Page 20 of The Scars of War (Of Ruin and Fire #1)

Something Wicked

I wake to silence, and it’s not the comforting kind you welcome. The kind that hovers, thick and wrong, like it’s waiting for me to move so it can decide if I’m still real. My eyes open slowly. I’m in my apartment. Something’s off.

The bed is cold. The sheets are smooth. No tangled mess from the night before.

No blood. No bruises. No bite marks on my neck from where he slammed his mouth against me like he wanted to own my life.

The table where he bent me over is perfectly clean.

No scratches. No streaks. No evidence that my body ever begged against the wood.

My body? Fine.

No ache in my thighs. No handprint on my skin. No rawness. No soreness. Nothing that says I was fucked half-senseless just hours ago. No evidence of how badly I wanted to erase Elias from my bloodstream and replace him with war.

I sit up too fast. The hoodie I tossed to the floor is folded on the dresser. The feather? Gone.

The sketchbook is on the coffee table, neatly stacked on top of a fashion magazine I don’t read. I grab it and flip through. Blank pages. Every single one. No spirals. No sigils. No eyes watching from beneath the paper. No image of my face twisted in pleasure under a hand I didn’t draw. Just white.

My breath sticks in my throat as I stand. The hardwood is cold under my feet, too smooth, like it’s been wiped clean. I walk to the bathroom. The mirror’s spotless. No steam rings. No streaks of sweat. No lipstick smear where I leaned in, gasping.

And my reflection? It doesn’t flinch. No tangled hair. No bruises. No bloodshot eyes. Just me. Perfect. Polished.

Wrong.

I open the cabinet and freeze. There is new toothpaste… its unopened, and a completely different brand. One I didn’t buy. One I’d never use. There’s a new loofah on the hook too. The cheap kind. Still in its packaging. Someone’s been here. Or worse, someone’s been fixing me?

I don’t remember sleeping. I don’t remember folding laundry or taking a shower or resetting my entire fucking life. Someone did. Because the apartment looks like I never broke. Like I never bled. Like I never let Riven use me and in turn, used him right back.

I shove through the front door and spill out onto the street. And stop. She’s there. Across the street. Standing in the sun. Me. Hair wild. Lips bare. A white tank tucked into black jeans. That’s not what I’m wearing. It’s not me. But it is.

She looks right at me. Tilts her head like she’s amused, smiles, and then walks into a building I’ve never been inside. The city continues to move as if none of this is happening.

Two versions of me coexisting in this moment. I feel like I’ve been in two worlds, both dark with suffering. Has it always been this way, or am I just becoming more self-aware? Or is this reality about to burn to the ground ?

I don’t call him. I don’t have to. I know he will find me.

I make it two blocks before I feel it, the heat at my back, the press of a presence I’d know in the dark. I glance over my shoulder, and there he is. Not skulking in alleys and not hiding in shadows. He’s stalking across the street like he owns the fucking asphalt.

Black coat open. Shirt unbuttoned just enough to flash a scar I’ve seen up close and personal. No hesitation. No subtlety. Just that razor-sharp focus he wears like armor, all aimed at me.

He doesn’t stop when he reaches me. Just falls into step beside me like it’s already decided.

“I didn’t tell you before,” I say. “I’ve seen her.

In the mirror. In my dreams. And now? In the street.

She looks like me, but she’s not. And this time, she smiled.

” Riven doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. Something behind his eye’s shifts.

“Then we’re out of time.”

He leads me straight to a high-rise I’ve never noticed before, polished steel, faceless. The kind of place you pass a hundred times and never see. There’s no lobby. No lights. Just a door that opens the second he presses his palm to the glass .

A voice inside me says this is a bad idea.

I ignore it. The elevator doesn’t move up.

It drops. So fast my stomach lurches. There are no buttons.

No floor numbers. No music. Just silence and steel and the quiet hum of something I’m not sure is mechanical.

Riven doesn’t speak. He’s standing perfectly still.

Like if he moves, something will wake up.

When the doors open, the air is colder and stale. Like stepping into a crypt that remembers every secret ever buried. A hush so deep it presses against my skin, ancient and waiting.

