Chapter 13: Ash Between Nations
The Ash Vale was not made for humans.
It was where borders went to die. A strip of no-man's land, blackened by firestorms from wars no history book cared to remember. The soil was glassy and uneven, peppered with twisted skeletons of war engines long abandoned. Half-melted Arccores blinked dimly from beneath slag heaps, like the last memories of forgotten machines.
Aleister moved slowly through the wasteland. The card in his coat still pulsed, steady now, but faint. Like a lantern seen through thick smoke. It pulled him westward, deeper into the Vale's oldest scar: a trench wide as a city boulevard, lined with collapsed bastions from three different nations.
He passed them without comment.
Nethran designs: fungal steel towers overgrown with root-tubes. Valedren bones: white quartz fortresses broken and melted. And old banners from Kaelshad, the desert kingdom, still fluttered in the wind like ghosts refusing to burn.
He wasn't alone here.
He saw them watching from the rubble. Scavengers. Exiles like him. Some bore visible cards. Others moved like they'd hidden them long ago. None approached. Not yet.
Aleister found a collapsed transport pod embedded in a shallow dune of ash and made camp. Inside the cracked hull, he found remnants: a rusted Arcglove fused to the controls, a torn badge with the faded rune of a long-defunct scouting house.
He stared at it for a long time.
He had no nation now. No house. No allegiance.
Just a pulse in his chest and a card that the world feared to name.
That night, under a false moon and a cracked sky, they came.
Three of them.
Teenagers, maybe a few years younger than him. Faces covered in ash cloth, eyes sharp with hunger and calculation.
"You're him," the tallest one said. A girl with a chipped elemental glove hanging from her belt. Her voice was half-challenge, half-awe.
"Am I?" Aleister asked.
"Nullborn. Ash-walker. We saw you glowing last night from the rise."
Aleister didn't move. "That wasn't for you."
Another one stepped forward. This one was younger, barely more than twelve. No card on display. No glove. Just a look in his eyes like a question that had already been answered.
"Is it true?" he asked. "That your card is blank because it doesn't need to obey?"
Aleister considered the words. He thought of Irikrit. Of the Grove. Of the mask on the obelisk.
He nodded.
The girl dropped to one knee. "Then we follow you."
"Don't," Aleister said quickly. "I'm not a leader. I'm not anything."
But they had already decided.
Others emerged in the days that followed. Half-hidden shapes from the shattered edges of the Vale. Young, outcast, half-marked by incomplete cards or failed morphs. Some wore broken Arcgloves. Some wore none at all.
They didn't call him Aleister.
They called him The Null Flame.
And they moved with him as he walked, saying nothing, only watching as the path drew deeper into the Vale's center.
There, in the heart of it, he found what he hadn't known to look for.
A crater.
Vast. Glassed. Silent.
At its center, an Arcspire. Broken. Black. Still humming.
Aleister approached it alone.
The others stood back, afraid.
His card responded again, stronger now. No longer pulsing, resonating.
He placed his hand on the Arcspire's lowest edge.
It burned. Not heat. Not pain. But memory.
His. And not his.
He saw visions not of battle, but of chains.
Irikrit, bound in seven circles. A child morphing into flame and back again. A city of white stone swallowed by vines.
And then his own face.
But older.
Crowned in ash. Surrounded by masks.
When he pulled back, his card shimmered with a new layer. Not a rune. Not a color.
A name.
But when he tried to read it, the letters twisted.
"The Vein does not speak in mortal tongues," a voice whispered behind him.
He turned.
The girl had followed.
"What did you see?" she asked.
He looked out over the crater, where the wind began to rise and ash curled like breath.
"The beginning," he said.
She nodded, not understanding.
But already loyal.
And behind them, more shadows moved.