"Are you certain you’re alright? You just took down three people... that couldn’t have been easy."

"Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I just wouldn’t be able to sleep peacefully knowing something might happen to you."

A soft smile found Scar’s lips. After work that day, three men had come at them, and Amber had handled all of them before Scar could even process what was happening. No swords drawn. Just Amber. The sight was worth seeing.

She should have been resting, and he knew it. But he wanted Amber there. He’d worked out the approach to his inner realm, and even knowing nothing would happen, the point wasn’t the result. It was showing her something.

If he opened up first and gave her something real to witness, maybe it would make it easier for her to do the same eventually.

"I’ll be fighting my predecessors... maybe more than one. I don’t know what’s going to happen, so please, if anything goes wrong, get me out. I’m counting on you." 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Amber energetically nodded in understanding.

Scar settled into meditation with the ease of someone who had made it a habit. Since he’d started, a few things had become clearer.

The first time he’d connected with his inner realm had worked the same way as the first dark flames... not through effort or familiarity but through surrender. He hadn’t reached for it. He’d let it reach for him. Let the flame claim him rather than the other way around.

The approach was entirely theoretical in how he’d arrived at it, but the theory was backed by results. He’d used it before and succeeded. That gave him enough certainty to proceed, if not complete confidence.

He started at the surface, clearing his mind, stripping away thought after thought until nothing remained to pull him sideways.

It took a while. Then the darkness within him took over, filling the space everything else had vacated, and with it came the realm, looming at the edges like something that had been waiting for exactly this kind of quiet.

Soon, he found himself somewhere familiar: a dark, abyssal forest, trees packed so densely they felt like walls.

In the distance, six flames burned through the darkness. They were his predecessors, each one a presence he recognized without needing to see.

And between them, a creature nearly human in size was held in place by chains so heavy and thick they looked like they’d been built to hold something that didn’t want to be held.

This success was tremendous, but Scar’s celebration was subtle.

The first time he’d come here, something had caught his attention that he hadn’t been able to shake since. The decay ability, the one he’d been using as his own, didn’t belong to him. It belonged to Kendrick. His first predecessor.

That explained the flame of decay. He couldn’t use it without hurting himself. The only way through was the hands of decay. Kendrick’s hands.

He didn’t completely understand until he read one of the books Emma had given him.

The book Eternal Rot and Hunger focused on someone called Aster. According to the text, there was speculation that this man had killed his own son, cooked him, and fed him to the gods. Worse still, Aster had stolen the secrets of the gods and shared them with mortals.

The book dismissed all of this as false. According to it, Aster’s suffering stemmed from his betrayal, jealousy, and ingratitude.

Aster was just a lonely human when his father discovered him, saw the orphan’s potential, and decided to raise him as his own.

Under his watchful care, Aster grew into a fine man who lacked nothing. Eventually, he became strong and righteous enough to ascend as a deity, nearly matching his father, who was a god.

But Aster’s pretense came to an end when he started losing the attention his father had showered on him for centuries. His father had found another child he wanted to raise.

That wasn’t what Aster wanted. He needed all the attention to himself, and jealousy drove him to something unspeakable. In a moment when no one was watching, Aster killed his father’s new son.

Nothing went as planned. Rather than earning his father’s notice, he received punishment... imprisonment in an eternal flame of rot and starvation. Aster burned in the flame of decay.

This might not be the primary story about his Inheritance, Scar knew that. But reading it, he saw what Emma had wanted him to find: the clue embedded within. He was certain he understood.

Each of his predecessors, himself among them, bore different flames, because whoever had birthed their Inheritance was either trapped within countless fires, which they eventually merged with, or something warily similar.

This made him wonder: was the person who had birthed his flame the one trapped at the center? And if so, what crime had they committed to be imprisoned within so many flames? Were there only seven, or were there more?

Now Scar stood before his predecessors, and just as before, Kendrick, who had since moved to his side, gracefully stepped forward and settled behind him like a guard at post.

Something about Kendrick’s flame had shifted, though. At first, he had been nothing but dark flame, yet now hints of white burned within him, mirroring Scar himself, whose body had long since become consumed in complete white.

Kendrick’s frame had taken on something of a human shape, though his head and hands remained consumed in dark flame.

"Um... would it be okay if I fought more than one of you today? It would make things easier, so I wouldn’t have to come back every day."

He muttered and sighed.

Today, he faced a female, Brenda. The Inheritance had chosen her after Kendrick was slaughtered, but she survived only a few days past her awakening. Not nearly enough time to process the trauma this Inheritance brought with it.

