Page 1 of Stars in Aura (The Sable Riders #7)

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Fate’s Fall

ISSA

‘ Y ou are Fallen!’

A multitude of voices shrieked in a cacophony of divine wrath and judgment.

Their thunderous roars burst through smoke and flame, devouring walls, furniture, and even the roof in waves of blistering heat and choking ash.

The sky above one of Sacra’s high palaces cracked with thunder, and hail pummelled down as if the heavens wept.

Its interior, once radiant and sumptuous, even cozy for the household it had embraced, now burned.

Curtains of gold thread were consumed by licking embers.

Ethereal banners turned into drifting residue, and crystalline partitions fractured under the burden of divine betrayal.

A family of five stood huddled together in the heart of their home’s ruin, shielding one another, linked as one, limbs trembling, eyes dilated with horror.

The mother’s arms curled in a protective clasp, encircling her youngest daughter and second-born son.

The firstborn, a daughter with celestial starlit eyes, was pressed between her siblings like a shield as one of their father’s one-armed grasp held them tight.

‘I’m so sorry, my loved ones, tis my fault,’ he snarled with bitter rage.

His other hand trembled on the hilt of his glimmer sword electrified with azure and gilded energy arcs.

‘ Nada papa,’ said the eldest, a warrior in her own right, her golden curls disheveled, her face smeared in soot, her weapon thrumming in her hand. ‘You were set up.’

With the hiss of a thousand vipers, the Shackles of Vyri’el came.

Forged from the collapsed heart of a dying star, etched with binding sigils older than time, they sliced through the barriers, shields and smoke.

The rings of luminous gold spiraled like predators hunting their prey.

They shrieked across the space and snapped onto the family’s wrists and ankles with terrifying precision.

In seconds, their weapons were ripped from their grasp and flung away.

Each shackle extended on contact, linking into a chain of light, an arcane lattice of power and punishment.

The screaming kin fell to the floor as the radiant links twisted into a hovering cage, every sigil pulsing like a heartbeat.

They were pulled into its hold, the enclosure door slamming shut with ominous menace.

It rose, spinning, bathed in unholy illumination, defying gravity, mercy, and sense.

For one terrible moment, it hovered just outside the broken expanse of crystalline windows.

Framed by the smoking ruins behind it, the five souls caught within its judgment froze in the unforgiving grip of divine law.

Without warning, the cage was pulled into a vortex like a stone hurled by a god’s hand, and the heavens the family called home vanished in a final breathless heartbeat.

Within the whirling charybdis, the gilded prison plunged toward the planet’s surface below, hurtling through clouds and thunder.

Inside, horror unfolded as the cage fell into shadow.

The mother gasped as her children convulsed in her arms, their bodies writhing, their limbs shifting, bone-cracking, joints displacing.

Their flesh rippled unnaturally, and their celestial forms unraveled mid-fall.

Their radiant skin dulled, warped, and split into jagged ridges and grooves.

Their eyes, once mirrors of the stars, glowed red, ebony, and scarlet, burning from within like cursed embers.

Wings that once bore them across the heavens shredded into tatters, black and smoking, disappearing for eternity.

Faces distorted. Canines elongated. Their screams gave way to snarls.

Still, they held on to each other.

Her brother’s hand found the eldest.

His voice broke through the chaos, hoarse and heavy with sorrow.

‘We are lost.’

‘ Nada ,’ she breathed. ‘We are Sullied.’

The words burned like ash.

Just as her vision split, her flesh contorted, and her divine grace boiled away beneath the curse in a blast of smothering heat.

Still, through time and torment, they fell towards Sacra’s planetary crust.

The cage landed with a crash, blazing like a meteorite on fire as it burrowed and tunneled down into the abyss under the shadowed underbelly of the descended city of New Savartin.

They plummeted until the aureate trap struck rock with a silent quake, embedding itself deep in the tunnels where light did not live.

Only then did the gods-forsaken shackles release them.

The gilded cell imploded, dissolving into particles and motes of fine gold that hissed as they vanished without sound.

Leaving behind five bodies curled in a charred heap, trembling, breathless, and beaten.

They were forced to crawl, burned, twisted, still reeling from the violence of divine condemnation, dragging their scorched limbs through stone corridors slick with condensation.

In time, they found a cavern, a hollow in the dark that became their sanctuary.

When thirst clawed at their throats, they emerged to drink from a black underground lake that shimmered like obsidian glass.

When hunger gnawed at their bellies, they scraped mollusks from the walls.

With breath and grief, the eldest one shook with rage as her loved ones writhed from the curse, still pulsing through their veins like molten iron.

Her mother wept silently, and her sister gnashed her teeth in anguish.

While her brother and father trembled in stoic wrath against the waves of agony washing over them.

That was when she realized her healing power had not left her.

Whatever gods had cursed her blood, they had not taken that.

So she knelt beside her father and pressed her hands to his ruined chest.

Her potency, however, could not undo what had been wrought, and the soul stone attached to his heart still ripped him apart from the inside.

In tears, her heated palms soothed the pain as best as possible and slowed the decay.

She pressed her healing light to her other family’s warped limbs and charred skin.

Not to cleanse them of the curse, for that was too rooted, but to steady it, to hold the suffering at bay.

She used that same touch on herself in secret in the following weeks until the burning stopped.

Until her legs held firm again.

Until her lungs were no longer filled with ash and bitterness.

Until the radiance in her palm pulsed stronger.

She knew then she was ready.

It was time to rise.

She prepared by gathering dried lake weed, packing small satchels with mollusk meat, and carving crude tools from stone and bone.

She also searched the cityscape, eyes to the skies, seeking a sign.

Then, one morning, she spotted it in the dull glow of New Savartin’s false dawn.

The tether.

Her invisible rope-ladder to the heavens.

The power filament strung from the highest plane, pulsing in the veil betwixt worlds.

It was not visible to anyone else, but to her, it shimmered.

A stairway to heaven only her eyes saw.

She turned to her family and wrapped her father in a fierce embrace.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ she whispered.

Her brother nodded, his face scarred but luminous with a touch of hope. ‘Return to us, Issandra Elaris Astraeus D’Leqan, Flameborne Daughter of Healing Twilight. Warrior of the Burning Horizon, Healer of the Sullied and the Skybound, Soulbearer of the Last Light. Return and make us well.’

She held him, her burned, damaged limbs entwining his lean, damaged frame, in a close hug.

‘I shall bring back that which we need,’ she promised. ‘So this disease, this deities’ curse, is stripped from us for eternity.’

She glanced up at the tether swaying in the dying burst of sunset.

She took a breath, stepped into a run, and leaped, extremities outstretched.

Her blemished fingers wrapped around the ladder’s silken current that only she had the strength and will to climb.

Wincing and gritting her teeth against the pain, she rose.

Toward vengeance.

Toward salvation.

Toward the gods.