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**Chapter Fourteen: The First Ember**
He stood before me like a monument carved from smoke and sorrow.
Not the monster I'd imagined in childhood dreams. Not the wrath I'd felt in my veins when I first saw what he'd left behind.
Just... him.
Tall. Pale. Golden-eyed. Flames curled loosely around his hands, as if they were breathing with him.
"I thought you were a story," I said. "A warning. A ghost."
"I was," he replied. His voice wasn't cruel. Just tired. "And now you've burned those stories down."
Kaelen stood behind me, quiet as thunder before a storm. The Watcher had his blade half-drawn.
But I didn't move.
"I didn't come to fight," I said.
A flicker of a smile crossed his face. "Then you didn't come like your mother."
I bristled. "She came to stop you."
"She came to *save* me," he said, almost too softly. "And when she saw what I had become... she knew it was too late."
He stepped aside, gesturing to the empty courtyard behind him.
"It wasn't always like this. This city lived. Its walls held joy. Its people danced in flame and moonlight. Before betrayal. Before fear."
I didn't follow.
"You broke the sky," I said.
"I tried to protect it," he answered. "But they feared what we were. What *you* are. So I made a pact to shield us. I gave up everything."
He looked at me then—really looked.
"And now you've inherited it all. The gift. The grief. The blade. The crown no one wants."
My chest tightened.
"You don't get to decide who I become."
"No," he agreed. "But soon you'll be asked to choose between peace and fire. And when you do, remember this—"
He reached toward the flame between us, and the ground lit up with swirling runes: images from the past, alive and sharp.
—My mother, holding me as a baby.
—My father, standing between two armies, bleeding fire.
—A circle of masked figures binding a crown in chains.
"Everything that burned," he said, "burned for you."
Then the flames collapsed, and the shadows returned.
He turned away.
"You have seven days," he said quietly. "Then the Revenant Circle will come for you. If you survive… come find me in the city where I fell."
He vanished into smoke.
And I stood there, heart burning, not with rage—
—but with *choice*.
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