The defiled temple of Chauntea burned long after the screams had ended.
It's roof had collapsed inward, blackened beams leaning like broken ribs over a sanctum choked with ash. What remained of the village - once called Camden Dene, for the river that carved the valley in a slow silver arc - lay scattered in smoking ruins along the water’s edge.
The river's now murky waters flowed on, untroubled, carrying embers and fragments of charred remains of prayer scrolls, debris and shards of timber toward lands that would never know their source.
Darvin 'Greybeard' stood cautiously at the threshold of the ruined shrine, the fur mantle on his shoulders dusted grey, his breath slow and steady despite the heat. His greatsword remained sheathed. There was no enemy left to hunt.
His skills had served him well following the tracks here - boot leather, cart ruts, horse shoes, the careless signs of bandits who believed themselves beyond consequence. They had taken the village months ago, driven out its folk or put them to the sword, and turned the Earthmother's temple into their headquarters and counting house. The ranger had expected blood.
He had not expected judgment.
Behind him, the strange heretic priests of the 'Yellow God' and their hired guards moved among the ruins with quiet purpose. Their prayers had ended an hour earlier, when the last of their holy firestorms guttered into coals. What had begun as a cordon of holy flame - meant to trap and frighten the bandits within - had become something far greater. Darvin did not pretend to understand the full shape of it. He only knew that when the priests raised their voices, the sky itself had seemed to listen before erupting.
Now, only one sound broke the crackle of dying embers.
A child's cry.
Darvin froze.
It was faint. Thin. Alive.
He stepped forward without looking back, boots crunching over scorched stone as he followed the sound into the temple’s heart. The altar had split in two, its painted depiction of Chauntea's holy symbol scorched and unrecognisable, but beneath it - cradled in ash and shattered stone - lay a dirty bundle of cloth that still smouldered, yet did not burn.
Inside it, an infant stirred.
Darvin knelt, ignoring the heat that bit through his gloves. The babe’s coppery skin glowed faintly, as though embers lived beneath it. White hair coiling to to tips the colour of fresh flame clung damply to a brow already marked with soot. When the child opened his eyes, they reflected firelight like molten gold - staring up at him with wonder.
The ranger swallowed.
"I’ll be damned," he murmured, voice rough as gravel.
Footsteps approached. Robes brushed stone.
Kaspian Dawnfire knelt beside him, reverent and unafraid, the sun symbol at his throat gleaming brighter as he looked upon the child. He was young - barely more than a man, but divine power sat easily upon him, like a well-worn cloak. His expression was not shock, nor horror, but quiet awe.
"The Yellow God preserves whom He wills,” Kaspian said softly. “Even here."
Behind him stood Sunmaster Alric Vaelor, A man in his mid-thirties of equal age to Darvin, his superior - stern, broad-shouldered, his beard still dusted with ash. The senior priest’s gaze was sharp and appraising, not unkind, but unyielding. He studied the child as one might study a sigil burned into stone.
"The holy fires were ours," Vaelor said at last. "The judgment was lawful. If the child yet lives, then his survival is no accident."
Darvin shifted, instinctively turning the babe away from the lingering heat. "Or it’s just luck," he said with uncertainty. "Plenty of folk survive fires they shouldn’t."
Kaspian glanced at him, a faint smile touching his lips. "You do not believe that."
The ranger did not answer.
The truth was, he had seen too much fire in his life through his duty to his own god, Gwaeron Windstrom to trust coincidence. He bore the scars of it still - flesh and memory both - earned three years ago when Vaelor and his acolytes had dragged him half-dead from a burning caravan ambush along the Dragon Coast. A debt was a debt that must be honoured. That was why he walked with them now, why he had led them to Camden Dene before the priests even knew its name.
Vaelor stepped closer. "The bandits followed Mask," he said with little surprise in a tone which seemed careful and economical with the information being shared. "A demarchess from one of Westgate's guilds, by the signs. Ruthless but not especially clever... She used this place to bleed the coast roads dry, but her men's activities were blatant."
"And the child?" Darvin asked, regarding Vaelor carefully.
Vaelor’s jaw tightened as Kaspian replied. "There were no others of her rank among the dead."
The implication settled like the ash at their feet.
Kaspian reached out, fingers hesitantly hovering just above the child’s brow. The flames did not touch him. Instead, they bent - softening, dimming - as if in deference - as if they were a part of the child itself. "If he is hers," Kaspian said, "then even so, Amaunator has claimed him from her shadows. Justice does not end with blood."
Darvin grunted irritably as he scanned around the temple, the smouldering and barely recognisable cadavers of the bandits seemed to counter the young priest's sentiments.
