Pyraxis pressed a bony hand to the flame in their hair and felt only warmth, not heat. For three hundred years the fire had crowned their skull, feeding the flame-magic that once cracked stone and boiled rivers. Now the flame guttered like a dying candle. Red embers clung to the strands. The mage's ribs stayed cold. Without hotter, purer fire to feed the crown, the old magic slept, and Pyraxis could not wake it. They climbed the chains to the crypt they called home. The charred stone box hung in the air, turning slow, wrapped in heavy iron links. Eerie fire still leaked from its cracks. Pyraxis pushed inside and held their dimming hair close to that blaze. The crypt-fire licked the embers but did not catch. It was old smoke, spent and gray. Pyraxis had burned this fuel too many times. It gave no more. On a rusted stand near the wall, four candles guttered on a skull-topped holder. Its bony arms reached out. A long red tongue curled from its jaws. Pyraxis lifted the thing and stared at the small honest flames. Candle fire was weak. But it was living fire, not the dead heat of old stone. They touched one strand of hair to a wick. The ember hissed. Then a single candle flame bent sideways and poured into the mage's hair like water finding a crack. The crown flared. Warmth crawled down the spine, into the ribs, into the finger bones. The magic stirred. It was faint, but it moved. Pyraxis needed more. They stepped out onto the chains with the candle-holder gripped tight. Below waited a twisted tree they had passed a hundred times, a face pushed out from its trunk, mouth open in a frozen snarl. Its bark was old and dry. Old dry wood burned hot. Pyraxis climbed down and set the candle flames against a low branch. The tree screamed. The face split wider, and the branches thrashed like arms. Fire ran up the trunk in bright ropes. Pyraxis leaned in and drank the heat through their crown. The flame in their hair roared white now. Their hands trembled with returning power. For one breath, three centuries fell away, and the old magic filled them whole. Then the tree tore free of the ground. Roots ripped up in a spray of dirt. The burning trunk lurched upright, taller than the crypt, the snarling face turned down at Pyraxis. It had never been only a tree. The fire had woken something inside it. Pyraxis stepped back, crown blazing, magic hot in their bones at last. They had their fire. Now the thing they burned to get it stood over them, wreathed in flame, and reached down with clawed wooden hands.