Chapter 205: The God Flame
Aveline blinked at the glowing sphere in her hand, then looked back at Aelion with open bewilderment.
"What?" she asked, still staring at the light as though it might explain itself. "Is this fire? Why is it white? And why does it look like this?"
The strange power crackled softly against her palm, bright as molten moonlight and restless as a storm, its edges flickering with something that resembled lightning threaded through flame. It was so bright, so fierce, that she could not even decide what she was looking at, much less how she had made it.
"How do I stop it?" she asked.
Surely it should stop on its own. Surely it was not meant to linger there like a living thing.
Aelion, who had backed away with admirable caution, stared at her hand as though he were afraid it might strike him if he looked at it too directly.
"That is..." He swallowed. "It cannot be."
Aveline frowned. "What do you mean it cannot be?"
"I have read somewhere that white flame is of the gods," he said slowly.
She made a face. "Didn’t you call that old man’s blue flame divine?"
Aelion shot her a look. "There is a difference between divine and of the gods, Ava. This is not just flame. It looks like some kind of amalgamation of fire and lightning. I have never seen anything like it before, and I do not think I have ever even read about it."
Aveline’s lips twitched with disbelief. Gods? That was absurd. She could not possibly be something like that. She was just Aveline. She was not some chosen vessel or celestial miracle. She barely understood what she had done, let alone why the result looked as though it belonged in a legend.
"Alright, that is enough," she muttered, then puffed out a breath at the light in her palm.
Nothing happened. At least, nothing she expected happened. She thought it would snuff out like a candle.
Instead, the white-hot sphere flew off her hand and struck another boulder with a violent crack, shattering it into pieces in a burst of heat and dust.
Aveline stared at the smoking wreckage in silence.
Then she slowly lowered her hand.
"That is it," she said flatly. "No fire and no lightning for me."
Her little heart could not bear this kind of chaos. It was far too much power, far too much destruction, and far too much of whatever inexplicable thing had just awakened inside her.
She turned away before she could think too hard about it, already feeling the tremor in her fingers.
"I’ll stick to my shadow-bending," she muttered under her breath, partly to herself and partly to the universe, as if saying it aloud might convince the world to leave her alone.
Behind her, Aelion watched her go, his expression still caught somewhere between awe and alarm.
"Don’t forget about tonight," he called after her. "Be there, under the willow tree when the moon rises."
Aveline lifted a hand in a distracted wave and kept walking. She had to fold both hands against her chest to stop them from shaking.
What was that?
What had just happened?
That was too powerful. Too dangerous. Far too much for someone like her to have, much less for her to understand. For the first time in a long while, the thought of her own power made her feel smaller rather than stronger.
"I’ll stick to shadow-bending," she whispered to herself again, as though repeating it would make the decision easier.
In the distance, one air-bender cloaked in darkness slipped quietly away.
And once he was gone, another figure stepped from the shadows.
Edric Vantaris drew in a slow breath, his gaze still fixed on the place where the white flame had vanished.
"That was indeed the God-Flame," he murmured, more to himself than to anyone else.
The words tasted wrong the moment they left him.
Before he could turn that revelation over in his mind any further, a summons reached him from the King. The call was sharp and immediate, leaving no room for delay. Edric slipped back into the shadows at once and vanished, only to appear a few moments later in the King’s chamber.
The room was dim and quiet.
The King sat reclined in his leisure chair near the window, his eyes closed as though the weight of the day had finally pressed even his thoughts into silence. He looked tired. Not the sort of fatigue that could be slept away easily, but something older, heavier, and more persistent. When Edric entered, the King did not move.
"She has the God-Flame, Sire," Edric reported at once.
He had expected surprise. Perhaps even concern.
But the King’s expression did not change.
Only after a long moment did he lift one hand and point toward a thick leather-bound book resting open on the table beside the window. The cover was worn, the edges marked by age, and strange runes and old symbols had been etched into the surface until it looked less like a book and more like a relic.
Edric approached cautiously.
The first few lines were enough to make him slow.
The deeper he read, the more his eyes widened.
It spoke of the Creator making the Night Fox and the Dawn Hare. It said they were fashioned to command light and shadow, to exist not as simple opposites but as two halves of a greater balance, each unable to survive without the other.
One in the other. Bound together from the beginning.
Then came the curse.
The legend claimed that they had angered the Creator, and so they were condemned to walk in flesh, reborn again and again without memory of who they had been, destined to chase each other across the earth until the end of time itself.
It said that the Night Fox and the Dawn Hare would never be born at the same time, and that they would continue their endless pursuit until their punishment was fulfilled.
Edric’s head snapped up.
For a moment, he had forgotten every scrap of etiquette drilled into him over the years.
"Do you believe this?" he asked, too stunned to restrain himself.
His voice came out rough with disbelief.
"If this is true, then the Lord of Light and the Goddess of Shadows that we worship are not gods at all," he said, his thoughts rushing ahead of his fear. "They are walking among us in flesh. This is blasphemy," he whispered hoarsely. "The words of heretics."
His chest tightened as the implications flooded in. How could their gods not remain in their temples? How could they be flesh and blood, moving through the world unnoticed?
If that was true, then what had generations of people been worshipping all this time? Stones? Symbols? Stories dressed up as sacred truth?
It felt impossible.
Unholy.
Wrong.
The kind of wrong that made the skin crawl.
The King opened his eyes at last.
"I want to believe it, Edric," he said quietly.
There was no triumph in his voice. No certainty. Only exhaustion, and something else beneath it that Edric did not like at all.
"Then tell me," the King continued, his gaze steady now, "why does she have the God-Flame, if she is not a god walking in flesh?"
The question settled over the chamber like a blade laid carefully across the throat of the world.
Edric said nothing at once.
Because there was no immediate answer.
And because, for the first time in a very long while, he had the disturbing feeling that the legends were not merely legends at all.
"If she were truly a god, how could you erase her memories?" Edric asked. "You did it when she was still young. And if that is the case, does that mean the Crown Prince is not the Night Fox?"
At that, the King looked away.
For the first time since Edric had entered the chamber, something in his composure faltered. His breathing deepened, turning heavier, and the tiredness in him seemed to settle into something more troubled, more human. He lifted the hand that still bore the mark of his earlier struggle and stared at it for a long moment, as though the faint pain there was easier to face than the truth he was trying to put into words.
"I am not sure," he admitted at last. "She is only now beginning to understand what she is, perhaps for the first time, and for some reason she has imprinted herself on my poor son."
His mouth tightened faintly around the words poor son, not with tenderness alone but with frustration, with fear, with the exhausted helplessness of a man who had already watched too much slip beyond his control.
"It was difficult back then," he continued, his voice low. "And now..." He let out a quiet breath, then looked at the hand again, as if the memory of her resistance still lingered there. "It was easy to erase Vaelor’s memories of her because he had gathered them like treasure, because they were all held together in one place. I only needed to cut the cord that tied his soul to those memories."
He paused.
The silence that followed felt heavy enough to press against the walls.
"But with her..." the King said more slowly.
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