Heat swirled in the air, pressing against Sam’s skin like a warning. The ground beneath her feet was charred black, cracked with glowing veins of molten gold that pulsed like a heartbeat. The sky churned, a never-ending inferno of shifting fire, stretching endlessly above her.
Then, the earth trembled.
From the distance, the flames surged and coiled together, forming something massive—alive.
The Ember Guardian emerged from the inferno, its body shifting between molten rock and raw fire. Neither human nor beast, its head crowned with smoldering embers, its limbs pulsing with an unbearable heat. Two searing white-hot eyes burned within the firestorm of its form, unblinking, all-knowing.
It raised an arm, and the fire itself breathed.
Figures began to take shape.
“Through fire, find the truth.”
The words weren’t spoken. They were branded into the air itself.
Before her, the fire twisted into shadows of her past.
- Her younger self, sitting at a school desk, deliberately marking wrong answers.
- Her teenage self, slipping through hallways, avoiding attention.
- Her older self, standing alone in an empty airport, gripping a one-way ticket.
The Guardian raised one smoldering hand, and a ring of fire erupted before her.
“Step into the flames. Face what you hide.”
Sam hesitated. Not from fear of pain—the flames wouldn’t burn her like that. But she knew what they represented. The things she had spent years hiding. The choices she had made to disappear.
She clenched her jaw. She would not turn away.
She stepped forward—
And the fire swallowed her whole.
The heat vanished. She was back in school. The test paper in front of her was blank. She knew the answers. She always did.
But she had lied. Deliberately failed. Blended in.
A voice whispered in the flames: Why did you hide?
A pen appeared. The moment she picked it up, the paper ignited. The words burned onto the page.
Truth: I was afraid of what it would cost me to shine.
The fire shifted. She was walking through school corridors, invisible among the crowd.
Faces passed her, never seeing her.
A hand reached out, grabbing her wrist. She turned. It was herself.
A voice whispered: Is this what you wanted? To disappear?
The flames flared higher—forcing her to answer.
Truth: No. But I thought it was the only way.
She was in an empty airport terminal. A one-way ticket in her hands.
No one came to stop her. No one knew she was leaving.
A voice whispered: Was this freedom?
She gripped the ticket tighter. The fire consumed it.
Truth: I wanted to leave. But I never stopped running.
The flames roared.
And then—silence.
Sam opened her eyes. The visions were gone.
The Ember Guardian still stood before her, but the fire around it had dimmed.
It stepped aside. Revealing the final trial.
Ahead of her stood a massive doorway of fire.
It had no handle, no lock. The flames shifted constantly, neither fully solid nor fully open. The closer she stepped, the more she could feel it:
It was waiting.
Waiting for something from her.
She looked to the stone beside it, where words had been burned into the surface.
“The fire demands a piece of you.”
Her hands curled into fists. A piece of me?
No one told her what that meant. She would have to decide.
A memory?
A piece of knowledge?
A part of her identity?
The Guardian’s voice echoed one last time.
“The fire does not take. The fire remakes.”
She looked at the flames. They flickered, waiting for her choice.
To pass, she would have to give something up.
The question was—what?
Burning Beneath 
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