The seer girl never gave her name.
She didn't need to.
She carved the sigil of the Third Path into the chapel wall with a bone-dagger and told them to sleep beneath it.
"You'll dream," she said. "And you'll see."
Amara didn't ask what she meant.
She was too tired to care.
That night, the three of them — Amara, Lucien, and Madalena — laid down in the chapel's hollow stone room, wrapped in old silks and silence.
And then the dreaming began.
Amara stood in an endless field of bone-colored ash. The sky above was black — no stars, no moon, just pulsing, living darkness. The world felt old. Prehistoric. Before language. Before light.
Something stirred in the sky.
Not a god.
Not a monster.
Something… watching.
Then a voice — not from the sky, but from below:
"Do you know what the Flame was before it burned?"
Amara turned. The seer girl stood behind her — only now she was taller, older, cloaked in rings of iron and smoke.
"It was silence," she said. "Perfect. Balanced. Untouched."
"Then someone broke it."
She reached into the air and tore it like fabric.And behind the tear?
A door.
Burning with golden fire — the original sigil of the Flame, pure and wild.
"When the first bearer opened this," the girl said, "they didn't just awaken magic. They awakened consequence."
"And consequence remembers."
Amara stepped toward it.
Behind her, something moved.
She turned.
Lucien was there — but twisted.
His skin cracked with dark light. His eyes hollowed, burning shadow. Something stood behind him, cloaked in his silhouette.
"He made a deal to save you," the seer said. "But he didn't realize who he made it with."
"He thought it was Nereza."
"But it was something older."
Amara reached out to him.
The figure smiled through Lucien's face.
She woke up gasping.
Lucien woke screaming.
Amara was already beside him. His skin was cold. The black fire had spread — up his neck, down his spine. Symbols glowed under his skin now. Not Spiral. Not Flame.
Third Path sigils.
"I saw something," he choked out.
"So did I," Amara said.
Madalena stood near the doorway, pale.
"You're being marked," she whispered. "Not possessed. Not corrupted. Chosen."
Lucien looked at his hands. "By what?"
The seer girl's voice came from the shadows.
"The balance. The thing that watches when gods go to war."
Amara turned to her.
"What does it want?"
The girl tilted her head.
"To see if either of you can survive becoming more than what you were made to be."