It rose from where they lay tangled together, a column of sacred fire that climbed toward clouds that were already beginning to respond. The temperatures were scorching, heat that should have reduced flesh to ash but somehow didn't!
The feel was sacred and ancient, belonging to processes that predated the current age of the Lands of Stone.
Inside that pillar, Serala felt a tinge of pain.
Then she felt something she couldn't explain.
Her body was changing. Every part of her, from bones to blood to the cultivation channels that had been refined across nineteen summers of dedicated practice, was being rewritten by flames that seemed to know exactly what they wanted to create. It felt like growing pains, like her entire existence was being stretched and expanded to accommodate something larger than it had been designed to hold.
All systems of her body grew and elevated in ways she couldn't believe!
