## CHAPTER 41: _"The Fire We Carry"_
Eline stood atop the Flame Citadel, where once Lysia had fallen. The wind tangled her hair, and the sky rippled in crimson twilight. She did not come to grieve. She came to announce.
The curse had not ended with Lysia.
It had not ended with Arien.
It had become something else—**a responsibility.**
---
The Council met once more. But they no longer asked "what next?"
Now they asked: **"How do we protect what we've become?"**
The flames whispered a prophecy no one had ever heard before:
> "There will be a Fourth Flame. But only if the Third survives the silence."
Eline understood.
It was not an enemy that would challenge them next.
It was *forgetting.*
---
She organized the Pilgrimage of Memory.
One hundred scribes, each with the Third Chronicle and the Song of the Three Trees.
They traveled to the distant cities—the ones untouched by the Archive, the ones that still feared magic, the ones that whispered Lysia's name like it was a ghost.
They carried **truth.**
Not to convert, but to connect.
And in every village, the same thing happened:
Children listened.
Elders wept.
And the Flame took root—in hearts.
---
Back in Elira, a storm brewed.
Not clouds.
**Doubt.**
A faction called the Nullborn rose—those born without magic, bitter, angry, and afraid.
> "Why should memory rule us?" their leader, Talven, asked.
> "Why must we kneel to a story we didn't write?"
They plotted to burn the Archive.
Eline met Talven in secret.
> "If you destroy the Archive, you destroy your past too."
> "Maybe that's what we want."
> "Then what makes you *you*?"
He had no answer.
Only fire.
---
The night the Nullborn attacked, the Archive glowed red. But not from flames. From *defense.*
Every story ever written in Elira formed a wall. Glyphs of love, of sorrow, of mistakes—they swirled into a barrier no blade could pierce.
And in the center, Eline stood alone.
> "I won't fight you," she told Talven.
> "Then you'll fall."
> "Then let the stories decide."
He struck her with a cursed blade.
She bled words.
> "What...?" he gasped.
> "My blood *is* the Archive now."
She had written herself into the story—*literally.*
And the blade melted in her light.
---
Talven wept.
Not in defeat.
But in awakening.
> "We feared what we didn't read."
> "Now you'll write your own chapter," Eline said.
---
The Nullborn became scribes.
And for the first time, every kind of voice—magic or not—was added to the Flame.
The Fourth Tree shimmered in a dream that night.
It was coming.
Not because of destiny.
But because they had chosen *remembering.*
Eline ended her speech at the Festival of Flame with these words:
> "Love was once a curse. Then a wound. Then a memory. Now—now it is the fire we carry. It is our map, our warning, our truth. And we burn not to destroy. But to be seen."
And the sky lit up in golden fire, shaped like a heart wrapped in vines.
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