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His first memory is gold.
Always gold.
Though time blurs the details, he remembers the drops of gold spilling from his open wound, one drop slowly sliding down his skin and painting the pristine floor. In this memory he is young, not yet the Deliverer, the Chrysos Heir, the Nameless Hero. It comes before he reaches adulthood and before he leaves his hometown, when he is too green to understand the true significance. The boy from Aedes Elysiae has yet to understand what destiny has in store for him. It happens once. It happens a million times. Through a shifting lens of time and memory, he perseveres.
_ _ _ _ _ watches gold pool on his knee. This time, it is a scraped knee. Friends he will someday forget the names of run ahead, laughing at the accident. They have yet to see him as anything but human. But they will. He does his best to hide the traces of the injury, but only succeeds in smearing blood across his leg. The gold stains his palm and his skin. He launches himself to his feet, scrambling along the dirt path to catch up to people he will one day leave behind.
Cyrene appears this time, her presence as fleeting as a flower. She stands in a field of gold with a shining sky behind her and names him Deliverer. It is the first title he will carry. And the last. There are constants that endure in every permutation. One is this title. Sometimes given by the girl he meets in childhood—the first time, he thought of her as a friend; he does not know what to call her now. She is a mark of his fate as much as the color of his veins. Sometimes the title arises from anonymous whispers—rumors that spread from town to town.
From the first moment he sees golden blood, _ _ _ _ _ knows he is promised no small destiny. He knows as surely as he loves his hometown that he will leave it behind. Cyrene’s words are not a surprise to him even the first time. His destiny is written in his blood, and it doesn’t matter what title he bears. The hundredth time he merely nods.
Years later, he can still hear the words in her voice— Deliverer , savior of thousands, bringer of a new dawn. It reverberates through his life like a thread of remembrance. Even in a thousand different voices, he can still hear an echo of her. There is power in a name, after all, and power in the first to give it.
_ _ _ _ _ has three constants in each life. The first is the destruction of his hometown. The second is his rise as a hero.
The third is his failure.
The crackle of flames lingers in his ears as he runs from the fields of Aedes Elysiae, now crimson with flame. How can he be a hero when all he does is fail? How can he be a hero when all he does is sacrifice?
Perhaps he was born lucky. He never loses hope. Some would call it idiocy, and perhaps they would be right, but he can never give up. He will save, and save, and save, until he earns the title of Deliverer. The sacrifices—the losses—the failures—burrow beneath his skin, but he works tirelessly for a better world. Amphoreus needs a hero, and he has never been one to turn a blind eye. Perhaps he was born cursed. His heart bleeds for those he saves and those he fails. It bleeds for his friends and strangers he never meets, but it bleeds gold, and sometimes that feels like all that matters.
Fate has marked him from his origin millions of lives ago, and all he can do is try. He did give up—once or twice or a thousand times—but he always returns to the fields of Aedes Elysiae and begins again. Again. Again .
His determination is not a virtue. It is all he has left.
He flees Aedes Elysiae on the back of a purple dromas, leaving behind the only life he wants to live. He flees simplicity and returns to his damned fate.
Okhema sits in the shadow of Kephale. Phainon learns to greet each day living in the shadow of his destiny. Long, long ago, he was overjoyed to earn the title of hero. He may never have dreamed of heroism, but who doesn’t admire legends? A young boy picked up the wooden sword his father crafted, waving it in the sky and fighting imaginary monsters. A young man wields steel and saves anyone he can reach. It may never have been his dream, but it is his fate.
Phainon trains his strength and spends his sweat, tears, and golden blood on the effort for Era Nova. Even from the beginning, he was naturally a hard worker, committed to a better world. The strength to fight did not belong to him from the start, but he trained for it with unwavering devotion.
He learns from the Grove and forms friendships—friends he has loved and lost a thousand times—but he can never turn away. Aglaea once tells him that love is all that matters. Or maybe, it’s love is a hero’s greatest strength. She is softer in some lifetimes, but he remembers those words even when the version of her before him is colder. Somewhere, beneath her marble exterior, he knows she has compassion greater than anyone.
