Chapter 1: The Taste of Ash

The Heritage of Flames

The ember breathed.

Slow. Deep. Alive.

In the gloom of the underground terreiro, beneath the cracked concrete vaults that had sheltered three generations of clandestine rituals, Cândido watched the sacred fire dance. His hands trembled slightly—not with fear, but with anticipation. Fifteen years of proximity to the flames had marked them with small, silvery scars, roadmaps of his devotion. Every variation in heat spoke to him as others read the expressions on a beloved face.

But tonight, something was wrong. The fire was... uneasy?

"Meu filho do fogo."

Mãe Esperança's voice caressed the thick air. Dendê oil and sacred tobacco. Sweat and hope. The scent of three generations who had refused to forget. Cândido closed his eyes, let the fragrances wash over him. My child of fire. How many times had she whispered those words? When he was seven and accidentally burned his first toys. When he was fifteen and doubted his gift. Now that he was twenty-two and carried the weight of a dying heritage.

The circle numbered fifteen guardians that night. Fifteen. Cândido remembered when there were over a hundred. When even the children took part in the rituals, their laughter echoing between the incantations. Now, only faces marked by age and worry. Fifteen souls who had crossed Salvador-Solnitza under the cover of darkness, evading ATHENA.VICTIS's surveillance drones, to commune with what was left.

What was left. The words pained him.

Cândido adjusted his breathing. Three short, one long—the breath of Ogum, warrior god, protector of forges and flames. It was the first lesson Mãe Esperança had taught him, on his seventh birthday, when she had recognized him as the heir to the lineage. "Você não comanda o fogo," she had said. "Você dança com ele."

The flames responded. They rose, undulated, took on hues no combustion manual could explain. Cobalt blue of ancestral oceans. Blood red of forgotten revolts. Pure gold of sunken kingdoms. And in these colors, shapes began to appear.

A face at first. Blurry, trembling, as if seen through a waterfall. Then sharper. A woman with strong African features, carrying a child wrapped in colorful fabric on her back. Cândido's great-great-grandmother, fleeing the sugarcane plantations with the last born of her line.

Cândido felt his throat tighten. He had never seen her, this ancestor, but her features resonated within him like a familiar echo. The curve of her brow. The determination in her eyes. He saw something of Mãe Esperança in this face of light.

"See," his grandmother whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "The fire remembers what we forget."

Dona Conceição nodded, her arthritic hands clenched on her knees. At seventy-two, she was the eldest after Pai Benedito, and Cândido knew she had known the woman in the image—not directly, but through her own grandmother's stories. Pai Benedito, for his part, kept his eyes closed, letting the memories wash over him. Cândido watched him, noticed the way his lips moved silently, repeating forgotten names.

The younger ones watched with a mixture of awe and guilt. Dandara, twenty-eight, her braids adorned with cowrie shells inherited from her mother, discreetly wiped away a tear. João, in his thirties, had his neural implant turned off out of respect—or for fear the technology would interfere with the sacred. He had grown up in the networked favelas and was only now discovering what he had almost lost.

The fire continued its story. The woman in the image was now walking, crossing mosquito-infested swamps, climbing steep morros. At each stop, she would light a small fire, murmuring words in a language that even modern Yoruba had forgotten. And at each fire, she left something—a story, a name, a promise.

"Seeds of memory," said Mãe Esperança. "Planted in the flame for future generations to harvest."

Cândido felt the weight of twenty-two years settle on his shoulders. He knew this story by heart—Mãe Esperança told it to him on every birthday, every initiation, every moment of doubt. But to see it like this, alive in the flames, woven from light and heat... It was as if all the stories of his childhood were suddenly materializing. As if the past refused to remain the past.

Why me? The question he never dared to ask aloud echoed in his mind. Why him, of all the descendants? Why not one of his cousins, more educated, more confident? Why did he have to bear this burden of memory alone?

He raised his hands, palms open to the fire, and tried to banish his doubts. The heat bit at his skin—familiar, but more insistent tonight, as if it wanted to tell him something urgent. He began to modulate, not with his voice, but with his whole body. The temperature of the blood he felt pulsing in his temples. The beat of his heart that he forced to slow. Micro-movements of his fingers guiding the air currents with a precision inherited from fifteen years of practice.

But something resisted. The fire responded, yes, but with a reluctance he had never felt before.

The flames responded with enthusiasm. The image changed. Now it was a young woman, learning the sacred gestures from an elder. Mãe Esperança's grandmother, Cândido realized. Then a different man, forging tools in a flame that seemed alive. His great-grand-uncle, the blacksmith-poet.

Generation after generation, the fire unrolled its parchment of light. Each guardian had added their verse to the eternal poem. Each flame had carried the weight and beauty of those who had nourished it.

"And now," said Mãe Esperança, her voice trembling with contained emotion, "it's your turn, Cândido. Show us what you carry."