Sad as it was, Scar wasn’t simply going to crumble because a seventeen-year-old orphan who wanted nothing but to live had been taken by an Inheritance she never asked for.

His mind didn’t get the chance to spiral further. Brenda stepped forward, and the moment she did, new memories resurfaced, arriving like a prologue to an episode he hadn’t yet seen.

Now that Kendrick was allied with him, Scar could fight beside him the way they once did in the real world, or he could step back and let Kendrick carry it. The objective was simple either way. They just had to touch Brenda.

The realization brought a soft smile to his lips. He wanted to fight this one alone. If there was any way to make his predecessors respect his wishes and cease their interference — with his orders, his mind, all of it — it was to prove himself superior to every last one of them.

If anything, this fight was going to be easy. Brenda had no fighting skills to her name and hadn’t even learned how to throw a punch before death took her. But she burned in a blue flame, and that was the one thing that gave him pause. What was the blue flame about?

With the flicker of a finger, he commanded Kendrick to stand by. Almost instantly, Brenda’s body responded, morphing into something hauntingly similar to what Kendrick had become during their fight.

She rose to nearly twice her height, massive wings unfurling behind her, her limbs jagged and wrong, horns splitting through her head as they had always been waiting.

Brenda charged toward him without hesitation. There was nothing calculated about it; just raw, brainless aggression, like a brute hurling itself forward on sheer anger alone.

Scar sidestepped it easily. But that was the thing about brutes, unpredictable in the worst way.

One moment, Brenda was crashing beneath her own force, and the next, her body wrenched itself to an impossible angle, blue flames erupting from her and consuming Scar entirely.

’Wait—what? What’s this?’

He wondered briefly why the flames weren’t burning, and then the answer came, and it was worse. They didn’t have to. He dropped to his knees, hands clutching his head tightly, agony pulling him down.

He wasn’t being tortured. He wasn’t being beaten to death. It was something quieter than that, illusions, ones he had never wanted to see.

And within the blue flames, there was only one. His greatest fear. Dain killed him, over and over again.

Each hallucination was different... a different version, a different end. And yet despite how many times he died within them, the pain never dulled. If anything, each death hurt more than the last.

His mind gave out before he even realized it. He had no desire to question whether any of this was real.

He didn’t know what losing would mean. Unlike before, his life wasn’t on the line, and he was only in his room, but there was no denying it. If he lost this fight, his mission to bring his predecessors to his side would end there.

His mind couldn’t process any of it. But it didn’t have to. Because somewhere through the despair, something warm bloomed in his chest, as if something, or someone, was out there cheering him on.

The thought struck him all at once. He could win. Even just one victory against Dain and all of this despair would end.

That little hope was enough. It was all he needed to claw back just enough self-awareness to pull himself free from the flames. And yet, he was made of flames. And still, his heart was pounding.

"There’s no doubt anymore. This flame is despair."

From that moment on, getting caught in Brenda’s flames again was not something he intended to allow.

He knew instinctively that something had happened to his real body in that window and that Amber had stepped in. That was the only reason he was alive.

Everything that happened in this place amounted to nearly no time in the real world. So if Amber had been able to see his body struggle in the span of a single second, then he had made the right call. Asking her to watch over him had been the right decision.

Scar was quick on his feet now. He had none of his supernatural advantages here, not like in the real world, but he was rational where Brenda was not.

That was enough. His leg connected square into her gut and sent her slamming hard into the ground.

"Finally, I won."

He stood there, panting. The fight itself was never the problem, it was Brenda’s despair that had gotten under his skin, and it had scared him.

But that fear only made one thing clearer than anything else. Letting the others touch him with their flames would be nothing short of stupid. Even the thought of it gave him chills.

Brenda rose to her feet and took her place beside Kendrick. No words needed. She was on Scar’s side now.

The realization came shortly after. He couldn’t fight any more of his predecessors, not now. He needed to return to the real world and come back no sooner than a day later. And as if his body had known before he did, by the time the memory landed, he was already disappearing.

Just like that, Scar’s eyes opened.

Amber was holding his hand, and it was trembling harder and harder with each passing second.

Amber furrowed her brow.

"Are you finished already, or did you give up?"

It was psychopathic, maybe. But seeing the worry carved into Amber’s face made him smile all the same.

"Yeah, time passes more slowly over there."

Amber exhaled deeply.

"Thank goodness you’re okay. Your body started trembling as soon as you closed your eyes."

Scar awkwardly scratched the back of his head.

"I really would have died if you hadn’t acted. Thank you... truly."

Before Amber could react to his smile, Scar was already telling her about the fight and the ability he had walked away with. Hearing it made her glad, and that settled it for him. He had more reason than ever to have her around next time.