Chapter 146: Elandra
The second Gate breathed heavily. It had been dormant until now.
Buried deep in the blackened heart of a fallen city, it was once a temple to the Flame, now a graveyard of gods, it waited and Cassian stood before it. He wasn’t alone.
The air around him was heavy with incense, blood and rot. Echoes whispered through crumbled halls. He had gathered them carefully, desecrated Seers, exiled mages, Umbrazin dissidents whose hunger for power had twisted their skin and their souls.
They called him the New Flame.
The Gate pulsed once more, its core ember-red, alive in ways it hadn’t been since the Old War.
Cassian didn’t flinch. He walked forward, crimson eyes fixed on the crack in reality. His shadow slithered unnaturally behind him, not following his steps but leading them.
At the threshold, he lifted his hand. The Umbrazin blood inside him responded, seething. Black light flickered through the veins in his arm, coiling like smoke. He reached out and placed his palm against the stone etched with forgotten glyphs.
It burned. The screams that followed weren’t his. All around him, the dead rose, not as flesh, but as memory. Twisted revenants made of the Gate’s discarded truths. Eyes, hundreds of them, opened in the dark. A face formed from the veil: scorched, golden-eyed, feminine.
“Lucira,” he breathed.
But it wasn’t her.
It was the impression of her, corrupted, copied and fractured through time.
The Gate was trying to remember her.
Cassian knelt.
“Show me,” he said, his voice deeper, older.
The Gate cracked a little wider.
In the Fortress, Isla staggered awake.
Her breath caught in her throat. The visions were coming again. They were too strong and too sudden.
He could hear Lucira’s voice and see Lucira’s eyes. But this time, not in the black void of the Gate. This time, in a sunlit glade.
The world shifted. She was there.
Isla stood in the vision, barefoot in tall grass, surrounded by ethereal blossoms that glowed like stardust. The trees sang in a language she had once known and in the center of the clearing… stood her mother.
Lucira turned, radiant as ever, older now. No longer trapped in half-shadow, her features were whole.
“Isla,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion.
Isla ran into her arms.
They embraced in silence, the kind that speaks through blood.
“Where is this?” Isla whispered.
“A memory,” Lucira said. “But one you must reclaim.”
“I don’t understand…”
“You are becoming, Isla and the world is cracking because of it. The Veil is thinner than ever. The war ahead… It’s not just between power and darkness. It’s between memory and forgetting. Between those who shape the future… and those who would rewrite the past.”
Isla blinked. “Cassian.”
Lucira nodded slowly. “He’s close to finding the Second Flame.”
“The what?”
Lucira pulled her close again. “You were born of a convergence, Isla. But so was another.”
The forest shimmered. A figure appeared.
A man, half-shadowed, tall and lean with pale hair and striking amber eyes. He didn’t smile, but there was warmth in his gaze.
“Corven,” Lucira said gently.
Isla’s heart stopped.
She knew that he must be her father.
His voice was low and steady. “We have little time. The blood within you, it’s the last link to the Old Flame. But the Second… it was split from you at birth.”
Isla couldn’t breathe.
“Another child?” she whispered. “A twin?”
Corven’s eyes turned sad. “A fracture. Not a twin in form, but in spirit. It was meant to protect you. But that part of your essence was lost and now… Cassian is searching for it. If he finds it before you do…”
“He’ll finish the Veil’s unraveling,” Lucira said.
“Where is it?” Isla asked.
Lucira raised her hand and touched Isla’s forehead.
Suddenly, the vision cracked open.
Flashes of a city on fire. A cradle hidden in flame. A baby marked not by prophecy, but by silence. The child never cried.
The Silent Flame.
Then, a scream. A name: Elandra.
Isla collapsed back into her body with a gasp.
Raven appeared suddenly. She had sense Isla’s tension dissipate through the bearing of the fortress.
“Lucira,” Isla said, “she showed me… Elandra. Another Flame. Another piece of me. Cassian’s looking for her. We have to find her first.”
Back at the second Gate, Cassian smiled.
He had seen it too. The girl. The other Flame and his blood boiled with hunger.
“Elandra,” he whispered. “My fire-born star.”
The revenants stirred behind him, recognizing the name like a summons.
Cassian stood and turned to his followers.
“Begin the search,” he said. “Bring her to me. Alive or bleeding. Either will suffice.”
His voice echoed through the ruins like thunder because f he found her first, he wouldn’t need Isla anymore and the Gate would burn open.