My dear friend,

I put pen to paper again, though I wish my words could carry the weight of what my soul beheld. Hunters came to Her Majesty not long ago with tales most unsettling. Cries, they said, drifting from deep within the Nether’s crust. Not the cries of beast nor man, but something stranger, the sort that makes the hairs rise on the neck and the tongue dry in the mouth. Many laughed at their tale, but the Queen did not.  I couldn’t tell you whether she thought it worth investigating on its own merit or if it were another search for the Eternal Flame, but with our Queen’s record, I dare not question it.  She summoned us - the hunters themselves, along with me and my crew, commanding that we investigate what the hells sought to hide.

We found an old bastion there, half-swallowed by rock and age. At first, our work rang with the usual chorus of picks striking stone, hammers driving spikes, voices raised in jest and song. Yet as the walls opened, that noise bled away. The deeper we dug, the quieter it became, until even our own tools seemed ashamed to make sound. My men began to speak in whispers, as though afraid the bastion might hear them. It was a silence so heavy, friend, it pressed upon the chest like the weight of the deep.  Not one soul in that place could answer why we felt that way, but we all knew better than to break the silence.

The tunnels we opened gave way to the inner walls of the bastion.  We pressed on. The tunnels stretched farther than I would have thought possible, corridors carved by hands long turned to dust. Banners clung to the walls rotted to threads, their colors lost but their shapes still proud. My men glanced at them as though expecting the soldiers who once bore them to step from the shadows. The hunters who had brought us stood nearest the Queen, their eyes sharp, but even they looked unnerved at what we uncovered.  You could feel fear warring against their resolve to stand by the Queen..

Step by step, the silence deepened. It was not merely an absence of sound.  It was as though the stone itself swallowed every note before it could reach our ears. A man coughed beside me, yet no echo followed. Another struck his chisel, and the blow rang dull, like a drum half-filled with sand. Some would later recall that they could almost hear breaths that were not their own, slipping between the strokes of their work. I will not tell you if I heard the same, for I cannot say whether it was the bastion or my own fears that whispered to me.

At the heart of that fortress, we found a great hall. Its pillars leaned as though tired of standing, its floor cracked with age. We gathered in the center, waiting for the Queen’s command. She did not speak at once. Instead, she raised her lantern and walked slowly across the stone, her light glinting on shattered helms and rusted blades strewn like offerings at the feet of a long-forgotten throne.

And then we saw it. A glow, faint at first, seeping through the cracks of the dais as though the earth itself were exhaling. We cleared the rubble with bare hands and trembling arms, and the glow grew stronger until it burst forth in a pillar of azure fire.

Friend, much as with the Flame of Hope, no words of mine can capture it.  You simply must see the grandeur for yourself. The holy flame blazed higher than a house, blue and fierce, hotter than any forge, yet it gave no warmth of comfort. Its heat was a warning, its light a lament. Standing before it, I felt as though all the dead of the Nether had gathered in one voice and chosen flame as their tongue.

The Queen declared it then, her voice steady though her eyes glistened. “The Flame of Souls,” she called it, “born of sacrifice, kept alive by memory.” And she decreed that the hunters and warriors who had led us to that place would bear a new name: Soul Hunters. Guardians not of hope, but of remembrance.  In the days since that event, I have seen the strength of those warriors grow ten fold.  None in Kindra have held the strength to stand against them, and I doubt those outside will.

With care and reverence, we bore the flame back to Kindra. It rests now beneath the arena, sealed behind glass so all who fight above may look down and know the cost of every clash of steel, the cost of every mistake in battle, the cost of letting your passion wither into a gentle ember.  I walked that glass myself, and though the fire’s heat pressed against me, it was the silence of divinity that lingered in my bones.

This flame, my friend, is no beacon of triumph. It is a reminder that loss stands beside us, always. And yet, I believe it will make our people stronger, for to honor the dead is to give the living purpose.

In Flame,
Thorne Pyrestone, Foreman to Flame