Here we go.
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CHAPTER 1: THE HOLLOW SIGIL
Throne of Bone and Flame
🔥 Brutal Dark Fantasy | Total Target: 6,000 words
🩸 Part 1: (~1,500 words below)
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Ash fell like judgment.
It drifted from the great sky-pyre above the Square of Silence, settling on Kael's bare shoulders like snow that had forgotten how to melt. His wrists were bound behind his back with iron shackles etched in the flame-tongue of the Empire. Each rune shimmered faintly, pulsing with a sickly red light. They burned against his skin with a heat that didn't fade.
He knelt before a stone altar blackened by centuries of executions.
Above him, an obsidian monolith loomed—the Pyre Pillar, centerpiece of the Emperor's justice. The pillar was carved from a single slab of flame-forged rock, marked with the sigils of the Hollowed: those who had been judged unworthy to speak, live, or even die with dignity.
Kael was next.
A priest in crimson robes paced before the crowd, his voice amplified by the flame-motes that orbited his mouth. "By the will of the Undying Flame," he intoned, "we cast the condemned into silence. He who bears no name. He who denies the light. He who speaks the Old Songs."
The crowd jeered. Stones clacked against one another as people pounded them together in rhythm—an old tradition. It was said the sound made the souls of the condemned shatter faster.
Kael didn't flinch.
His eyes were fixed on the altar before him.
He had been here once before. Not as a condemned man, but as a child in the crowd, holding his mother's hand, watching someone else burn.
Back then, he had asked: Why do they scream if the fire is holy?
His mother didn't answer.
She had disappeared three weeks later.
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Three flamebearers approached from the edge of the square, carrying a long iron pole between them. It glowed at the tip—a wicked curve of bone and metal fused together by heat. The Sigil Rod.
The crowd went still.
Even the wind held its breath.
Kael did not look up as the priests circled him. He felt the blood drying on his ribs, the bruises blooming down his spine. He felt the stares of thousands—hungry, fearful, loyal.
But above all, he felt the absence.
Where his name used to be, there was only cold.
The Hollowing hadn't started yet. But already, he could feel the Choir humming beneath the surface of the world, like voices buried under black water, rising slowly.
They were waiting.
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A voice called out behind the altar.
"Hold."
The Executioner of Flame stepped forward.
He wore no mask.
His face was pale and beautiful, like it had never known sun or mercy. His eyes glowed faintly with emberlight, and when he spoke, his voice rang like iron dragged across stone.
"His name is Kael," the Executioner said. "But that is not what matters."
He raised the Sigil Rod. The bone-tip steamed.
"What matters is that he spoke a forbidden word."
The crowd hushed.
The Executioner turned toward Kael, kneeling at the base of the altar, stripped and broken.
"Do you deny it?" he asked.
Kael raised his head slowly. "No."
"What did you say?"
Kael's mouth was dry. The words ached in his throat, as if saying them again would break something sacred.
Still, he said them.
"I sang."
Gasps. Shouts. A woman screamed and covered her child's ears.
The Executioner's lip curled. "Then you will burn not as a man, but as a mouth."
He pressed the rod to Kael's chest.
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Pain.
No—something beyond pain.
It wasn't the heat that broke Kael's body. It was the sound. A great, keening hum that tore through every bone, vibrating the marrow until thought itself cracked.
His back arched involuntarily. His breath caught. His heart thudded like a war drum.
The rod didn't just scar flesh—it etched memory.
Kael saw himself. Not from his own eyes, but from the outside. A child crying beneath the ruins of a fire-bombed temple. A thief stabbed in a back alley for a crust of bread. A slave digging graves for the dead beneath Hollowgate. A prisoner whispering the lost verses of a song forbidden for a thousand years.
He saw it all.
And behind it, something else.
Something watching.
The rod lifted.
Smoke curled from Kael's chest. The Hollow Sigil was there now—spirals of flame etched into his skin like a broken sun, the mark of silence.
It pulsed once.
Then again.
Then it burned white.
The Executioner frowned.
"That's not—"
The sigil howled.
A burst of force rippled outward from Kael's body, flinging the priests to the ground. The flamebearers staggered back, clutching their heads. The stone altar cracked straight through.
Kael collapsed to one knee.
His breath came in short, jagged gasps.
And then—he heard it.
The Choir.
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At first, it was just a low hum—almost a vibration. But then the notes began to rise, not through the air, but through his bones. The voices were layered, infinite, human and inhuman, shrieking and singing in perfect discord.
He felt them inside him.
In the crowd, people clutched their ears. Some screamed. A few simply dropped to their knees and wept.
The Executioner drew his sword.
"Contain it!"
Too late.
The pyre at the base of the altar erupted in ghost-flame—white and cold, roaring like a storm. It didn't spread to the wood or stone—it spread to people.
Every man or woman marked by the Empire's false flame began to burn.
Only Kael stood untouched.
The sigil on his chest now glowed like moonlight—pure and unyielding.
And from behind the smoke, someone stepped through.
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She was clothed in ash-gray rags and shadow. Her face was hidden by a hood, but her voice carried through the madness like steel.
"You remember," she said.
Kael turned toward her.
"Who are you?"
She didn't answer. Instead, she extended a hand.
The flame bent away from her.
"They'll send the Inquisitors. The Flamebound. The Crown's own pyreguard. If you stay, you die."
Kael looked back at the square.
Priests screaming.
Crowd fleeing.
The Choir rising.
He took her hand.
And the world changed.
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[END of Part 1 — ~1,500 words complete]
Next up: Part 2 (Kael escapes the ruined pyre square, begins his flight into the wastelands, and learns what it truly means to be Ashborn.)