Chapter 12: The Goddess’s Trial

The Academy was quieter than usual — unnervingly so.

No sparring steel echoed from the eastern rings. No bursts of elemental practice flared from the training grounds. Even the mess hall felt subdued, as if everyone was waiting for something to fall — but didn’t know what.

Kaen walked the stone corridors with the ease of a ghost.

His presence had become myth within days. They whispered when he passed — not insults this time, but fragments of theory, uncertainty, and fear.

“He hasn’t slept since the Tribunal…”

“…he walks like fire itself is guiding him…”

“…he’s not even supposed to be here anymore.”

Kaen didn’t care.

He no longer measured himself by what they said.

He had one goal now: to leave this place before it became his cage.

The first place he went was the Observatory — the highest point in the Academy, where telescopes and ancient rune-charts were used to track magical flows in the sky.

And where one person always sat at this hour.

“Thought I’d find you here,” he said.

Meika — or as she now insisted on being called, Setzu — didn’t turn around.

She sat on the stone ledge, legs crossed, cloak pulled tight around her form. The wind played with her loose strands of silver-black hair.

“I saw your name removed from the training roster,” she said flatly. “Not even a notice. Just… gone.”

“They’re not subtle about exile.”

She finally turned her head slightly. Her eyes — normally sharp and amused — were unreadable.

“Leaving?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

She stood, her back straight, taller than he remembered.

“You’re not the only one with secrets, Kaen,” she said. “The Academy fears you, but they fear me, too. They just don’t know it yet.”

Kaen raised an eyebrow. “And what are you, then?”

Setzu smiled — not kindly.

“A reminder.”

She moved toward him, slow but deliberate. Her hand brushed against the front of his cloak — just briefly — and he realized her fingers had pressed directly where the scroll was hidden.

“You’re not the only one being claimed,” she whispered.

Then she stepped past him, descending the stairwell without another word.

Kaen remained on the ledge for a long moment.

The wind whispered against the edges of his cloak, carrying the scent of distant flamewood — the trees that only burned when touched by mana.

Far below, a hawk circled, then vanished into the clouds.

Everything was moving.

Every silence was charged.

The storm hadn’t broken yet…

…but the world had already changed.

And he was no longer sure who would stand beside him once the fire came.

Kaen walked the southern courtyard in silence, boots soft against the frost-touched grass. The sun hovered low, painting long shadows that bent across the old statues and training stones. Few students came here anymore — it had become a forgotten place, neglected as the Academy shifted its priorities toward politics and power.

That’s why it surprised him to see someone waiting.

A man sat beneath the gnarled blossom tree — an ancient sakura whose petals hadn’t bloomed in decades. He wore a long traveler’s coat, worn at the cuffs, and a weather-stained hood drawn low over his face. A scar split his lower lip. One hand rested on a polished cane.

Not the kind for walking.

The kind that concealed a blade.

Kaen stopped at a distance.

“You’re not faculty.”

The man looked up, slowly.

“No,” he said. “But I walked these halls before your time. Before this place became… what it is.”

Kaen didn’t relax. “Who are you?”

The man smiled, faintly.

“Someone who once bled for Raien.”

Kaen’s chest tightened. “You knew my father?”

“I followed him. And I buried half a dozen of my brothers doing it.”

“Then why now? Why here?”

“Because the fire’s moving again,” the man said. “And some of us are still bound by old oaths.”

He reached into his coat and pulled something out — a ring.

Silver, blackened at the edge. Marked with a symbol Kaen recognized only because he had seen it days ago on the scroll from the Crimson Crescent.

House Dert.

“He kept this hidden,” the man said. “He said his son would earn it, not inherit it.”

[Kaen's Thought] Kaen hesitated, then took the ring.

It pulsed in his hand — faintly warm.

“But I didn’t come just to hand you trinkets,” the man added.

“Then why?”

The older man’s eyes hardened.

“There are whispers from the Empire. Rumors that a prince of flame lives.”

Kaen stilled.

“Raien’s son,” the man continued. “The one they thought Asuka destroyed in the forest. They’ve realized he survived.”

“How?”

“Because something rose from the Hollow. Something that burns like Enjin. Something they’ve feared would return for generations.”

Kaen clenched his jaw.

“So they’re coming?”

The man didn’t answer directly.

Instead, he rose, the cane tapping once against the ground.

“There are those inside the Academy who want you gone. There are those outside who want you dead. But me? I just want you to be ready.”

“And Kaen… not everyone who served your father still remembers that remembered the pain and forged the will why they did.”

He turned and vanished down the stone path before Kaen could respond.

Kaen stood beneath the sakura tree, staring at the ring in his palm.

He hadn’t been found. He had been exposed.

And if the Empire truly knew what was inside him…

It wasn’t just Tsukihara that would burn.

The world would burn trying to stop him.

Kaen stood in front of the old hearth in Sayari’s quarters. The fire had burned low, casting a quiet orange glow across the stone floor. Dust floated in the air, untouched by wind. The space was silent — not in the peaceful sense, but in the way a place goes still before something sacred is broken.

