Page 18

T he sky above Nythia is black and brooding, like an open wound that refuses to heal—clouds churn with shadowed fury, streaked through with veins of crimson bleeding across the horizon. Here, time bends. One sunrise can last hours. Or disappear entirely. Ash clings to my skin like snow, swirling through the air as if the land itself refuses to let me forget its ruin.

I make my way across the deserted courtyard, the silence heavy and unnatural. Twisted, burned vines coil around the blackened stone, desperate things that cling like relics of a resurrection that never came.

Above, perched like a phantom atop the tallest spire, Malachi watches. His wings, vast and still, cast a shadow that stretches over the courtyard. He sees me. They all do.

You don’t leave a place like this.

You survive it. Or you surrender.

There’s been no word from Kainen.

My heart hammers in my chest, my lips tremble with unspoken thoughts, and my body aches with the weight of every emotion we’ve buried between silences. I thought when he left me in the courtyard, the storm would pass.

But the silence only thickens. It coils tighter. It chokes.

I pass the shattered fountain—long since dry—but the vines that wind up its jagged spine pulse with veins of glowing crimson. They feed from something unseen, something buried. I once asked Nieve about them. She only offered evasions—gentle, never cruel. Like she knows what I’m becoming. What he’s shaping me into.

A low growl rumbles through the stones beneath my feet. Not heard—felt.

Malachi.

At the castle’s edge, where the tower casts its long shadow over the trees, the dragon watches. I look up.

And I see him.

Kainen descends the steps carved into the tower’s side, his armor loose at the shoulders, his movements slower than usual—as if the weight of war clings to him like a second skin. His gaze locks on me, and for one heart-wrung second, I feel like a secret he’s trying to keep from himself.

“What happened?” I ask, my voice barely a breath.

He says nothing.

Instead, he moves past me, stopping just short of the scorched stone wall that marks the courtyard’s edge. His hands are stained with blood. Not his.

The urge to touch him claws at me. To carry some of the weight he never admits he bears.

But I don’t. I can’t.

Because touching Kainen was never safe. Not then. Not now.

At last, he speaks—his voice low, threaded with something ancient. “The border’s breached.” He swallows hard and looks up. “It’s mourning.”

The look he gives me cleaves the air between us. There’s something wrong. Something bad. “Selene,” he says, voice rough as torn silk, “be ready. The Nightfallen are here.”

My breath catches in my throat.

Kainen moves toward me slowly, like he isn’t sure whether to worship me or destroy me. His breath brushes my lips—hot, dangerous, like the edge of a blade that wants to cut.

“In this cursed world,” he whispers, “the only thing I don’t understand is you.”

He pauses. “And I hate the unknown.”

I barely manage to whisper, “Maybe… I’m not meant to be understood.”

He smirks, slow and dark. “Then I’ll burn every kingdom until I do.”

And then he kisses me—hard. Like a declaration. Like a war.

The ash here is thick—too thick.

As I step over the shattered threshold of what once must have been a great estate, now drowned in ruin, it swirls like smoke around my boots. No one speaks of the House of Ash. Not even Nieve. Her lips close tight when I ask where he was taking me. Even Malachi growled when Kainen named it on our path.

Blade slung across his back, Kainen marches ahead of me, his cloak trailing soot in its wake. Though his silences are not uncommon, this one is weighted—like memory.

“What was this place?” I ask, my voice nearly lost in the hiss of wind sweeping through splintered beams and sagging eaves.

He doesn’t look back. “A haven,” he says, “once. Before the flames claimed everything.

Not just any fire. Dragon fire.

The bones of the place speak of that heat—long since gone, yet still pulsing in the stone. The walls whisper in a tongue older than time, and the ash shifts subtly beneath each step, as though it recognizes me.

“It’s haunting,” I whisper.

Kainen stops beneath the archway of a collapsing hall. “Every inch of Nythia is haunted.”

As we press forward through scorched corridors, a pressure builds in my chest. Burnt portraits hang in twisted frames—faces lost to time and fire. A broken harp rests in the corner, its strings snapped like veins.

This place wasn’t merely destroyed.

It was abandoned.

Kainen brushes his fingers against a charred pillar, and something in the air hums. Beneath the ash, ancient runes pulse—faintly red.

“Why bring me here?” I want to ask, but the words are slow on my tongue.

He turns. And there’s something in his eyes I’ve never seen before. Not quite pain. Not quite hope. Something older. A memory being dragged from the depths.

“This is where the first blood pact was forged,” he says. “Between a dragon and a mortal. This is where it began—for me. And perhaps for you.”

My heart stumbles. “You think I’m connected to this place?”

“I think it’s calling to you.”

It is.

The moment he says it, the air shifts. Thickens. The runes burn brighter, like blood vessels beneath skin. And I feel it— beneath the floor. A pulsing heart. Magic, ancient and feral, awakening because I am here.

Then I fall.

The floor vanishes beneath me, and I scream as the ash rises to swallow me whole.

Ash falls like snow—but not the kind that melts or glitters.

This ash burrows into your bones. Clings to your skin like guilt. Heavy. Suffocating. It makes every breath feel like mourning. Like remembering.

Alone, I follow a winding path through gray-black dust that cloaks Nythia like a funeral shroud. If I listen too long, the wind murmurs things—fractured, bleeding thoughts that almost sound like words.

