyra’s mind:

“Breath to breath, flame to flame, name to name.”

She could not see their faces, but she felt their presence: ancient, watchful, patient. Some had waited years for this. Others doubted she was ready.

The air was dry as parchment and hot beneath the skin. Not sweat-hot—ember-hot, as if the chamber breathed from its walls.

This was not routine.

This was Naming.

She had kept the fast. Spoken no word in three days. Dreamed only by firelight. She had not faltered.

And yet.

And yet her thoughts trembled like flame against wind.

"Do not resist the vision," Veska’s voice came, not aloud, but within her—sharp and resonant as a struck bell. "It will find you regardless. Better to meet it standing."

Nyra swallowed hard, lifted her chin, and let her eyes close.

Scorched herbs. Iron. The faint, acrid sweetness of burnt bloodmoss. The smoke coiled down her throat and curled around her ribs.

Then the fall began, like sinking backward into water gone still and black.

Nyra gasped and dropped to her knees.

Stone. Smoke. Silence.

The chamber returned in pieces, but not as it was.

The altar flame had surged high, licking the upper walls. Shadows writhed across the ceiling like ghosts fleeing the light. Around her, the full circle of the coven stood in stillness. The flames at the outer ring trembled—reacting, not to wind, but to presence.

Her obsidian flame-dish had not shattered, but her breathstone had slipped from her hand. It lay near her knee, its etched symbol now pulsing faintly in the floor’s reflection.

And in her right palm: the medallion.

It glowed—not just with light, but with presence. The glyph from the vision was there now, etched into its face in dull red and ember-gold. Living. Breathing. Flickering in time with her ribs.

Wisp flinched visibly. Noon gave a sudden, clipped squawk and then went rigid on their shoulder. The sound echoed oddly, like it had struck something sacred.

Veska stepped forward at last.

She did not kneel. Did not reach for Nyra.

Only placed her hand over the girl’s chest, directly above the heartbeat that had not slowed since the vision struck.

Her voice, low and clear, cut through the heat.

“You are not what you were. The Flame has spoken. Rise as Keeper—and bear your name.”

But Nyra did not speak it. Could not.

Because the name had not come.

Only the glyph.

Behind Veska, Zhen exhaled—just shy of laughter. “Well. That’s never happened before.”

Tali’s face was a mask of conflict—disapproval, confusion, and something Nyra couldn’t name. Rek’s expression had gone still, sentinel-like. He tilted his head as if trying to hear something beneath the silence.

Wisp stared at her, wide-eyed. Then quickly looked away.

“She’s marked,” Zhen said again, quieter now. “Whatever she saw—it wasn’t just for her.”

Veska’s hand lingered a second longer, then dropped.

No one moved.

The air, once full of chant and fire, now trembled with something else.

Like the moment before a name is spoken aloud for the first time.

Veska

Veska remained behind after the others had gone.

The chamber still breathed smoke. The flames along the ring guttered low, but the altar’s heart had not cooled. Neither had the stone beneath her feet.

She stared at the place where Nyra had stood—where the vision had struck her down and something older had risen in her place.

The glyph had not faded.

It would not.

Veska touched her own naming sigil where it hung at her throat, worn smooth by time. No Keeper in living memory had failed to speak their name at the rite’s end. And yet, the ritual had not failed. The glyph had burned, had marked, had chosen.

She whispered a single word into the chamber—one not spoken aloud in decades.

Then turned, and let the stone seal behind her.