Subsection: "Ashes We Inherit"
The fire had long since died down, but the silence between them burned hotter than ever.
Hatku sat close to his sister now—closer than he had in what felt like lifetimes. The green glow from their shared flame had faded to embers, but the warmth it left in his chest was something deeper than magic.
It was blood.
Family.
Truth.
"Tashina…" His voice was rough. "How did you survive?"
She didn't answer right away. Instead, she stared into the last flickers of the fire, like it held the only pieces of her memory still intact.
"The day the Universal Gods punished our mother," she began, "I ran."
Hatku's throat tightened. He remembered that day too well—his mother's screams as the gods twisted her into something else. Something monstrous. Not dead. Worse.
And then the whisper returned to him, the one he had buried deep since that day.
"Slay the Ultimate Being, and the beast shall be freed."
The decree of the Universal Gods echoed like a curse carved into the walls of his soul. He didn't know what the Ultimate Being was. No one did. Only the gods. But the cost of not finding and killing it... was his mother's continued torment.
Tashina didn't know. She couldn't. Not yet.
"I was hiding behind the storage cellar," she said, dragging him back to the present. "You told me to go there if anything ever went wrong. I watched them take her. I watched them burn the old oak and shatter Father's blade."
Her hand brushed the hilt of that very weapon now—somehow retrieved and restored, humming with faint, ancestral power.
"I thought you died when they brought the house down. I screamed for you, but the gods silenced me. One of their collectors grabbed me. Said I was too young to kill… that I'd be 'useful.'"
Hatku's jaw clenched. "They enslaved you?"
"Worse," she said, softly. "They trained me."
She stood and walked toward a rack of old weapons hanging above the hearth, her cloak trailing like dried blood behind her.
"I was kept in a fortress near the Wailing Realm. Conditioned. Forged into something they could use. Something that could kill on command."
Hatku rose slowly, the firelight catching the tight fury in his eyes.
"How long?"
"Years," she said. "I lost track. I became someone else just to survive. But one day, I snapped. Killed one of their war-keepers, took back Father's blade, and set fire to their armory. I've been running since."
She turned toward him.
"I've been waiting for something to tell me it wasn't all gone."
Hatku swallowed hard. "And me? I was that sign?"
Tashina nodded. "I didn't know if it was really you at first. Not until you looked like him."
She didn't have to say who. He saw it too. Their father's face in his reflection—fierce, stubborn, cracked with the weight of war.
"You looked like Father," she whispered. "And when I saw the flame… I knew."
Hatku said nothing. That flame wasn't just shared blood—it was shared rebellion, pain, purpose.
And still, the heaviest truth sat chained in his throat.
He would have to kill the Ultimate Being. Whoever—or whatever—it was. He didn't know how much time he had. But the moment he succeeded, their mother would be freed from the beastly curse.
Or so the gods promised.
But promises from gods were often daggers with honeyed edges.
Subsection: "Beneath the Burned Tree"
The journey to their old home was quiet. Too quiet.
They moved through forgotten valleys and groves swallowed by vines. The trees bent like grieving mourners, and the wind carried the scent of ash and iron.
When they reached it, Hatku nearly stopped breathing.
What remained of the house was a shattered skeleton of memory. The walls had caved in. The roof was nothing but rotted beams. And the great oak that once stood proud in the yard—the one their father carved runes into—was a charred stump now.
Tashina stepped ahead, kneeling by what was left of the hearth. She brushed away soot, revealing the faint family sigil—two crossed blades beneath a rising flame.
"This is where we used to sleep during storms," she said. "I remember waking up with your arm over me, thinking everything would be fine if I just stayed still."
Hatku moved toward a broken training post. He touched the splintered wood. "And this is where Father would make us spar. Said if we didn't learn to fight young, the world would teach us harder."
She laughed, the sound brittle. "He was right."
Hatku nodded, but his mind was far away.
He stood where their mother used to garden. Her favorite spot.
The soil still felt warm. As if she'd been there recently.
"Tashina," he said, "do you think she's still...?"
"Alive?" she asked quietly.
He didn't answer. Instead, he stared at the woods behind the house—dense, dark, and whispering.
"She's not dead," Tashina said. "I don't feel it. I would know."
Hatku swallowed the ache in his throat.
She was alive.
Just not the same.
And if he ever found the Ultimate Being… then maybe—maybe—she could be again.
"We'll find her," he said, voice steady.
"And then?"
Hatku looked up, past the burned trees and the scars of home.
"Then I do what I must."
Tashina watched him, unsure of what he meant.
But she didn't ask.
And he didn't tell.
As the sky dimmed to dusk, they sat in silence beneath the ghost of what was once a family.
And the fire between them—though faint—still refused to die.