"More of your heresy."
Kaspian met his gaze, unoffended and speaking in the tone of a man far older than his youthful age. "The Yellow God teaches us that justice refines. That even sun fire may temper, not only destroy that which is irredeemable."
Vaelor said nothing, but nodded gravely - his silence heavy with assent.
The child stirred again, a small fist curling around Darvin’s thumb. Heat pulsed faintly through the ranger’s glove - warm, not burning. Alive.
"You found the child... You should name him." Kaspian stated in a gentle tone, surprising Darvin.
Darvin looked down at the babe and sighed, turning his gaze toward the valley beyond the shattered walls, where the river caught the dawn and turned it to gold.
"Camden,” he said, with thoughtful weight. "For this place, and what was lost here."
Alric Vaelor nodded once. “And Daystar,” he added humourlessly. “For the light - his light, that always endures.”
Darvin exhaled slowly, eyes never leaving the orphan child’s ember-bright gaze.
Camden Daystar did not cry again. He only watched the rising sun through the remains of the temple's broken roof, unblinking, as though he already knew it's name.
Elversult rose from the Dragon Coast like a hymn carved into stone.
The large manor houses where the wealthy resided caught the sun first each morning, pale limestone blazing gold beneath it's fiery gaze, though as it reached it's midday zenith it lingered fiercely above the Temple of the Morn which dominated the central hill around which the city was built. The lower districts lingered in shadow until the bells of the Temple called the faithful to prayer. Camden learned early which streets welcomed light and which survived without it.
He belonged to both.
By the time he had seen sixteen summers, Camden Daystar stood slightly taller than most of the acolytes who studied beside him, his copper-toned skin burnished brighter with each passing year. His silver-white hair was grown out, glowing and flickering like flame when his emotions stirred - anger, excitement, shame - like a hot coal drawn suddenly to breath. The priests said it was a blessing learning restraint.
Camden was not so sure but heeded their counsel and lessons.
He had been educated thoroughly. Scripture, law, civic duty. The measured justice of the Yellow God, the sacred geometry of the sun’s path, the moral clarity of light revealed. Kaspian Dawnfire took great care in his instruction - not as a Sunmaster might, but as a foster-father who believed his son had been chosen for something important and yet unnamed.
Their debates were frequent.
Kaspian observed that Camden was quiet by nature, not as bright as some of the other acolytes, though certainly above average in intelligence. But when pressed - where doctrine met lived experience - his words burned hot, surprising his foster-father with an occasional well-thought arguments. He questioned punishment delivered without witness. He asked whether justice must always be visible to be true. Once, boldly, he asked whether the sun’s light erased shadows, or merely forced them to retreat.
Kaspian listened. Always patiently. Always calmly. His son's arguments were one's he'd debated many times with those of Lathanderite faith sharing the Temple, but he was glad for the lad's curiosity and willingness to learn and listen.
Afterward, he reminded Camden of faith and duty.
Not as a chain - but as a calling.
Still, it was the night that claimed him first.
Elversult after dusk was a different city. Lanterns and laughter, backstreet alehouses teeming with folk, smoke rising from cookfires and tavern chimneys alike. Camden learned quickly that darkness did not blind him as it did others. His sight cut cleanly through it, colours muted but present, heat signatures whispering along stone and skin alike. He could see who lingered too long in alleys, who watched from doorways, who carried anger like a brand beneath their hooded cloaks. He too was careful in garbing himself in one he'd claimed from the temple, not wanting to draw undue attention to his appearance. His keen sight provided him access to a second world away from the temple and his responsibilities.
Despite his initial cautiousness, he slipped out often - too often.
Sometimes to the low hill beyond the eastern wall where scrub grass grew stubbornly between stones with a couple of the bolder acolytes he'd befriended and persuaded, though usually alone.
There, he let the fire come. Not wild flame, not destruction - just light. A dancing ember across his palm. A thin ribbon of heat curling from his fingers. Control mattered. Darvin had taught him that. Camden wasn't sure when he'd gain this gift, but it felt instinctive - a feeling of trapped heat within his chest that would spread throughout his body when he willed it, manifesting as sparks and small flame for now. It was a secret activity of self-exploration that simultaneously worried and excited him.
Darvin 'Greybeard' still visited when his paths allowed it. The Illuskan never stayed long, never slept within the city if he could avoid it. They walked the outskirts together, speaking little and usually through the ranger's imparted lessons. Darvin taught Camden to read tracks in dirt, to feel weather through bone, tie knots, hunt and skin hares, fish in the rivers - but perhaps most importantly - to understand that fire did not hate — it only consumed what it was fed.
