The stairwell descended far deeper than it should have.
They were just beneath their home, yet Skyler counted over 200 steps. Each was engraved with a different symbol—some familiar, some impossible. Some… he recognized, though he didn't know how.
The room at the bottom pulsed softly with golden-blue light.
The walls weren't made of stone, but of black crystal, veined with threads of silver fire. In the center floated a platform—half metal, half organic—and on it rested a book sealed in layers of transparent flame.
Skyler stopped at the threshold.
The moment his eyes met the book, it opened on its own.
Pages flipped rapidly. Not from wind—but from recognition. It was reading him as much as he read it.
His sister, Saya, followed silently. She stood beside the floating platform and touched the flame without fear. The fire parted around her like mist.
"The Book of Recalled Flame," their mother said from the steps above. "Only those of the blood can open it. But only you can understand it."
Skyler stepped forward. The flame didn't burn.
He reached out, touched the page—and the room shuddered.
Words ignited across the pages, not in ink, but in memory. Letters danced in and out of form. Some spelled languages he recognized. Others were pre-verbal—emotional glyphs that stabbed into his brain like soundless thunder.
And then a name appeared, scrawled in ancient script:
SKYLER NOVAAH — Archive Key. True Witness. Flamebound. Version 7.
His hands trembled.
"What is this?" he breathed.
"A record," his mother replied. "Of all that your blood remembers. All your past lives. All the forgotten deaths. All your failures. All the seals."
Skyler tried to turn the page. He couldn't.
"I thought this was about prophecy," he whispered.
"No," his father said from the shadows. "This is about containment."
"If you remember too much, too fast… the multiverse could rupture."
Skyler looked at the next page. It was locked. But fire pulsed beneath it, begging to be read.
Suddenly, the book spoke—not aloud, but in thoughts:
"Seal One remains. Memory Ignition imminent. Accessing buried sequence…"
"Warning: Identity core unstable. Suppression breaking. Prepare."
The room began to shake.
Saya's eyes rolled back. "He's waking up," she whispered. "The Skyler that remembers."
From the darkness, a red line of fire streaked across the crystal wall and drew the sigil of a shattered eye.
Then a voice—Orias—echoed from nowhere and everywhere.
"Skyler Novaah. Your blood has opened the First Page."
"And the Witness Flame has seen you."
Skyler fell to his knees as a flood of memories—foreign, ancient, painful—pierced through his mind.
He saw:
A tower collapsing in 12 dimensions at once
A woman aflame screaming his name across dying stars
A blade of memory stabbing through a god's chest
And himself, older, crueler, and burning like a sun, erasing timelines with a glance
And just as quickly—it was gone.
The book slammed shut.
Skyler gasped.
"What did I see?" he asked aloud.
"Not what," Orias answered, his voice solidifying into a presence nearby.
"Who you were."
Skyler looked up, eyes wide, face pale.
The page had only turned one time.
There were hundreds more to go.