Chapter 4 The First Gate

The cavern hummed like a living throat.

Seren stepped forward, boots scraping against the stone ledge as heat washed over her. The air rippled. Gold veins pulsed faintly along the walls, brightening and dimming like a heartbeat buried beneath the earth.

Elder Nyros stood a few paces ahead, staff planted firmly, his sightless eyes tilted toward the river of light below them.

“Ley current,” he murmured. “You feel it now, don’t you?”

Seren opened her mouth then closed it again.

Feel was an understatement.

Every inhalation tasted like burning copper. Every breath thrummed with invisible power. The golden mark on her collarbone tingled beneath her jacket, reacting to the energy radiating from the cavern’s core.

Nyros lifted his chin. “Good. You’re awakening. Whether you wanted to or not.”

Seren swallowed hard. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Neither did fire ask to burn,” Nyros replied calmly. “Yet it does.”

He gestured her forward.

Seren hesitated, but only for a moment. She stepped beside him and stared down. The cavern’s center expanded into a massive pit where molten light swirled like a river made of starfire. It wasn’t liquid. It wasn’t flame. It was something in between—raw, living magic.

“The First Flame Gate,” Nyros said. “Every dragon-blooded descends here eventually. To enter this current is to lay your soul bare.”

Seren’s stomach tightened.

“Explain,” she said.

Nyros turned toward her, expression unreadable beneath the shadows of the cavern. “Your veins must be aligned to the world’s hidden arteries. Dragonfire is not summoned. It is remembered. These gates” he tapped his chest“are locks placed on your bloodline long ago. Break one, and you access more of your inheritance.”

“Inheritance,” Seren echoed bitterly. “That’s what you call this? A cult hunting me? My brother being used as a battery? My life”

“That wasn’t your heritage,” Nyros interrupted sharply. “That was the Covenant. Mortals playing with forces beyond them. Unlocking your Gates is not their path. It’s yours.”

Seren fell silent.

Nyros’s voice softened. “You want to save Rowan. This is the only way.”

That closed the argument.

Seren exhaled slowly, forcing her heartbeat to steady. “What do I have to do?”

Nyros raised his staff. “Enter the current.”

She blinked. “Just… jump in?”

“Walk,” he corrected. “It will sense you. Fire always senses its own.”

Seren stared at the glowing pit again. “And if I can’t handle it?”

Nyros shrugged lightly. “Then you will die.”

Seren stared at him.

He waited.

After three quiet seconds, he added, “But it will be quick.”

She almost laughed at how casually he said it but it wasn’t funny. Not even close.

“This is insane,” she muttered.

“Everything worth doing is,” Nyros answered.

Seren clenched her hands. Kaien’s face flashed through her mind his warning, the grief in his voice when he told her the Covenant wanted her alive for the ritual. Her brother lying unconscious for two years, skin pale, eyes unmoving, body sustained only by machines. And under it all, the faint pulse of fire in her blood. Calling. Whispering.

Maybe she’d been walking toward this moment from the start.

She stepped toward the edge.

Nyros held up a hand. “Before you go, understand the danger. The First Gate tests memory. Your worst moments will surface. Regrets. Failures. Losses. If you flinch from them, the current will consume you.”

Seren’s breath caught. Memories she avoided moments she couldn’t relive pressed at the edges of her mind.

But she forced herself to nod. “I’ll manage.”

Nyros angled his head. “Even your brother?”

Seren froze. Heat stabbed behind her ribs.

Nyros didn’t apologize.

“Good,” he said. “Hesitation means death. Resolve means survival. Now go.”

Seren inhaled once, sharply, then stepped forward and dropped into the current.

Heat swallowed her whole.

She didn’t burn. She dissolved.

At first, it felt like falling into a warm ocean, weightless and strangely gentle. Then, abruptly, the current seized her, pulling her through liquid light. Her body flickered between forms solid, smoke, flame, something else entirely.

Her heart pounded against her ribcage like it wanted to escape.

Then the world snapped open.

She stood in their old apartment.

Whole. Untouched. Before the explosion.