"Out here," Darvin once said, gesturing toward the wilderness beyond the Coast Way, "nature doesn’t care who or what you are... We are all part of it's balance."
Camden treasured those days spent hiking out in the wilds, but wondered if Darvin's lessons were provided based on some sense of obligation to the Temple authority. The old man's reluctance to linger in Elversult and talk with his foster-father, Kaspian left him troubled and the old man was hard to read.
It was in the city that things became complicated.
In his twentieth year, he met Natali. A flirtatious Damaran girl a couple of years older than him with laughing hazel eyes. He'd noticed her working at the Wyvern's Pipe, a tavern near the marketplace where local and foreign pleasure-seekers alike drank and traded the latest rumours from around the city and beyond.
She laughed easily, swore fluently, never asked Camden where he came from yet boldly asked about his strange appearance. At first, she thought his glowing flame-lit hair and burning eyes were a trick of lantern-light. When she learned otherwise, she only blinked once and said with wonder in her voice, "Well. At least I’ll never lose you in a crowd, handsome."
For roughly two years, they circled one another - sometimes close, sometimes distant. Camden helped her carry barrels. She teased him about his hood and robes and his careful, refined speech. They shared a night together once through Hammer's cold seasons in a abandoned apartment behind the tavern, where the walls were warm from the ovens next door. The pair had furnished the dwelling with smuggled bed-clothes and wine taken from the tavern for their evening's pleasures.
Then came the fire.
It was small, as fires went. An old storehouse blaze near to the city's more affluent houses known as the 'Ladytowers' and quickly contained. No lives lost. But whispers travelled faster than flames, and someone remembered the 'lad with embers for eyes and fiery hair, the lad who walked the alleys at night to drink with revellers and miscreants.'
Camden never learned who accused him. Only that Natali smiled less when she saw him in the tenday that followed and feigned business with her work to keep him at a distance. It was during one evening that her over-protective father, a stern-faced man and member of Elversult's military known as the Maces met Camden in the tavern, firmly instructing him - yet kindly - that it would be better if he did not come back.
Camden returned to the Temple of the Morn that night, sad, shaken and silent. He did not enjoy confrontation or being stared at, but the eyes of many in the tavern were on him during the exchange during the old soldier's admonition.
Kaspian confronted him on the morning. The priest was well aware of his adopted son's nightly absences at this stage.
Though somewhat wearied at learning of Camden's activities, he did not scold or accuse. He spoke of paths and burdens, of how the Yellow God's chosen were often misunderstood by those who lived in half-light and modern world ignorance. He spoke of of Camden's mother, of the god Mask, of temptation and inherited shadows — not as condemnation, but as caution.
"Some ties," Kaspian said gently, "pull us away from what we are meant to become."
Camden nodded. He wanted to believe it was wisdom, not relief, that settled in his chest.
After that, he stayed closer to the temple. Even whilst brooding on his memories of Natali, he trained harder in an effort to push them out of his mind. Darvin had gifted him a longbow crafted from Phandar wood the previous summer and the young man had developed a talent for archery which the priests had let him practice in their courtyard - it served as a silent meditation to Camden, allowing him to focus his mind elsewhere.
His curiosity for distractions in the city diminished with time. He let the priests guide him. His nights grew quieter, his mood calmer, his fire dimmer and his questions fewer.
Darvin noticed the change when next they met in the spring. The old ranger seemed a little more talkative than usual as they trekked along the Trader's Road to Priapurl.
"You're standing straighter," the ranger observed. "You've the eyes of a man with direction."
Camden smiled, but it did not reach his eyes.
"The priests say I have a special destiny... Regardless... I have responsibilities now." he said with stoic resolve.
Darvin studied him for a long moment, seeming surprised at the younger man's mature tone and lofted a bushy brow. As he looked away toward the distant treeline he sighed - almost wearily, but knowingly "Kaspian told me the story... About what happened in the city and the warehouse... Don't let one incident decide who you're allowed to love."
Camden nodded slowly to his mentor but did not answer.
Outside the distant city and far from the Temple of the Morn, the sun climbed - brilliant, unyielding - and Camden Daystar stood in its light as it's rays painted the winding trail in soft amber hues. He turned and glanced back toward Elversult to see it's buildings and towers dotting the horizon.
For a moment, he thought of Natali but without a sense of regret this time. Perhaps they'd meet again he considered, though as he turned back to catch-up to Darvin he pondered his so-called destiny - wearily wondering if he was walking toward it but never noticing how narrow the path had become.
