The Prime Flame pulsed in Lyra's hand like a living sun.
It didn't burn her.
It sang.
Each heartbeat echoed with the weight of forgotten stars, the breath of newborn galaxies. Her skin shimmered faintly with golden veins of light, and her eyes — once volcanic and wild — had become steady. Focused. More flame than fury.
Sera watched her from the shadows of the ship's main chamber, arms crossed, the Frostflame curling lazily around her fingertips. Riven stood beside her, silent as always, though his gaze was sharper than before — as if he could already sense what this new power meant.
Kaelen sat farther back, half-shadowed, saying nothing.
And Aeris? She simply knelt before Lyra, eyes lowered.
"You are the beacon," Aeris said. "You will guide us through what comes next."
Lyra shook her head. "I'm not ready."
Aeris looked up. "You will never be ready. That is why it must be you."
Meanwhile, across the Realms, the sky shattered.
Not metaphorically — literally.
In a dying world at the edge of the Horizon Realms, a merchant looked up and screamed as cracks spidered through the clouds. Light bled through the seams of reality. And then, from the core of the sky, stepped a figure.
Wrapped in twilight armor, with a cloak made of falling hours and a mask forged from frozen seconds, the Seventh General emerged.
They did not speak.
They existed.
And where they walked, time died.
Birds hung in mid-air, frozen. Rain halted mid-fall. The world forgot how to breathe.
They passed through without resistance.
Their destination lay beyond.
The Prime Flame had ignited.
The Hunt had begun.
Back aboard the Nightingale, Kaelen stared at Lyra for a long while. She trained relentlessly now, pushing her connection to the Prime Flame, her aura brighter with every session.
But he could see the cost.
The Flame didn't give. It tested.
"I can feel it whispering," Lyra admitted to him quietly one night, when they stood alone in the upper observatory.
"What does it say?"
"It remembers… everything. And it wants me to remember too. Even things that didn't happen."
Kaelen's jaw tightened. "Alternate timelines. Possibilities."
She looked at him. "In some of them… I kill you."
He smiled, bitterly. "In some of them, I deserve it."
The ship was silent the next day when Aeris appeared in the war room, her expression pale.
"It's coming."
Riven drew his blade. "What is?"
She didn't answer. She simply activated the holomap — and the image flickered with static.
At its center: a ripple of shattered time.
Kaelen's eyes narrowed. "The Seventh."
Aeris nodded slowly. "The Void's deadliest enforcer. The only one not born of this reality. A weapon shaped in the ashes between Realms."
"What do they want?" Sera asked.
Aeris turned toward Lyra.
"She wants the Prime Flame. And she will unmake you to get it."
Their destination became clear: they needed to outrun the General, and reach the Oracle Forge — a forgotten Realm once used by the Architects of Flame to test and evolve wielders of primal power. Only there could Lyra truly bond with the Flame without being consumed.
As the Nightingale broke toward the Forge, the stars around them dimmed.
Kaelen sat beside Riven in silence.
"She'll come for me first," Kaelen said. "She'll want to test me. To remind me what I was."
Riven looked at him. "And if she does?"
Kaelen's eyes sparked faintly with embers.
"Then I show her what I am now."
Elsewhere, in a chamber of twisted geometry and stillborn time, the Seventh General knelt before the Void-King's mirror.
"She holds the Prime Flame," the King said.
"I have seen it."
"Break her."
"I will."
"And Kaelen?"
The General paused. Then:
"He still wears guilt like armor. But armor breaks."
The Void-King's voice was low.
"He was once mine. Bring him back… or destroy what's left."
The Nightingale neared the Oracle Forge — a Realm without a sky, where rivers of molten starlight carved through forests of glass. The air shimmered with psionic tension, the residue of ancient minds long ascended.
Lyra stood at the threshold, the Prime Flame quiet in her hands.
But before she could step through, the sky fractured.
And the Seventh General descended.
She did not speak.
She moved.
Faster than thought.
Sera barely blocked the first strike with a wall of frost, only to be flung backward. Riven struck with silent precision — his blade singing with truth — but the General caught it mid-air, twisted time around it, and shattered it.
Then she was on Kaelen.
The air cracked with pressure as their flames collided — Ash against Echoed Time.
"You remember me," she said through the mask.
"I burned you once," he growled.
"Then let us burn together."
Their clash tore the air apart.
But it was Lyra — glowing with goldfire, her body trembling — who stepped forward, arms outstretched.
"No more," she whispered.
And the Prime Flame blazed.
It pushed back the General's aura.
It rewrote the moment.
Time slowed.
Reality breathed.
And the Seventh General faltered — for the first time in millennia.
Lyra stood over Kaelen, who had fallen to one knee.
"I won't let your past define you," she said.
And to the General:
"And I won't let your future touch us."
The light exploded.
And the General vanished — not destroyed, but forced to retreat.
The battle was far from over.
But hope had burned brighter than ever.