NOVEL WEB Chapter 1: The Fire That Was Never Meant to Burn
The blade was never meant to break.
That was the first lie.
It was not the divine hand of a god that had forged it, nor the decree of fate that had set it ablaze. No—Varnis Ignis Aeterna had been born of sweat, of steel, of a smith who had never believed in legends until he found himself making one.
And now, centuries later, the legend was all that remained.
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The city of Varnis had once been a beacon. In the days before its fall, it had been a kingdom of towering spires and stone-lined roads, of rulers who whispered their decrees from gilded halls while the common folk toiled in the streets below. For all its splendor, for all its glory, Varnis was a fractured thing—held together only by the fear of collapse and the promise of power.
The first time the blacksmith had seen the king, he had not been wearing a crown.
"Make me a weapon that cannot break," the man had said.
The blacksmith had nodded, because when a king commands, there is no room for refusal.
The blade had been wrought from the heart of a fallen star, its metal folded over and over again until it no longer remembered what it had been before. The flames that shaped it did not die when the forge cooled. They lived within the steel, coursing through the blade like a heartbeat, waiting to be unleashed.
It was the second lie.
But no man-made blade—no matter how strong—can hold forever.
The war came. Not all at once, but in pieces, like the slow burning of embers before the fire raged. Varnis stood, because the blade stood. Because the king wielded it like a divine decree, because the people believed in it, because the stories had already started to shape themselves around it.
It would not break, they said.
It could not break.
A lie told often enough becomes truth.
Until the day it doesn't.
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The king fell.
The fire did not.
It raged, searing the earth, carving ruin into the bones of the city. The blade did not shatter in battle, as one might have expected. No enemy's strike had undone it. No siege had worn it down. It had not been snapped in two by the hands of a warrior greater than its wielder.
No.
The king fell.
And so did the blade.
The moment the king's body hit the ground, the blade did not land with him. It fell to the ground, slipping from his grasp, and the moment it left his hands—
It fractured.
Not in halves. Not in pieces. But in a scattering of molten embers, flying in all directions, embedding themselves into the land, the air, the very essence of Varnis itself.
The Eternal Fire was no longer a single flame.
It had become many.
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They say the shards are still out there.
That those who find them will know power beyond measure.
That the fire still burns, waiting to be reforged.
It is the third and final lie.
Because the truth is this:
The fire was never meant to be contained.
And no matter how many hands seek it, no matter how many try to wield its strength—
It will never burn the same way again.