Chapter 109: The Ember That Walks
The first sign came with the silence.
It was not the silence of peace, nor the silence of sleep. It was a silence that clawed at the air itself, like the breath had been sucked out of the world and left a hollow where sound once lived.
Caedren's scouts were seasoned veterans—men and women who had ridden through haunted woods where the trees whispered death, who had watched cities fall to flame and steel, who had seen the darkest shadows cast by broken kings and whispered betrayals. They had faced ghosts and monsters and storms. Panic was a word they did not know easily.
Yet when the Emberborn crossed into the borderlands, none of them returned.
No screams.
No whistles.
No snapped twig to mark their passage.
Only silence.
That silence.
The silence that roared louder than any battle cry.
Then the ash began to fall.
It started at dusk, when the sky held no clouds but only a dimming twilight. From the western ridge—where the soldiers stood guard over the Shattered Border—black flakes drifted downward like snow, but unnatural. They were brittle and dry, yet the air around them rippled with heat, as if some unseen forge had cracked open miles away and spilled its embers into the sky.
A young soldier from Vasselport—a boy barely more than a man—reached out his gloved hand.
He caught the falling ash.
It burned through leather and flesh alike.
Pain exploded across his skin. He yelped and jerked his hand back, clutching the seared glove in horror.
The camp descended into quiet panic.
In the war tent, the air was thick with tension and the smell of sweat and fear. Caedren stood over a large map spread across the table, his fingers tracing the lines of rivers and borders as if searching for answers in the ink.
Lysa, Garet, and Commander Rhen flanked him, faces grim beneath the flickering lantern light.
Galen's nearest front was marked with a red feather pinned precisely to a cluster of hills. But Caedren's finger tapped elsewhere—on the Dead Scar.
"That's where it's headed," he said, voice low and certain. "The Emberborn doesn't care about territory. It's after me."
Rhen leaned forward, eyes sharp and suspicious.
"We don't even know if it's a person."
"It's not," Caedren said, his gaze steady, dark like a gathering storm. "It's worse. It's a memory with a sword."
Lysa's voice was barely above a whisper.
"What do we have that can stop it?"
Caedren's answer was a simple one.
"Me."
The room fell into a heavy silence.
"Me," he repeated, the weight of the words filling the tent like a drumbeat of inevitability.
"This thing was once Ivan's. It fell from the path. It serves Galen now—but only because no one ever made it kneel."
Rhen scoffed, bitter.
"And you will?"
"No."
Caedren's eyes burned.
"I'll remind it who it was."
He stood, pulling the familiar sword from its sheath with a metallic ring. The blade caught the lantern light, sharp and silver.
He turned to Lysa.
"If I fail—burn everything behind me. Don't let it reach the heartland."
The confrontation came beneath a bloodless sky on the broken plain known as Sylar's Grief—a battlefield long since turned to ruin.
The earth was scarred, cracked and blackened from a war two centuries old, where men fought over gods and kings.
The wind was sharp and dry, carrying the scent of ash and iron.
The Emberborn stood unmoving in the center of the shattered field.
Eight feet tall.
Armor like molten glass frozen mid-flow, shining with an unnatural gleam.
No face.
Only a furnace of molten light burning behind a cracked visor.
A blade of pure fury—like a beam of living fire—clutched in its hand.
Caedren approached alone.
The wind parted for them, as if the land itself held its breath.
"You served Ivan," Caedren called out, voice ringing across the emptiness.
"I carry his fire."
The Emberborn's head tilted slowly, like a great beast considering its prey.
"I am fire," it said.
Then it charged.
The fight was no duel.
It was eruption and collapse.
Fire and stone.
Caedren moved like a gale—lightning in flesh and steel. His sword flashed silver arcs, cutting the dry air and clashing against blows that could shatter stone itself.
The Emberborn moved with the inevitability of death—slow, precise, final.
Each strike sent sparks screaming into the twilight.
On the third exchange, Caedren's sword shattered.
Steel fractured with a ringing crack.
He rolled beneath a deathblow, blood streaking his brow.
Pain bit sharp, but he fought through it.
From his coat, he drew Ivan's journal—the sacred page.
"Ivan spared the one who betrayed him!" Caedren shouted, voice raw with defiance. "He built a world from his loss!"
The Emberborn paused.
The flame in its visor flickered.
Then, for the briefest moment, dimmed.
Caedren saw the opening.
He struck.
Using the broken hilt of his sword, he drove the jagged shard deep into the crack along the Emberborn's core.
Light bled out—not red, but gold.
Ivan's fire.
The Emberborn fell to one knee.
"You are not a weapon," Caedren gasped, struggling to breathe.
"You are a warning."
"And now your story ends."
The Emberborn spoke, voice like cinders in the wind.
"Then write it well, Heir of Flame."
And it collapsed into ash.
The camp waited in breathless silence.
Hours passed like moments.
When Caedren finally returned, his armor was scorched, his face streaked with soot and blood.
He walked slowly, leaning heavily on his sword.
He said only one thing:
"Galen cannot imagine how much fire is still left."
Outside, the black ash still drifted softly from the sky.
A reminder.
The ember that walks had been snuffed out.
But the fire inside the heir still burned.
The war was far from over.
The fire still burns.