Word spread again—but this time not in rumor.


It came through flame itself.


Messages written in smoke over riverbeds. Ash patterns dancing in sacred fires. Dreams carried by candlelight. All whispering the same truth:


“A girl born of no name

has rooted the flame.”


They came not as soldiers, but as seekers.


Women whose blood had been denied.

Boys who had been marked "unfit" to train.

Old men who remembered names erased before they could speak them.


They walked barefoot into the Circle.


And Sungbo welcomed them all.


She did not test their blood.

She read their fire.


With every new soul added, the grove changed.


Flame no longer just burned—it grew.


Vines lit with heat curled up tree trunks. Memoryroot sprouted near the fire ring, pulsing like slow heartbeats. The wind began to carry not just scent, but language—fragments of stories that had never been told.


Sungbo called it The Becoming.


“The flame is no longer just witness,” she told Bela.

“It’s a participant now.

It remembers with us.”


But not everyone celebrated.


From the northern provinces came warnings.


House elders met in secret, watching their bloodline scrolls flicker. One by one, the oldest names began to rewrite themselves—admitting forgotten branches.


And worse?


Some children in their ranks began glowing at night.


Not from house-taught flame.


From memoryroot.


In the heart of House Asa, an archivist cried out as an entire vault of lineage tablets turned to dust—


leaving behind only one unmarked shard with a new name etched in red light:


“Nyah.”


Back in the Circle, Sungbo gathered her kin beneath the canopy of fire-lit trees.


“We have become something they can no longer control,” she said. “Not a threat. A mirror.”


Bela stepped forward. “So what do we do now?”


Sungbo raised both hands, palms marked with spirals and rootlight.


“Now, we prepare not to fight them…

but to outlast them.”


And in the soil, the fire whispered:


“I have remembered.

I will not forget again.”