# The Campfire

The fire was Axiom's doing.

Not the gathering of wood — Ren handled that, pulling dry timber from the collapsed lecture halls with the careful selectiveness of someone who has spent two years working with materials. Not the arrangement — Thalien knelt and built the pyramid structure with the practiced hands of a being who had lit ten thousand fires across five Ages, each piece placed with architectural intention. Not the spark — that was Kaedra, who extended one finger toward the kindling and sent a thread of Fire so precisely controlled that it caught the smallest twig without singeing the ones beside it.

But the choosing of the place — that was Axiom.

The golem walked to the center of the broken courtyard, to a specific point among the cracked flagstones, and stood there. "This is where the refectory hearth was," Axiom said. "Before the ceiling fell. The stone beneath this point has been heated by fire for nine hundred years. It remembers warmth."

Thalien looked up from his timber pyramid. His amber eyes held something that might have been surprise, if an Eldrian five Ages old could still be surprised. "You are correct," he said. "The refectory stood here. I ate at its tables."

"I swept its floors," said Axiom.

The fire caught and grew. Shadows climbed the broken walls and danced among the ivy. Above, through the absent ceiling, stars appeared — first a few, then many, then the full sweep of the Arcanean sky, the constellations that the Academy's astronomers had named and the dark spaces between them that the Academy's philosophers had argued about.

They sat. Or rather, four of them sat and one stood and one hovered and two watched from the shadows.

Ren sat closest to the fire, cross-legged on a fallen stone, his sketchbook on his knee. He was drawing again — quick, nervous strokes, capturing the fire, the faces, the way the amber light caught the runes of the Foundation Gate behind them. Vesper hung near his left shoulder, a dim violet glow that pulsed faintly with the rhythm of the flames.

Kaedra sat against the eastern wall, far enough from the group to maintain her exits, close enough to hear. She had drawn one blade — the old soldier's knife, the one with the chipped handle — and was sharpening it against a stone with slow, rhythmic strokes. The sound was a metronome, steady and deliberate, and it filled the silence that none of them seemed willing to break.

Axiom stood at the fire's edge, perfectly still. The amber eye-lights reflected the flames, and the gold-veined crystal at the golem's joints caught the firelight and scattered it in warm refractions across the flagstones. Axiom was watching the fire. Not monitoring it for structural risk — watching it. The way the flames moved. The way they reached and fell and reached again. The way no two moments of burning were identical.

Thalien sat opposite Ren, on the far side of the fire. He stared into the flames with eyes that saw through them, past them, into the layered memory that fire carries for those old enough to read it. Five Ages of firelight. Five Ages of faces seen across flames. His hands rested on his knees, palms up, in the old Eldrian posture of reception — open to what comes, resistant to nothing.

The silence held. It was not comfortable. It was the silence of people who know they should speak but do not yet know what language to use with each other.

Ren broke it, because Ren always breaks silences, even the ones that might have been better left whole.

"So — has anyone done this before? The Gates, I mean. Walking through all ten." He looked around the fire, pencil pausing. "Because I failed the first one. Twice. Just so we're all starting from the same place."

Kaedra's sharpening did not pause. "No one walks all ten. That is Luminor rank. There are perhaps three living beings who have achieved it, and none of them are sitting in a ruin making small talk."

"Four," said Thalien, quietly. "There were four. One was lost."

The fire crackled. Vesper's light dimmed, and Ren felt a pulse of cold recognition through the bond — Vesper's memory-fragments stirring, sharp and incomplete.

"The Gate spoke of fractures," Axiom said. The low voice carried above the fire-sound without effort. "It said we were chosen because we are incomplete." A pause — long, considered, weighted with three centuries of learning what pauses meant. "I would like to understand what my fracture is. I did not know I had one until today."

Kaedra's sharpening stopped. She looked at the golem across the fire with her mismatched eyes — one human, dark and guarded; one mechanical, orange and precise — and for a moment, the tactical assessment dropped away, and what remained was something rawer.

"You will know," she said. "The Gates are not subtle about it."

From the broken colonnade at the courtyard's edge, a faint light shifted — starfield patterns moving across skin that was trying to stay hidden in shadow. Solenne, watching. Not ready to approach. Not able to leave.

And on Axiom's shoulder, three eyes gleamed in the firelight — two steady, one flickering — seeing past the fire, past the faces, into the shape of what this night would become.

The fire burned. The stars turned. Seven strangers sat in the ruins of something old and waited for the morning, when the first Gate would demand an answer to a question none of them had finished asking.