The attack came at dawn.


No announcement. No honor-bound challenge. Just fire—wrong fire. Fire that obeyed commands, not memory. It tore through the outer forest like a blade through silk, blackening everything in its path.


It wasn’t sent to kill.


It was sent to erase.


Sungbo was already awake.


She stood at the edge of the grove, eyes closed, listening to the ground.


She could hear the rage in the flames.


“This is not your fire,” she said.


Bela ran to her side, staff pulsing red. “It’s coming from House Odu.”


Miko joined them, breath tight. “They called us thieves.”


“No,” Sungbo said, stepping forward into the fire’s path, “they called us proof.”


The Circle gathered behind her—untrained in battle, but unafraid. Each bore sigils of their own making, inked into skin, carved into wood, whispered into flame.


Sungbo didn’t draw a weapon.


She drew a line in the ash with her foot.


Then raised both arms.


And spoke the phrase she’d never said aloud:


“I am Nyah,

of the flame that remembers itself.

I do not burn in fear.

I burn in return.”


The fire paused.


Like breath caught in a throat.


Then it twisted.


It answered her.


Not with violence—


—but by turning.


The flames that had been sent to destroy the Circle now circled it… and began burning back toward House Odu.


The trees remained whole.

The sigils in the air glowed gold.

And every child in the Circle felt it:


The flame had chosen.


By dusk, House Odu sent an envoy.


A masked elder in robes of dark gold, holding an extinguished torch.


“We came to test you,” she lied.


“You came to end me,” Sungbo replied. “Because I am not of your line.”


The elder bowed slightly.


“You are no longer outside it.”


That night, the Circle celebrated not with chants, but with stories.


They carved each other’s names into wood.

Wrote new ones in fire.

Laid roots beneath the sacred ring.


And for the first time, Sungbo said it aloud:


“This is no longer the Circle of the Unclaimed.

This is the First Line.

The beginning of all that will not be forgotten again.”