Page 31 of Shifting Hearts

EPILOGUE

Raven

T he mountain is quiet now.

Not silent. Never silent. It breathes beneath me, stone, ash, and memory. The battlefield below is scorched clean, the snow melted into black glass where dragon fire kissed the earth. The dead have been buried, the living have been marked, and I am no longer who I was.

The prophecy lives inside me, not as a whisper, but as a pulse. It doesn’t speak in riddles anymore. It knows me. It is me. I carry its flame in my blood, its weight in my womb.

Kieran stands beside me, his hand warm against mine. His mark glows faintly, tethered to mine, a bond that no war could sever. He hasn’t shifted in days. He says the dragon sleeps now, not because it’s tired, but because it trusts me to keep the fire lit.

I look out over the valley, where the Forsaken rebuild, where the Brotherhood has scattered, where the old laws have been burned and new ones are being carved into stone.

“They’ll come again,” I say.

“Let them,” he answers. “We’ll be ready.”

I rest my hand on my stomach. The mark there glows brighter.

The bloodline has bound. The flame has awakened. And the world will never be the same.

They call her Ember. Not because of the fire she carries, though that would be fitting, but because she glows in silence. She doesn’t cry like other children. She watches, she listens, and sometimes when the moon is high and the wind stills, she hums in a language no one taught her.

Kieran says it’s the old tongue, the one the dragons spoke before they were hunted into myth.

I believe him.

She’s five now. Her eyes are silver like mine, but her pupils slit when she’s angry. Her skin burns cold when she dreams, and last winter, when the Brotherhood marked the solstice with blood rites, she walked into the circle and the fire bent toward her, not away.

They say she’s the true heir. That the prophecy was never about me, but about what I would bring into the world.

I don’t care.

She’s mine. Ours. Born of war and love and ruin, and I will burn the world again before I let it take her.

Tonight, she sleeps curled against Kieran’s chest, her breath syncing with his heartbeat. I watch them from the doorway, the mark on my palm pulsing faintly.

Outside, the wind shifts.

Something is coming.

Not war. Not yet.

But a summons .

The old powers are stirring. The Forsaken whisper of a second flame. A twin prophecy, a shadow that walks like a man but bleeds like a god.

And Ember, my daughter, smiles in her sleep.