## CHAPTER 64: _"The Hollow Flame"_
The wastelands beyond Elira were nothing like the legends. They were worse.
Where once stood the Citadel of Flame—a monument to the gods who first carved magic from light—there now stretched a broken land, dark and groaning beneath a sunless sky. The air hissed. The soil bled ash. The wind did not blow—it whispered.
Arien led the march, his sword sheathed not in steel but in fire. Behind him, Lysia walked silently, cloaked in midnight blue. She hadn't spoken since the moon refused to rise. Not even once. But her hand remained in his.
"Beyond this point," said Elithra, "there is no map."
"There never was," Sairen muttered, one hand on her dagger, the other gripping the relic they'd taken from the Veil.
They passed statues cracked in half—gods carved with mouths screaming skyward, arms shattered, wings clipped.
> "This place remembers pain," whispered Lysia.
> "So do we," Arien answered.
---
**The Forgotten Path**
Hours bled into days, or so they thought—time itself fractured in the Hollow Flame. Shadows moved even when no one walked. Their dreams bled into waking. The wind mocked them, speaking in languages not meant for mortals.
At night, the stars were replaced by glowing glyphs that shifted across the sky.
"Each one is a name," said Elithra. "Each one… a god who died screaming."
Arien saw his own name once. Written in flame.
And Lysia's? Hers wasn't written. Hers was *missing.*
"Why?" she asked.
"Because you were never meant to exist," said a voice from the dark.
They turned. A figure stood beneath the dying tree of ash—a woman cloaked in flame, her eyes bleeding silver.
---
**The Trial of Flame**
"You are not here to find the gods," the woman said. "You are here to replace them."
"Who are you?" Arien asked.
"I am the First Light. I am the last breath of the Hollow Flame. And this world… is ending."
She raised her hand, and fire swallowed them.
What followed was not battle, not pain, not death. It was memory—fused, inverted, alive.
Each of them relived their greatest regret.
Arien saw himself abandoning Lysia at the lake.
Lysia saw herself shattering Arien's heart with her silence.
Sairen saw her brother dying because she fled.
Elithra… saw herself as a goddess.
And when the fire faded, only the truth remained.
---
**The Rebirth**
"We are not who we were," Arien said, rising.
"No," Lysia replied. "We are who we must become."
The First Light smiled and vanished.
In her place, a temple rose—built from ember and ash, floating.
"The Hollow Flame," Elithra whispered.
They entered.
There, resting on an altar, lay a book bound in flesh and fire: *The Covenant of the Gods.*
Written in blood was the final truth:
> _"Love is not a curse. It is the weapon that kills gods."_
And beneath it, a final choice:
> _Sacrifice the one you love to seal the Veil._
> _Or let the gods return._
Lysia reached for Arien's hand. Her voice broke the silence.
> "I choose neither. I choose us."
Arien nodded.
> "Then let the gods come."
The Hollow Flame erupted.
And the world changed.