They say the sky burned for three days.

  A pillar of white-gold fire rose from Woundguard like a cry to the gods, brilliant, screaming and unnatural. It lit the heavens from coast to coast. Birds fell from the sky. Magic fractured. The Light went silent.

  Some called it a miracle.

  Others, a reckoning.

  Most just called it the end.

  And in a way… they were right.

  It wasn’t meant to happen that way.

  The portal had been opened by divine rite. Ritual flame, consecrated steel and scripture sung by the high choir of the Order. We were to strike deep into the abyss, form a foothold, and return before the world even felt the wind shift.

  But the portal ruptured behind us, moments after we had marched through.

  Sanctified artifacts shattered.

  The priests died screaming.

  Light and fire spiraled upward into the sky and then collapsed inward like a dying star.

  The portal didn’t close. It exploded.

  The flame that once pierced the heavens became only a memory. A scar etched into the clouds, talked about in taverns and feared in temples. Most had stopped looking to the horizon. They believed the worst had passed.

  They were wrong.

  The ground beneath Woundguard’s outer walls trembled as the portal shimmered for the first time in months. No one dared approach it anymore, not the paladins who remained, nor the scholars who once worshipped its edges. It had gone cold.

  Until now.

  The wardstones cracked first. Quietly. Like bones too old to hold their shape.

  Then came the heat.

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  A wind, soft and wrong, swept through the fortress. The air grew thick, sickly at first, then blinding.

  A circle of flame erupted in the portal chamber.

  Not a gate.

  Not a wound.

  A doorway.

  We were the vanguard.

  Sixty knights of the Sacred Flame, sworn to carry the Light into the deepest wound the world had ever known. Sixty Flameborne who walked through the portal, armoured in faith, silence, and fire.

  Five of us returned.

  Not marching. Not triumphant.

  We staggered back, hollow-eyed and blood-marked, had to force the portal open ourselves.

  We weren’t sure it would work. Part of me hoped it wouldn’t.

  I stepped through first.

  Not because I wanted to.

  But because the others had followed me in, and if I didn’t lead them home, no one would.

  We were not men anymore; we were simply what had remained.

  The portal flared behind us one final time and closed, not with violence, but with finality.

  As if it were tired. And gods, so were we.

  We stood in the heart of Woundguard, surrounded by rubble and scorched stone. The fortress groaned above us. Distant shouts echoed from the battlements. Steel clashed. A siege had begun.

  The world hadn’t waited.

  A young sentry on the stairs saw us emerge.

  He dropped his weapon, then dropped to his knees.

  Others followed.

  Not in worship. Not in recognition.

  In awe and in terror.

  They knew who I was.

  Not by the sigil on my chest, melted nearly beyond form.

  Not by the torn banner strapped to my back.

  But by the silence that followed me.

  They don’t know what we saw.

  They don’t know what we brought back.

  They only know we survived.

  And that is enough to make them afraid.

  The gods didn’t save us.

  The Light didn’t speak.

  The only thing that kept us alive in that place was each other, and the thing inside me that never stopped burning.

  It’s still burning now.

  I am Caedor Flameborne.

  Knight-Captain of the Sacred Flame.

  First through the portal.

  One of five to return.

  We were not meant to come back.

  We were not meant to endure.

  But we did.

  And still—

  we burn.