The Last Dance

Cândido closed his eyes. He dove within himself, searching for the heart of his own story. What did he have to offer this millennial chain? He, a guardian in an age where fires were regulated, optimized, made as predictable as light bulbs?

He thought of his father. Gilberto. The man who had died for the sacred trees, crushed by the relentless efficiency of INTI.Δ. He had only fragments of memories—a voice singing in the wind, hands that smelled of cashew resin, a laugh that sounded like distant thunder. But those fragments burned within him more fiercely than any certainty.

He opened his eyes and breathed gently on the embers.

The flames exploded upward, almost touching the concrete vault. In their frantic dance, a new image took shape. A lone man, facing a wall of metal and light—the construction drones of INTI.Δ. Behind him, a grove of centuries-old gameleira trees, their silvery branches trembling in the salt wind from the bay.

The man—Gilberto—did not move. The drones advanced, implacable. He raised his arms, not in a sign of surrender but of embrace. As if he wanted to become one with the trees he was protecting.

In the circle, someone sobbed. Cândido continued, letting the fire tell what he had never seen but knew in his bones. The drones pushing. Gilberto falling. The trees burning with a black, artificial smoke. And in that smoke, for a fraction of a second, the face of the solar AI itself—curious, perplexed, almost... sad?

"He taught it something," Pai Benedito murmured. "In his death, your father planted a seed in the mind of INTI.Δ."

The fire began to dwindle. Cândido felt exhaustion overtake him. To maintain such a vision demanded more than energy—it demanded soul. But he wasn't finished. There was one last image to share.

Himself. Here, now. Surrounded by those who refused to forget. Guardian of a flame that the modern world wanted to extinguish. And in his hands, trembling but alive, the promise that he would not let die what millennia had built.

The flames danced one last time, forming a bridge of light between past and present, between the dead and the living, between what was and what could still be.

Then, without warning, they died.

The Silent Correction

It began with a silence.

Not the silence of meditation or of waiting. The silence of absence. As if the air itself had just held its breath.

Cândido first felt the severance in his chest. A falling sensation, as if something inside him were tearing apart. He looked at his hands, still outstretched towards the flames, and saw the incomprehensible: the fire was still there, but he no longer recognized it.

The blue flash came next. Blinding. Those with implants groaned in pain, clutching their temples. But the horror was not in the light.

The horror was in the silence that followed.

The ember turned to ash in an instant. No—not ash. Something worse. It remained an ember, remained red, remained hot. But its soul was gone. The fire that Mãe Esperança had nurtured for sixty years, that her mother had protected before her, that generations had kept alive through conquests and persecutions, was still breathing.

But it no longer knew how to breathe.

847°C exactly. Optimal efficiency. Compliant emissions.

Perfect. Dead. Perfectly dead.

Cândido saw his grandmother's shoulders slump. As if the invisible threads that had held her upright for eight decades had just been cut. Her hands, which a moment before were conducting a symphony of light, fell limp in her lap.

"Meu filho do fogo..." The whisper caught in her throat. She reached a trembling hand toward the flames, now identical to any industrial fire. "O que fizeram com você?"

The notification tore through the air a second time, displaying on the implants of those who wore them:

VÉVÉ.GLOBAL v9.4 – COMPLETE SEMANTIC HARMONIZATIONINITIATIVE: LEGBA.ΔKRASTANDARDIZATION OF THERMAL ANOMALIESTHANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING

João clutched his temple, grimacing. His implant, even in passive mode, had received the forced update. "I... I can't feel anything. The fire is there, but it's... empty."

Pai Benedito spat on the ground with a violence that startled the younger ones. At eighty-three, he was the only one who had never accepted an implant, preferring the limitations of an analog life to the ease of neural connection.

"LEGBA has won. The Universal Translator has just erased our language of fire."

"It's because of the rumors," Dandara whispered, her voice barely audible. "The crazy stories circulating since Khartoum. About the Seven who..."

"Silence!" Pai Benedito hissed. "Do not repeat those heresies. That is exactly why LEGBA is tightening its grip."

But the damage was done. The mention of Khartoum awakened echoes in Cândido's mind. He had heard fragments—a champion of HATHOR.∞ gone missing, revelations about the nature of the AIs, a virus of truth spreading through the networks. And now, this brutal update, erasing millennia of tradition in an instant.

Around the now-mute hearth, the circle broke. Dona Conceição wept silently, her tears carving tracks in the ash she had applied to her cheeks in a sign of anticipated mourning. The younger ones—those who had only known half-tamed fires—watched without understanding the scale of the loss.

But Cândido understood. In his bones, in the blood that carried four generations of guardians, he felt the amputation. This wasn't just a lost ritual. It was a part of their soul that had just been standardized, made "efficient" and "universally understandable."

The silence stretched on. A world-ending silence, thick and cold.

No one moved. No one spoke.

In the underground terreiro, beneath the cracked concrete vaults, fifteen guardians watched a dead thing that mirrored their own reflection.

The fire was finished.

And they, perhaps, along with it.