Sayari stood by the window, back turned.

She had known.

Even before he spoke, she had felt it — the decision in his bones.

“You’re leaving,” she said softly.

Kaen nodded. “Tomorrow. Before first light.”

She didn’t turn around. “Alone?”

The word hung in the air like smoke that refused to fade.

Sayari turned, eyes shadowed by something older than fear.

“Do you understand what that means?”

Kaen met her gaze. “It means they won’t decide who I am.”

She approached, stopping only a step from him. Her fingers, once strong and calloused from swordwork, now trembled as she reached for something hidden beneath her robes.

A box.

Small. Wrapped in faded crimson silk.

“This was meant to be given to you when you came of age. I thought… perhaps I could delay that moment forever.”

Kaen took the box gently, unwrapping it with care. Inside lay a vial of deep, shimmering red — like liquid flame held in glass. Alongside it, a folded slip of parchment marked with old, twisting runes.

“What is it?”

“A drop of Oathfire,” Sayari said. “Taken from the sacred well beneath the shrine in the northern mountains. The last that was ever harvested.”

Kaen narrowed his eyes. “Oathfire?”

“It’s more than magic. It binds flame to will. To word. To choice.”

She looked at him with something between pride and sorrow.

“If you drink it, you can forge an oath so strong it cannot be broken — not by gods, nor demons, nor death itself.”

Kaen stared at the vial. “What if I make the wrong promise?”

Sayari smiled — softly, tiredly.

“Then the flame that shapes as much as it scorches will remember. And it will come for you.”

He stood in silence, staring at the fire in the glass.

“I want to make an oath,” he said. “But not just for power.”

Sayari waited.

“I swear,” Kaen whispered, lifting the vial, “that no matter what they try to make me — monster, weapon, heir — I will burn for my own name. And no other.”

He uncorked the vial and drank.

Not like pain — but like truth searing every part of him that had once been silent.

His veins lit. His skin glowed. The ring in his pocket pulsed.

And somewhere deep inside the old bones of the Academy…

A rune flared to life.

Later that night, Kaen stood outside the gates.

He didn’t bring much.

His cloak. His blade. The scroll from the Crimson Crescent.

And the fire that would never leave him again.

He looked back once — just once — at the walls that had both sheltered and betrayed him.

Then he walked forward.

Into the wild.

Into war.

Into whatever name he would carve from ash and flame.

The world beyond the Academy walls was colder than Kaen remembered.

Wind howled low through the narrow pass that led into the highlands, bending dead grass and whispering through broken stones. The sky was overcast, and somewhere behind the mist, the second moon — Kureha — had begun to wane. Only a sliver of silver remained.

Kaen’s boots crunched softly as he moved through the pass. He hadn’t seen another soul in hours.

But he felt them.

Eyes in the dark. Breath he couldn’t hear, but sensed like a tremor beneath his skin.

He was being followed.

He stopped beside a broken pillar — half-sunken into the earth and covered in old prayer runes. It looked like the remains of an elven shrine, long abandoned.

He crouched, brushed his fingers across the cold stone.

The moment he did, a low crack echoed behind him.

Not a rock.

Not wind.

A blade being drawn.

A shadow lunged at him from the mist — silent, swift, too fast for an ordinary man. The figure was wrapped in tattered robes, face hidden behind a bone mask carved with symbols of the Empire’s inquisitors.

Assassin.

Kaen drew his blade in one motion, parrying the strike. Sparks danced. The masked figure moved like liquid — no wasted effort, only sharp, surgical intent.

Another strike.

Kaen twisted, dodging narrowly, and drove his knee into the attacker’s chest. The figure staggered back — but only for a second.

Then came the second.

Another masked one, leaping from a ledge above. Kaen raised his hand. Flame burst from his palm, not wild but precise — it caught the second attacker mid-air and threw them into a stone wall.

Silence followed.

But it wasn’t over.

A third figure stepped from the shadows — slower, taller, unmasked.

Her skin was pale grey, her eyes black — not human.

Demon.

But not one of the aristocrats. A scout-class, perhaps — one bred for speed and silence.

“You weren’t supposed to be this far north,” she said, voice smooth like oil on water. “The Empire had you tracked heading west.”

She tilted her head. “I can still bring them your body. It doesn’t need to be intact.”

Kaen’s eyes narrowed.

“Then try.”

She vanished in a blur of motion — no chant, no spark — just shadow.

But Kaen had already stepped forward.

He didn’t fight like before.

This time, the flame that shapes as much as it scorches moved with his limbs. Not summoned — intertwined.

He ducked her strike, twisted, then unleashed a burst of heat that melted the air around him. Her skin seared on contact. She screamed and stumbled back, snarling in a tongue he didn’t recognize.

“Who sent you?” he growled.

She spat blood.

“You don’t understand what you are. You never will.”

“Then explain it.”

She laughed — then bit down on something in her mouth.

