Beyond the veil of Velvora lies Solmire — a region not ruled by flame, but by the bones that survived it.
Asher's eyes opened—not in a blink, but a jolt, as though consciousness had been hurled across a border he never knew existed.
Everything was wrong.
The light was the first lie. It looked like sunset, but it never shifted. The horizon pulsed a steady crimson, as though the very sky was bleeding from ancient wounds. There were clouds, but they didn't drift. They hung, cracked like glass, glowing from within like cooling magma.
Then the wind—hot and dry like a forge exhale—rushed past him, kicking up pale dust.
No. Not dust.Bone.Ground-up fragments of old wars and forgotten beasts. The entire landscape stretched in a colorless expanse, white and scorched, as if a thousand generations of death had been pressed into the sand.
Asher took one step forward. The world didn't ripple like a dream. It anchored. Real. Tangible. A memory, yes—but not his. A throne's.
"The Fourth Pillar's domain," he realized, breathing in air that tasted of soot and memory. "This is Solmire."
The terrain before him told the story without a word.
Half-buried skeletons the size of buildings loomed on the horizon—dragons, maybe, or things that had never earned a name. Obsidian towers clawed upward like malformed fingers, pitted and broken from battles long over. And in the center of it all, carved into the heart of a caldera blackened by time, sat a structure that rejected symmetry or mercy:
A palace of jagged stone and bone, crowned with braziers that never dimmed.
No banners. No kingdom. Just authority.
The throne's vision shifted focus, zeroing in on a figure standing atop a cliff made entirely of calcified remains. Alone, motionless, sovereign.
A boy—no, a young man, barely older than Asher by appearance. But the weight in his stance made him feel ancient.
Bronzed skin. Lean frame. He wore combat robes woven from ash-thread and gold, ceremonial yet brutal. His arms bore inked scripture, and around his neck hung a pendant shaped like a melting sun. Floating above his head—fractured and flickering—a broken halo hovered in jagged rotation, cracked in half like a divine crown that had tried to kill its bearer.
"That's him," Asher whispered to himself within the vision. "The Fourth Pillar."
The throne whispered his name into Asher's ears, like a curse spoken beneath one's breath:Vael Ashkar.
Vael stood unblinking, facing the red horizon. He did not speak like a prince. He declared like a survivor.
"This world is a kiln," he said, his voice calm and carved from heat. "And I was born in the fire."
Behind him, rising like a tide, stood hundreds—no, thousands—of hollow warriors. Their forms were skeletal, but clad in ember-forged armor. Helmets shaped like beasts of old, gauntlets dripping with smoldering flame. They did not snarl or groan.
They bowed.
Each one dropped to one knee when Vael turned.
Not as soldiers.
As worshippers.
He walked toward a burning pit of grey coals. In his hand, he held a scroll etched in blood-rust ink. Asher couldn't read it—but he felt it. A directive. A death sentence.
With silent precision, Vael dropped it into the flame.
"A new Pillar stirs in Velvora," he said without turning. "Send word to the Ember Priests. We strike the moment his city devours itself."
A cloaked figure—face obscured in smog—bowed and stepped into flame, vanishing.
Then, with the suddenness of a soul being snapped back into a body, the vision collapsed.
Asher gasped. He crumpled beside Rosa and Lucien, the glyph chamber's pale glow casting their shadows in spirals across the ruined cathedral.
"Hey! Hey—Asher!" Lucien grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. "You were gone! I mean—you were here, but you weren't!"
Rosa knelt beside them, eyes narrowed, pupils trembling with glyphlight. "What did you see?"
Asher coughed and pushed himself up, heartbeat like a war drum in his chest.
"I saw… a city. Not Velvora. A desert made of bones. And a boy—Vael Ashkar. He's the Fourth. He's real. He's waiting."
Lucien frowned. "Waiting?"
"No," Asher corrected grimly. "Planning."
Rosa's voice was low. "How many Pillars are there?"
Asher closed his eyes. "Five. One for each region. One for each throne."
His voice dropped, haunted.
"And they're not friends."
Elsewhere...
In a void between realms—a timeless, locationless place lit only by the breath of divinity—a floating orb spun slowly. Crystalline, humming with low resonance.
Within it, five sigils turned like clockwork gears:
The Glyph of Night — Velvora.
The Sigil of Flame — Solmire.
The Mask of Mirrors.
The Lily of Silence.
The Gear of the Forgotten.
Only two glowed. The rest lay dormant.
And in the center of that silence, a voice without sound spoke:
"Two have awakened.Three remain in slumber.The game begins anew…"
Far beneath Velvora, in the deepest chamber of the ruined cathedral, stone shifted.
A heartbeat pulsed—not from veins, but from memory.
Glyphs flared to life without touch. A door, long thought symbolic and sealed, cracked at the hinges.
Not opened by force.Not by glyph.But by Asher's presence.
By his bloodline.
From within—a voice.
And it did not speak to Asher the warrior.It whispered to Asher's true name.
[End of Chapter 113]
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Next Chapter:
Chapter 114 – "The Heart Beneath the Glyph"
Asher and Rosa descend into the lowest levels of the cathedral—a buried vault sealed since the First Collapse. What they find is not a weapon, nor a warning. It is the source of Velvora's curse itself. And it's waking up.