The Flamechase journey is fraught with danger, but it is not without happy moments. Someone once told him to live with joy—perhaps it was his mother, perhaps it was a stranger he passed somewhere in his travels—but he remembers those words too. He lets himself get into petty arguments with Mydei and provokes his professor. Life is easier with laughter. He can never forget the lurking dangers, but he can push them to the back of his mind for a little while.
After a million cycles, little surprises him. Variables change, but if he has seen something once, he has seen it a hundred times. He readies himself for battle after battle and whiles away freetime with the companions he has. Can you love someone you don’t remember? Phainon tries to be transparent with his present friends, but he sees them through a fog of memory, faces shifting as he tries to focus on the current moment, chest aching for people he can’t quite remember.
This time, there is an anomaly. A star falls.
In thousands and thousands and thousands of cycles, he has never seen a star fall. He has touched the sky in the journey to retrieve Aquila’s coreflame, but no astral body has ever come to the ground. He has watched the world perish in flame and flood and ice, but the dome of the sky has always remained untouchable. It is a shift. A chance. A sign, perhaps, that something will be different . His rules bind him within the circle, but maybe the Trailblaze is an opportunity to break the loop.
Phainon rushes to the location of the impact. There are people in need, anyway, and his curiosity burns with a fervor he can’t remember having. Maybe he did lose hope somewhere along the way, running like a hamster on a wheel, but it burns all too brightly now. The end to the Flamechase journey never felt like a proper end—all twelve coreflames to renew the world. It is a cycle, even if he succeeds—going around and around in circles with nothing to show for it. It lacks closure, and that breeds doubt, not that he does anything differently.
He meets two strangers, and he can tell from the first moment that they do not belong on Amphoreus. Though they speak the same language, they wear strange clothes. He disarms them as a precaution, but he knows that whether they are friend or foe, their presence will change Amphoreus to the core, though he has no idea of the magnitude of the change.
The two quickly join ranks with the Chrysos Heirs, demonstrating their strength and their desire to help. Even cautious Aglaea barely hesitates to bring them to their side, so Phainon can’t help but trust them. Though they are warned not to tell the general public about the world beyond the sky, they tell him stories of other planets.
Phainon never thought to touch the stars when his fate was to bear the world. Perhaps his views were more limited than he realized, always constrained by fate even when he tried to fight against it, because Amphoreus was the end and beginning of every destiny. But with the presence of the Nameless, he wonders about the world beyond the sky.
In response to learning Phainon thought the arrival of the two Nameless was a falling star, Caelus tells him there are those with a tradition of wishing when they see them and asks if he had one wish, what would he wish for. Phainon first thinks of the fate of Amphoreus and the Flamechase journey—to see Era Nova. That is his destiny and his greatest duty. What other wish could he, the Deliverer, have? A quiet voice wishes for the sky beyond Amphoreus, but he quickly puts that aside.
It is not long before he calls Caelus partner. They fight back to back and side by side with an ease he would only expect of someone he had known for years. Outside of battle, Caelus is amiable and easy to talk to, and the Trailblazer carries his own burdens but shoulders Amphoreus’ like he would never consider doing anything else.
Partner. Of course, Phainon means it in the sense of fighting together, of following the Flamechase together. Caelus teases him about another meaning with a twinkle in his eyes and a lopsided grin. Some moments last longer than others, and this one feels like an eternity. Caelus’ eyes are gold, like the fields of Aedes Elysiae, like the sun, like the blood of Chrysos Heirs. Like fate itself.
He has had lovers before. Some have faded with time. Others left scars in his heart with their bitter farewells. He has had brief liaisons, lasting connections, and those he once swore were soulmates—all ripped away by the cruel tides of time and fate. Girls and boys. Regular mortals and fellow Chrysos Heirs. Fairy tales and tales of betrayal. So the stirring of his heart is not entirely unfamiliar. He is human, after all (isn’t he?) But how many cycles has it been since he had a lover? Phainon allows himself friendships of all sorts, but he put up a boundary some time ago—after all, he was always alone at the end, and there are some risks he cannot bear to take again.
Caelus once asks about the sun tattoo, and Phainon tells him it’s a reminder of his fate— a blazing sun to light all of Amphoreus. The tattoo is gold because it could never be anything else. Caelus touches the band around his neck and tells him he shouldn’t be collared to his fate. He laughs then, but he thinks about it later, pressing his fingers to the memory of the touch.