I fail.

Ahead, the ruins emerge once more—dark spires rising like blades, cutting into the heavens. The House of Ash. The name the guards whisper, their eyes flicking to Kainen when they think I’m not watching. The place Malachi circles before each descent.

The place no one else dares to enter.

Kainen hasn’t been the same since the border battle. Not fully. His body moves through the castle halls. His voice still commands. But something inside him has gone quiet. And whatever he saw that day carved new edges into his soul.

Sharper. Colder.

More dangerous.

I follow the dragon sigil etched into a stone marker outside the gate. It's old—older than the tongue I’ve heard speak. Older than Nythia itself. It warms beneath my palm, and it feels wrong.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The voice is familiar, edged with ancient heat.

I turn. “Neither should you, Malachi.”

He pauses. Then his wings stir behind him, a great hush of wind and tension. His scaled hide crackles faintly, the scent of brimstone clinging to the air between us.

“This house doesn’t like your kind,” he says, his voice low thunder.

“What kind?”

He says nothing. That tells me everything.

I press forward. The iron gate groans open on rusted hinges, the sound like protest from the bones of the estate itself.

Inside, it’s cooler than I expected. The air tastes scorched. Timeless. My footsteps echo down corridors lined with charred tapestries and glass-strewn floors. The foyer is dominated by a half-melted piano, strings exposed like sinew.

This place remembers fire.

It remembers her.

The woman in my vision at the Fae court.

I shouldn't remember her—but I do. In flashes. The curve of her smile, wet with blood. Her fingers trembling in my hair. Her last look before?—

The stairs groan beneath my weight. The light above is strange—not natural. Like moonlight filtered through smoke.

A door at the end of the hall is warped and split, slightly ajar. Inside, the room is small. Simple. On the floor, a circle is burned into the wood—dark as obsidian. Long-dead candles ring its edges, runes long since scorched away.

I smell burnt jasmine.

Kainen’s voice breaks the silence.

“You shouldn't look into her eyes.”

I turn.

He stands in the doorway, shadowed and worn. The ash from battle still dusts his cloak. His eyes are storm-swollen. Ancient.

“I had to see it,” I say. “I needed to know.”

He doesn’t move. “This place is a wound. Hers. Mine. Don’t open it unless you’re ready to bleed.”

Something in his voice sends a chill through my bones.

He steps inside. The runes at our feet pulse faintly beneath his boots. There’s almost no light—only the echo of something long dead, refusing to rest.

“She summoned something here,” I whisper.

He nods. “Something she couldn’t control.”

“Was it Therion?”

“No,” he says, voice dark. “It was worse.”

I move toward him. The weight of the room presses against my ribs like a vice.

“Why didn’t you tell me your mother was a witch?”

His jaw flexes. “Because if I told you, you’d start wondering what else I inherited.”

My heart races. “And what if I already am?”

He turns to face me.

And it happens.

The air between us tightens, electric. The runes flare. The circle burns.

“You feel it too,” I whisper. “You feel what I’m becoming.”

His lips find mine—suddenly. Fiercely.

This kiss is not like before.

This is not anger. It is not desperation.

It is fire. He's a warlock. That is the power he inherited.

I follow her deeper into the forest, passing Newt’s cottage, and then I see it. A small cottage similar to Eryndor’s. It’s ancient and looks abandoned, but it must hold answers if it’s the only place that does.

There is life in the library.

Not in the way books rustle or lights flicker—this place breathes . The walls are carved from polished crystal and ancient roots, veins of glowing runes etched into the bark like a pulse. Scrolls float midair, suspended in silence. Books murmur softly in languages I’ve never heard… and one that feels like it’s simply waiting for me to understand.

Newt brought me here earlier and told me the Queen had “granted permission.” But the way he said it sounded more like an execution than a gift.

I don’t know what I’m meant to find.

I only know that I’m being pulled .

The deeper I walk, the darker it becomes. Not cold. Not frightening. Just… deeper. The light shifts from warm gold to flame-blue, illuminating a distant alcove where a single pedestal waits. A book rests on it—sealed, scorched, and yet somehow untouched.

It stirs the moment I arrive.

Holding my breath, I reach for it. The instant my fingertips brush the cover, the script ignites—first gold, then red, then a fierce, living orange. As if the words themselves are burning .

I open it.

The pages are inked in fire. Literal flame—letters that shimmer and twist, unreadable to the eye but not to the mind. They unravel in my thoughts not as language but as memory .

And I understand.

The Prophecy of the Sundering Flame

The soul split in two.

One to break the realm, one to defend it.

Born in flame, crowned in grief, bound to brothers of war.

One will rise, one will fall. One will choose.

And the world will burn, either way.

My hands tremble. The book goes still, as if it has given me what it came to give.

I stare at the words, now seared into my mind. They’re more than prophecy—they feel like truth . Like destiny wearing a crown of ash.

One is meant to save the world. One is meant to shatter it.

Is that why they all look at me like I’m a warning? Why the Queen won’t meet my eyes for long?

I close the book.

And for a moment, in the polished glass of the pedestal, I see my reflection…

And it flickers.

Two versions of myself.

One glowing with light.

One wreathed in flame.