A Tale from the Ember Marches

The Radiant Path of Elyon

The Ember Marches were a land where twilight shone red and the air hummed with ancient warmth. There, amid glowing terraces and ember-lit forests, Elyon was born to a humble family of glass-workers. They lived close to the Sanctuary of Cindrelon, where the Eternal Flame burned, a gift of Ignis itself. It was in harmony with every inhabitant of the Ember Marches, its glow reflecting the spirit of the people.

The first thing Elyon remembered was warmth. Not the warmth of a hearth or the sting of summer sun, but a deeper, living warmth, the breath of the Ember Marches themselves. As a child he would run barefoot through the glowing terraces near his family's home, laughing as drifting motes of ember light danced above him like red fireflies. But it was in the great hall of Cindrelon that the warmth truly came alive.

Chosen by the Flame

Always attracted by the temple, he had slipped in during the Dawn Chant, no more than five years old, curious about the voices rising in unison. The Eternal Flame towered at the room's center, shifting like a living serpent of light. When Elyon stepped toward it, the flame leaned, tilted, reaching for him.

Gasps echoed through the hall. A priest dropped his censer. Light bent, brightened, and wrapped around the boy like an embrace.

"By Ignis…" whispered High Priest Anvara. "The Flame knows him."

From that day, the priests watched him closely. They visited his humble home often, kneeling to speak gently with his parents, explaining destiny, duty, honor. Elyon's mother cried quietly as she combed his hair for the last time. His father knelt before him, pride stiffening his voice even as his hands trembled.

"Walk with the Light, my son," he said. "Not how they tell you to... Trust your heart."

Elyon carried that blessing with him into the Sanctuary.

Apprentice of Light

Life in Cindrelon was austere, but beautiful. Elyon awoke to morning chants, spent afternoons learning ancient scripture, and finished each day kneeling before the Eternal Flame, breathing in its warmth. He thrived. He sang the hymns with a voice too clear for his age. He mastered meditations meant for older acolytes. And when he healed a fellow apprentice's burned hand with a soft glow, the priests exchanged whispers of awe. His magic did not scorch. It did not blast. It soothed, mended, and strengthened.

Youngest High Priest

By the time he reached sixteen years old, the Eternal Flame treated him not as a student but as a companion. When Elyon approached, its light pulsed with his breath. When he prayed, it leaned toward him as if listening.

The priests could not deny what the Flame had already declared.

At an age when most apprentices still carried water for the elders, Elyon was elevated to High Priest of Cindrelon, the youngest in the temple's long and honored history. For a few short years, the Marches glowed as brightly as the flame he served.

The Fall

The corruption entered the Ember Marches like a whisper. Not a monster, not an army, but suspicion. Ambition. Jealousy.

Elyon began to feel it first through the Flame. It flickered, not because of wind or ritual error, but because it was suffering. It strained. It dimmed. It mourned.

At the same time, Elyon watched his homeland change. Neighbors who once greeted each other with warmth now glared with distrust. Old friends turned cold. And then… violent.

He saw his own family torn apart, victims of paranoia, lies, and something fouler still. He was powerless against this darkness, able only to witness the aftermath: friends striking friends, kin slaying kin, eyes hollowed by unseen rot.

Elyon, High Priest of Cindrelon, healer of hundreds, could not save his own family. That wound never healed. Worse still, the Flame itself cried out to him in pain. The sacred fire, once a beacon of truth and purity, now thrashed like a living creature in torment. Elyon felt every shudder, every gasp of its dimming light. The helplessness and the darkness it carried nearly broke him.

Betrayal in Cindrelon

Desperate for guidance, Elyon sought the other high priests. But the corruption had reached them too, subtly, insidiously.

"Enough of your prophecies," they told him.

"You imagine danger where there is none."

"You grow arrogant, Elyon."

Yet their smiles were strained. Their pupils strange. Their voices cold. When he demanded they investigate the dimming Flame, they accused him of blasphemy. They moved against him with the cold precision of conspirators long prepared. Jealousy, pent up for years, became venom.

The trial was swift. The sentence even quicker. Heretic. Deceiver. Threat.

They brought him in chains and to his knees to sacrifice him before the very Flame he had served all his life. But the Eternal Flame rebelled. It roared outward in a burst of radiance. Light cascaded over Elyon, not burning, but releasing its bounds and exploding in the room. At its base, a single ember glowed white, untouched by corruption.

He understood. He stood in haste, snatched the ember from the fire and ran.

As bells rang behind him and guards surged through the temple halls, Elyon fled the Marches carrying the last untainted spark of his people.

Exile

Elyon crossed villages burned from within, forests whose ember-lit trees had turned cold, and once-sacred groves twisted into nightmares.

Temple guards hunted him relentlessly.

And though his magic had once only healed, exile forced him to grow harder. He shaped bursts of radiance to blind pursuers, barriers of light that repelled twisted creatures by the dark. His light harming only what was pure darkness.

After months of hiding, Elyon stood upon a cliff overlooking a restless ocean. The Ember Marches were lost behind him, burned, broken, betrayed. Ahead lay only unknown shores.

He closed his hand on his chest around the white ember. The warmth pulsed once, like a heartbeat. He boarded a ship, driven by instinct, by hope, by the faint whisper of the Flame guiding him across storm and shadow. He landed at last on the shores of Mitraspera, a continent with its own wounds, its own shadows, its own light.

The Maturing of Light

Travel changes any man, but exile remakes him. Elyon wandered lands where good men acted cruelly for noble causes. Where creatures of shadow protected lost children. Where paladins in shining armor enacted horrors in the name of unquestioned "purity."

He healed both the worthy and the so called unworthy. He shielded both light and so called shadow. He listened. He learned.

Not all darkness was evil. Not all light was good. Some shadows offered refuge. Some radiance hid cruelty. The world was not a flame or an abyss, it was a braid of both.

One night, as he meditated under a clear sky of stars, a realization settled over him like a mantle: Light cannot exist without shadow. Shadow cannot exist without light. Balance is the true path.

Not destruction. Not purification. Not blind faith. But balance…

Elyon rose from that meditation no longer a frightened exile, no longer the naïve High Priest he once had been. He rose as something new, a guardian of the light who had learned to accept the presence of shadow, so long as it remained within its proper bounds.

A Radiant who carried his light not as a weapon, nor as a rigid creed, but as a beacon, guiding the lost, tempering the fallen, and keeping the darkness in check just enough to preserve harmony.

For the first time, Elyon also understood why the Ember Marches had fallen. His people had lived in a world of pure souls, untouched by deceit or malice. They had cherished light so completely that they never learned to recognize the signs of corruption, let alone resist it. In their innocence, they had no tools against the rot that crept in wearing friendly faces and whispered promises.

Light without shadow had made them an easy target. Unbalanced purity had left them defenseless.

Elyon vowed that he would not repeat their mistake. To keep corruption in check, one must understand darkness, not embrace it, not yield to it, but know it, recognize it, and maintain the delicate balance where neither light nor shadow overwhelms the other.

And someday, when he returns to Cindrelon, he will seek to balance it, and in doing so, let the Flame shine TRUE.

For Elyon the Radiant was not the last priest of Cindrelon. He was the first flame reborn.