The forest around the fire-ring had grown wild, yet not one branch dared cross its border.


Inside it, they gathered nightly—the Unclaimed, the Markless, the Ashborn.


Sungbo never called them students.


She called them keepers.


Not of power.

Not of control.

But of memory.


One night, a girl named Bela stood and lifted a rootbound torch to the stars.


“I have no name before this,” she said. “My blood was traded before I was born. But now I burn for the mother who never got to keep me.”


The flame turned blue.


Sungbo smiled. “Then your name is now Bela Flamekeeper.”


Bela wept. And with her, the sky wept too—light rain that sizzled as it touched their circle, blessing the ground.


But for each soul Sungbo named, another elder from the old ways grew fearful.


They began sending warnings.


First in smoke symbols.

Then cursed objects left at the edge of the forest.

And finally… a messenger.


A girl with one eye and a throat sewn shut, her hands glowing with unspoken fire.


She carried no words—only a single scroll tied in charred silk.


Sungbo opened it slowly.


Written in blood-ink was a decree:


"Return the flame to the rightful Houses.

Or be burned as heretic and thief.”


She folded the scroll, handed it back to the girl, and whispered:


“Then let them try.”


That night, she stood before her circle.


“They will come,” she said. “They will try to undo what we’ve made.”


Bela rose. “Then we won’t wait to be erased.”


A boy called Miko added, “We name ourselves. We stand.”


Dozens more followed.


“We are the root that remembers.”

“The fire that chose itself.”

“We are not stolen.

We are returned.”


Sungbo looked at them all—children once discarded, now burning brighter than any bloodline.


She raised her palm, flame curling like a heartbeat.


“Then from this day forward, we are not a circle.”


She drew a sigil in the air—spiral, branch, flame.


“We are a line.

And we begin now.”


And far beyond the forest, in the heart of a gilded House throne room, an elder felt her sigil crack—


—because somewhere in the world,


a new lineage had just been born.