"Dark Magic is always risky and unpredictable."

My life changed forever the night my Father walked in the door, uttered those words, and placed the frighteningly radiant flame in our hearth.

"What is that?" I asked innocently.

"The Sacred Flame..." he whispered hoarsely, his gaze unfocused and his thoughts prisoner to a time or a place far, far away from our family room.

I lost my Father that night; sure, he walked out our door a year ago today, never to be seen again. But truthfully, my Father has not been my Father for 15 years, since the night that lamentable inferno entered our lives.

Endless hours, sometimes days, my Father sat in his chair by the hearth, gazing into the fire and barely acknowledging his family around him.

And so it is that I set out into the world, painfully uncertain about what I'm searching for. I cannot say why I woke up one morning, snatched the flame - The Sacred Flame - from its perch and placed it within my very being. I have not yet set forth and the weight if this conflagration is unspeakably heavy.

But my Father sat idle and it drove him mad. Though the journey will undoubtedly be perilous, I seek only knowledge and understanding, even if in the end, I am consumed by the blaze...

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