He is the sun, a solitary existence, and the last Chrysos Heir to retrieve their coreflame. It is a lonely journey of a million cycles. He who bears the world. He who bears the memory .
Phainon asks about the journey of the Astral Express. He hears about various worlds from Dan Heng and Caelus. It’s strange to think that Amphoreus is just one of countless worlds—that there are people living and dying on distant stars. The idea fascinates him, and he dwells on it in quiet moments. The Flamechase journey is everything to him, but to someone else, his world is nothing.
Love lacks a sense of duty. It slips beneath his skin, resonating with old memories and forging new hopes. He is aware that Caelus will leave Amphoreus behind from the first moment they meet. Phainon thinks it must become a missed connection (he has made unwise moves before, and he realizes he should not put the Flamechase journey in jeopardy for someone fleeting). He decides to leave his love unspoken for the sake of the future. It’s another sacrifice for the Flamechase, but what’s one more?
That doesn’t mean his heart listens. Phainon has always loved easily (and has been called a fool for it more than once), but love and love are different things. He has been weighed down by connections before, asked to choose between duty and desire, but Caelus drives him to no such decision. Instead of fate, this feels like freedom. Like the rest of his life, his love is gold. But it’s of a different shade. Caelus is a visiting star, and what is the star to the sun if not a kindred spirit?
Phainon makes peace with his individual journey and tells the members of the Astral Express to go back to the stars, turning away, last, from Caelus before he can read his expression. He has bid farewell after farewell, but each one weighs heavier than the last. Phainon shoulders this weight, too. After all, sacrifice is a familiar burden. He presses on.
Everything turns gold until he himself is aureate.
Goldweaver, golden blood, golden fate. Amphoreus is stained with gold, not with molten metal but with blood, running with rivers and memories that remain unseen by most.
Destruction begins, and _ _ _ _ _ remembers his other self, the one embittered by his fate, who fought against the Flamechase instead of embracing it. The Flame Reaver is himself but not himself. Hatred rages like a fire. It’s far too easy to let himself go and be swept away by the desire to ravage . All his frustration, all his anger, all his desperation surges to the surface.
But he comes back—he carries the hopes of all the incarnations of all the Flamechasers, stained by the entire spectrum to a pure, blazing white. _ _ _ _ _ comes back, but Amphoreus is nothing but a shell. He who was prophesied to save the world has no world left to save.
For a moment, he is empty. Millions of cycles—millions of years of memories—his head is full of so much it becomes a void. An infinity compressed into a singularity. Destruction and rebirth are two sides of the same coin. He is _ _ _ _ _ with the memories of the Flame Reaver woven into his own. Hatred burns beside hope, and he struggles between the choice to wreak havoc or to pursue peace.
Caelus finds him then. In the empty landscape of the world he once called home. The only world he knew for so many years and years and years. The Flamechase journey has come to a close, but no new cycle begins, leaving him with nothing but memories of a world that never existed. The sky of Amphoreus has shattered, and he stares up at the real stars for the first time—so numerous, so distant.
_ _ _ _ _ looks up at the Trailblazer’s approach.
“Hey partner.”
Partner.
Love bleeds into the void. Seeping beneath his fractured skin to remind him who he is.
He is the boy from Aedes Elysiae who dreams of wandering Amphoreus. He is the Nameless Hero who saves the common people. He is Phainon, the Chrysos Heir on the path of the Flamechase. He is the Flame Reaver searching violently for a different solution.
Perhaps Aglaea was right—or was it Mnestia?—love is our greatest gift, and grief is the last remembrance of love. Death only comes to those who are forgotten, and he still remembers. The story of the Chrysos Heirs will be added to the archives of the Astral Express and thus fixed into the memory of the universe. He may be the last native of Amphoreus, but Amphoreus will be remembered, and the loss he feels now will someday be tempered by time.
_ _ _ _ _ finds an honest smile on his face, fragile in the face of so much grief, so much uncertainty. He has been stripped bare and reincarnated, but he still has breath in his lungs and life within his limbs.
Partner. Still?
There is no Flamechase journey left. No Amphoreus meant for a kinder era. But Caelus calls him partner , and perhaps that can form the foundation of a better tomorrow.