The air smelled like Rowan’s favorite tea. Laundry hung in half-folded piles across the couch. The soft hum of the air conditioner buzzed in the background.

Seren’s chest tightened painfully.

“No,” she whispered. “Not this.”

But the current had chosen its memory.

Rowan emerged from the kitchen, mug in hand, hair messy, shirt misbuttoned. He grinned at her the way he always did bright, unguarded.

“Seren,” he said, “you’re back early.”

Her throat closed.

This wasn’t real. It was the Gate probing. Testing.

Rowan walked closer. “Hey. You okay? You’re pale.”

Seren shook her head, fighting tears she hadn’t felt in years. “Rowan, this isn’t you. You’re”

“Sleeping?” he offered softly. “Or dying?”

She flinched.

His expression didn’t change, but his eyes darkened.

“You weren’t here when it happened,” he said.

Seren felt the words like a blade.

“You left. I called for you,” Rowan continued, voice quiet but merciless. “And the explosion took me. Wasn’t that convenient?”

“Stop,” Seren whispered. “That’s not true.”

“But you think it is,” the illusion said. “You always did.”

She backed away.

Fire sparked at her fingertips.

Rowan reached out. “If you’d come home an hour earlier, Seren… I wouldn’t be”

“STOP!”

Golden fire erupted from her palms, shattering the false Rowan into embers.

The apartment melted, folding into streams of light.

Seren staggered, chest heaving. The current whirled around her again, hotter angrier.

Then a second memory slammed into her.

She stood in the morgue. The burned corpse on the table. The moment her mark flared. The sparks that leapt across her skin.

Except this time, the corpse sat up faster. Grabbed her wrist harder. Its charred face split open wider as it whispered her name.

“Seren Ardent.”

She was thrust back into that night—helpless, terrified, unprepared.

“No,” Seren growled. “Not again.”

But the Gate had no mercy.

Hands burst from beneath the morgue tables burned, skeletal, clawing at her ankles. The shadows of Covenant cultists spilled through the walls like smoke. Rowan’s limp body appeared on one of the tables, sealed in crystal.

This wasn’t memory anymore. This was every fear she hadn’t voiced.

Seren clenched her fists.

“Enough.”

The first hand wrapped around her ankle.

Golden fire surged up her leg instinctively not a spell, not a command, but a reaction. It erupted from her in a roar of heat. Shadows disintegrated. Flames swept across the morgue like a hurricane of molten gold.

When the fire cleared, Seren stood alone.

Her chest rose and fell hard. Sweat dripped down her back. But she was standing.

The illusions faded. The current quieted.

Then she heard it a heartbeat that wasn’t hers. A slow, thrumming sound vibrating through the cavern of her mind.

The First Flame Gate.

It appeared before her as a massive door made of molten metal, veins pulsing like living arteries. At its center burned a glowing sigil the mark on her collarbone.

Seren stepped toward it.

The Gate pulsed once, as if asking a question.

Seren raised her hand.

“I’m not afraid anymore.”

She pressed her palm against the sigil.

The Gate exploded in a burst of golden fire.

Seren jolted back into her body.

Her knees hit the cavern floor. She gasped, lungs clawing for air. Every vein in her body glowed faintly, as if lit from within. Her vision sharpened the cavern brighter, clearer, more alive.

Nyros knelt beside her, one hand hovering over her back.

“You survived,” he said softly. “And you opened it.”

Seren trembled, not from fear but from power.

“I saw Rowan,” she whispered. “Not just the illusion. I felt him. Like he’s… connected.”

Nyros nodded. “Your souls share the same bloodline. Opening your Gate strengthens the link.”

Seren stared at her glowing hands. “So I can reach him?”

“You can find him,” Nyros corrected. “And you can save him.”

Seren stood slowly.

For the first time since the explosion, she felt something like hope.

Nyros straightened. “Your training starts now, Ashheart.”

Seren exhaled, golden sparks drifting from her breath.

Maybe she didn’t ask for this.

But fire had chosen her anyway.

And she would use it to burn the Covenant to ash.