EPISODE 1: The Night the Fire Shifted

TALES FROM THE VEILWALKER’S LODGE — Season One

The hearth had been burning the same for forty-three years.

Thalia knew because she’d been tending it for most of them, adding split oak in the morning and birch after the dinner rush, banking the coals before bed with the kind of practiced efficiency that came from repetition so deep it lived in her bones. The fire was as much a part of the Lodge as the stone walls or the warped floorboards that creaked in different keys depending on who walked them.

She’d seen that fire burn gold in summer and amber in winter. She’d watched it flare when storms rolled down from the mountains and settle into patient embers during the quiet hours before dawn.

But she had never—not once—seen it turn blue.

Thalia straightened from where she’d been wiping down the bar, the rag going still in her hands. The main room of the Veilwalker’s Lodge was in that comfortable lull between the dinner crowd and the late-night stragglers, the kind of hour where the air itself seemed to soften and settle. A handful of regulars nursed their ales near the windows. Old Corvin was dozing in his usual corner, chin tucked to his chest. The scent of rosemary bread and roasted root vegetables still hung warm in the air, mingling with wood smoke and the faint sweetness of Harl’s latest brew.

Everything was exactly as it should be.

Except the fire.

It flickered—just once—and the flames shifted from their usual warm amber to a cool, pale blue that didn’t belong in any hearth she’d ever seen. The color held for three heartbeats, maybe four, then bled back to orange-gold like watercolor bleeding into parchment.

Thalia’s fingers tightened on the bar rag.

No.

Not now. Not again.

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