The proof arrived on velvet.
Sealed documents. Ancestral scrolls. Gene-sequenced sigils extracted from Caelum's early spellwork, verified by three archivists and one neutral historian—Evran Tal conspicuously absent from the signatures.
Kael presented it on a broadcast from the old doctrine chamber.
"I am not myth. I am inheritance," he said. "The fire runs in my veins. The architecture of silence lives in my marrow. And it is time that legacy reclaims its throne."
The speech ricocheted through the cities.
Some wept.
Some knelt.
Some turned off the transmission and walked into the night carrying scrolls of the Living Doctrine.
Meanwhile, Sera Vex sat with Evran Tal in a garden blooming from repurposed ruins. He stared at the bloodproofs.
"It's legitimate," he muttered. "As far as blood goes."
Sera didn't flinch. "But memory isn't genetic."
Evran nodded. "No. But fear? That is."
Across Halron Vale, a referendum began.
A public vote: Should Caelum's heir be granted legacy authority?
The devil, sitting beneath a poetry plaque, whispered to no one:
"They'll choose fire. Unless grief speaks louder."
Sera wrote one sentence. No rally. No plea. Just this:
"Caelum abandoned power to remember who he was. Will you now give that power to someone who never earned it?"
The words spread like quiet rebellion.
People voted.
And in the end?
Kael was granted symbolic inheritance—name rights, ceremonial presence, access to archived essays.
But no governance.
No myth restoration.
No creed resurrection.
He held the title Fireborne Scholar.
And Sera?
She walked into a school the next day and found a child rewriting one of Caelum's doctrines into a poem about trees.
The myth wasn't reborn.
It was compost.
Used to feed new growth.