The First Flame was not a place.
It was a scar.
Buried beneath unmade timelines, it pulsed like a phantom artery—haunting every realm it had ever touched. But no map led to it. No prophecy revealed its path. To find it, one needed a guide born of paradox, stitched from echoes.
One needed the Cartograph Wound.
The rebellion's pact gathered in a void-folded sanctum known only as the Echo Chapel—a hidden sanctuary outside time, grown from memory and sealed by sacrifice. Ashira, Naira, and five others arrived, summoned by the call of the Heartshard Compass.
Among them was a creature draped in living parchment—skin made of inked timelines, eyes like blank scrolls. It called itself Elyon, the Cartograph Wound.
"I am not a map," it rasped. "I am where the maps bled."
Elyon had been born from the moment the Loom first broke—a paradox given flesh. It carried the paths to places that had never existed, and it could trace the First Flame—but at a cost.
"To seek the First Flame," Elyon warned, "you must give me a memory you cannot live without."
Each rebel stepped forward. One by one, they surrendered sacred memories—laughter, losses, names of the dead. Elyon fed on these echoes, absorbing them into its form.
Only Krael hesitated.
"I've already forgotten too much," he said.
Elyon turned to him. "Then give me the moment you forgave yourself."
Krael's grip tightened. That memory—brief, in silence, beside the ashes of the Loom—was the one light that kept him from unraveling.
But he gave it.
The Cartograph Wound opened.
Through Elyon, the rebels stepped into a bleeding corridor of broken realms—a shifting spiral known as the No-Path Spiral. Each step forward was a step into unwritten possibility, and each rebel saw glimpses of themselves in other forms, other choices.
Ashira, as Queen of a shattered sky-realm.
Naira, a ghost haunting a library of unborn spells.
Krael, still a child, never having drawn the blade.
They pressed forward.
At the Spiral's end, they reached a citadel carved into the bones of a dead reality. There, burning cold and unnatural, was the Cradle of the First Flame.
Not a flame. A child.
A being wrapped in coils of thread—its skin glass, its eyes voidfire. The First Flame was a godseed, not yet awakened. But guarding it was a weaver-shaped husk: a false being known as Oblivar, one of the Nameless King's original architects.
The battle was swift—and bitter.
Oblivar's voice turned the rebels against themselves with illusions of failure. Naira nearly collapsed. Ashira was pierced by memory-knives. Krael bled thoughts instead of blood.
Until Elyon, burning from within, sacrificed itself to collapse the false realm—binding Oblivar in pages of non-existence.
The rebels stood victorious, but shaken.
And the child—the First Flame—opened its eyes.
They were black stars.
It did not speak.
It remembered.
---
They now had the First Flame—but not the understanding.
The Hollow Flame cult had already begun moving. Entire pocket realms were being "null-drafted," erased to fuel the Nameless King's reformation.
And the prophecy was becoming clearer:
> "When the Forgotten Fire remembers its name, the one who gave up his own shall fall or ascend. And a god shall bleed."
Krael looked at the child.
"I think you were me," he whispered.
And the flame blinked once, slowly.