The Throne pulsed behind him like a second heartbeat.
But Auren didn't move.
He stood still, his fingers hovering just above the armrest, the echo of memory still burning his vision. The runes engraved in the chamber had begun to glow brighter, as if they too recognized their master's return.
Lyra said nothing. She knew this silence was sacred.
Not one of confusion… but of reckoning.
Then the masked figure from the shadows stepped forward again.
"The world has changed in your absence," it said. "The Karmic Order dissolved. The Hollow Sun fractured. Your name... whispered only by the dying and the damned."
Auren turned slowly.
"Then it is time the dead learned to speak again."
He extended his hand.
The flame within the chamber surged, racing toward him like a storm. It coiled around his gauntlet, trailing up his arm in spirals of red-gold light, pulsing with divine resonance.
From the light emerged his sword—not reforged, but remembered.
The same blade that once cleaved injustice from kings and demons alike.Khar'Zariel, The Golden End.
"You speak of the Hollow Sun," Auren said, voice low, reverberating. "Tell me who still bears its oath."
The masked one tilted its head.
"Few remain. Scattered. Some turned zealot. Others corrupted. And some... still waiting."
"Then I will gather them," he said.
"You think they will follow you still?"
"No," Auren whispered, "I know they must."
The throne room shifted suddenly—groaning, breathing, as if the stone itself bowed in acknowledgment.A seal shattered overhead. The ceiling opened like a blooming iris, and a single ray of twilight beamed down upon Auren.
From it descended a feather—not of bird, but of pure radiant energy.
He caught it in his hand. It burned into his skin. A mark. A command.
"The gods are watching again," Lyra murmured.
Auren didn't respond.
He already knew.
✦ Elsewhere…
Beneath the Fortress of Aelgrath, far across the realm in the dwarven stronghold of Ironsunder, a council of war convened.
Hammerlords. Forge-Seers. Oathkeepers.
All of them stared at a single relic: a glowing shard of karmic flame embedded in stone.
"The Knight has awakened," rumbled Baldrun Stonefist, the oldest among them.
"Then so shall the Pact," came the reply from a dwarven priest, eyes dim with firelight.
From deep vaults, forgotten weapons stirred.
Runes once inert began to hum.
And across distant continents, others felt it too.
In the forests of Veil'thir, the High Elves paused mid-ritual, their spells disrupted by an ancient resonance. The trees themselves whispered his name.
"Auren of the Flame… walks again."
In the skies above the Wyrmspire Peaks[1], dragons roared in agitation—instincts older than language stirred. The mark of the Karmic Blade burned across their ancestral memory.
And deep beneath obsidian oceans, even the demon-folk shifted uneasily in their sleep.
Back in the chamber, Lyra looked up at Auren.
"What now?"
"Now…" he whispered, staring at the throne once more, "we restore the fire that once held the world accountable."
"You mean… rebuild the Hollow Sun?"
Auren turned toward her, his eyes glowing like twin suns beneath storm cloud lashes.
"Not rebuild," he said. "Reclaim."
And as the words left his lips, the sigil behind the throne erupted, carving itself into the cavern wall anew—a blazing symbol of justice, mercy, and divine retribution.
"Ashes remember. And beneath every ruin, a flame waits to rise—not to warm the guilty, but to judge them." — Oath of the Hollow Sun
[1] I don't remember that I have mentioned about Wyrmspire Peaks ealier but fyi it's a matured Dragon nest which used be surrounded with the dense divine energy in the ancient time.