For a moment, the battlefield vanished.
No snow. No blood. No sky.
Only flame.
It roared in silence, white-gold and endless, stretching across everything Cambria could see, until time itself felt swallowed. She was no longer kneeling in the war-torn valley. She was floating in a hollow of heat, her body suspended mid-motion, her mind vibrating between memory and pain.
Then came the voice.
Low. Familiar. Commanding.
"Cambria."
She turned.
Lucien Vale stood at the center of the fire.
Not the broken man she had known. Not the ghost of a traitor or the remorseful father who had lingered in the shadows of her rise. Here, in the flame, he was whole.
Golden armor wrapped around his body, marked with the sigils of the lost Vale kings. A crimson mantle flowed from his shoulders. In one hand, he held the hilt of the ancestral sword its blade now burning like a comet. His eyes… were not human.
They glowed like stars.
Cambria blinked. "Where… are we?"