A pulse of dark mana exploded from her body, not as flame — but as rot.

It cracked the earth. Warped the trees.

Nothing remained but ash, bone, and whispers.

Kaen stood in the quiet.

His heartbeat steady.

The world had changed.

The Empire wasn’t just watching.

It was sending killers.

And if they knew he had Enjin’s flame…

Then every step forward would be a step into war.

The shrine lay in ruins.

What remained stood beneath a jagged cliffside, buried in vines and stone. Cracks split its foundations, and the sacred altar had long since collapsed under the weight of time and war. Yet the moment Kaen stepped into the clearing, the air changed.

Thicker. Still.

As if the land itself remembered what once happened here.

He moved slowly, hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Not out of fear — but reverence. There was something ancient beneath the silence. A pressure beneath the skin of the world.

Then he saw it — a fractured monolith at the center of the broken shrine. Faint runes still glowed along its edges. The symbol carved at its base sent a chill down Kaen’s spine:

Enjin’s sigil.

The same symbol that pulsed through his dreams. The same mark that now burned faintly behind his ribs, just below his heart.

He knelt before the monolith, fingers hovering over the cold surface. The moment he touched it—

—

Vision.

Fire everywhere.

Not chaotic — purposeful. A battlefield of shadows and light.

Screams in a language he didn’t know, swords that sang like bells, and a figure wrapped in black and red flame standing atop a mountain of stone.

Not a man.

Something in-between.

“Raien…”

Kaen stood in the body of another — taller, stronger, older. His hands were stained crimson. He held a sword unlike any he’d seen. No edge. No steel. Only flame forged into shape.

Beside him — Enjin.

Not as a deity. As a presence. Towering. Immense.

Then Kaen — Raien — turned toward him.

Not in the vision. Directly.

“Do not let them rewrite what was sacrificed.”

Kaen gasped, stumbling backward.

The air rushed back into his lungs, and he felt the monolith’s heat fade from his skin. The world around him spun for a heartbeat — and then steadied.

That hadn’t been just a memory.

It was a bond.

And it confirmed what he feared: Raien hadn’t just been a noble warrior.

He had fought alongside gods.

Or worse — against them.

Kaen rose, breathing slowly.

He didn’t need answers anymore.

He needed truth.

Even if it came wrapped in blood and fire.

The walk back from the shrine was slow. Not because of fatigue — but because the weight of what Kaen had seen clung to him like smoke. The vision hadn’t faded. It moved behind his eyes like a second pulse, shaping every breath, every thought.

And the voice:

Do not let them rewrite what was sacrificed.

The wind whispered through the trees. But the air no longer felt empty.

Something followed him.

Not footsteps. Not shadow.

Presence.

Nothing.

But the fire in his chest responded — flickering, rising. It recognized what the eyes could not see.

Then, without warning—

A woman stepped from the forest.

She wore no cloak. No armor. No insignia.

Only a long robe the color of fading coals and bare feet on frozen ground. Her hair was silver, but her face was young. Her eyes—

they burned without flame.

Kaen reached for his sword.

“Don’t,” she said calmly. “If I wanted to kill you, we wouldn’t be speaking.”

“Then who are you?”

“I am the last of those who remember Enjin not as myth — but as truth.”

Kaen didn’t relax. “You knew him?”

“I served him. And I carry the name he gave to no one else.”

She stepped closer, stopping a few paces from him.

“They called me Ashira.”

The name pulled something deep from his memory — from the vision.

“You were with Raien.”

“I was with both of them.”

She knelt, not in reverence — but in acknowledgment.

“You carry more than blood, Kaen. You carry the echo.”

She rose. “The Empire has moved. The Crescent Circle is fracturing. And your name — the one they tried to erase — is rising from every fire you leave behind.”

Kaen narrowed his eyes. “What do you want?”

Ashira smiled — the first warmth he had seen in days.

“I want to see if flame can choose who it becomes.”

She handed him something wrapped in thick black cloth.

He opened it carefully.

But not of steel.

It pulsed — not with light, but with breath. Like a living thing.

“This was Enjin’s gift to Raien,” she said. “Now, it belongs to you.”

Kaen stared at the weapon.

It had no edge, yet it cut through the cold around them.

It had no weight, yet it anchored everything in his hands.

He whispered the word without thinking:

“Ikari.”

Not a name.

An emotion.

Rage.

Kaen remembered Sayari’s words: 'The fire that loves you can also consume you.' As he stepped toward the altar of the Old Flame, he felt it—not power, not glory, but the weight of a choice yet to come. One day, he would have to choose between becoming a god—or remaining a boy who remembered his mother’s lullabies.

Ashira nodded. “The world will name you many things. But only you can decide which name will burn long after the others are gone.”

That night, Kaen didn’t sleep.

He watched the stars shift overhead.

The flame inside him had stopped trembling.

It didn’t burn out of fear or pain anymore.

For the storm.

For the war.

For his choice.

And when the time came, he would not whisper his name.

He would carve it into the world.

With flame.