The walls are stone, dark and damp, and veined with gold that pulses faintly under the surface. The floor creaks underfoot like it's holding something in. Riven leads the way, and I follow him down a corridor lined with artifacts behind glass.

A crown, broken down the middle. A blade carved from bone.

A bell with no clapper. Everything hums. Everything knows.

We stop at the end of the hall. A blackened iron door.

No handle. Just a burn mark at its center, shaped like a closed eye.

“This is where the warnings are kept,” he says, voice low. I look up at him .

“I thought this was about prophecy.”

“It is. Prophecies are just threats dressed as fate.” He presses his hand to the eye. It opens.

Inside is a small chamber. Bare stone. One pedestal. One scroll, coiled and bound with something that isn’t rope. It looks like sinew. Maybe wire. Maybe both. Riven doesn’t touch it. He waits. I step forward.

The scroll pulses once, like it knows me.

I pick it up, and my skin burns on contact.

It isn’t pain, but recognition. Like some part of me buried too deep just woke the fuck up.

I unroll it. The language isn’t one I know…

but I understand every word. War. Death.

Pestilence. Famine. Symbols I’ve seen before. Twisted. Elegant. Familiar.

I trace each one with my eyes, and my chest tightens.

These aren’t just drawings I’ve imagined in passing.

These are the exact shapes I’ve etched in charcoal, scratched into margins, bled into the corners of my sketchbook without knowing what they were.

“They’re real,” I whisper. “I’ve drawn them. I thought they were…just mine.”

Riven steps closer, voice low and sharp.

“They’re older than language. Each one is a mark.

A binding. A warning.” He points to the first…

a jagged, branching shape, sharp like cracked bone and spear tips.

“War. That one’s mine. A sigil carved into the first weapon ever raised in anger.

” The second glows faintly. A broken circle, halo-like, but split down the middle with something leaking through.

“Pestilence,” he says. “Elias’. It represents spread and corruption, not just of the body, but of thought.

Contagion in its purest form.” Next, an hourglass shape cracked at the waist. Bleeding shadow from the center.

“Death. Vale,” he says, and I hear the tension in his voice.

“His mark isn’t about endings. It’s about what lingers after.

” The fourth is delicate. Deceptively simple.

A curved stalk wrapped in thorns like a piece of wheat sharpened to draw blood.

“Famine,” he murmurs. “That one belongs to Niko. It’s not hunger.

It’s withholding. The slow ache of need that goes unanswered. ”

And then the fifth. The almost-circle. The one with edges like teeth. Half-erased but still watching. “And this?” I ask, throat dry. He doesn’t answer right away. Just stares at it. At me. Finally, he speaks. “That one doesn’t have a name.”

“You know what it is?”

He nods once, slow. “We call it Oblivion. Not because that’s what it is called...but because that is what it brings.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“I think it’s waking up,” he says.

“Because of me?”

“Because you’re not what we thought.” He drags a hand through his hair, jaw tight. He looks back at the scroll, his voice quieter. “And maybe we’re not either. Everything we believed—what we are, what we’re for—it starts to look a lot smaller when you're standing in the middle of it.”

The scroll hums in my hand. My blood answers. And Riven’s voice drops to a whisper. “You weren’t supposed to find this.”

The vault doesn’t seal behind us. There’s no sound of a door closing.

No hiss of magic. Just silence stretching longer than it should, wrapping around my throat like a second skin.

Riven moves ahead of me, just a few steps, before something halts him mid-stride.

One foot still in the air. His entire body tenses, not with shock, but with recognition.

He tilts his head slightly, like he’s just heard something too quiet for human ears but loud enough to matter.

I stop walking.

The air shifts. Like the laws of physics hiccupped, and something slipped through the gap. There’s pressure in my chest, deep and sharp, like the drop of a rollercoaster, but not thrilling.

It’s ancient. Instinctual. Like every cell in my body just realized we’re standing somewhere we shouldn’t be. Riven lifts one hand and presses it flat to the stone wall beside him. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at me. And I don’t ask. Because then I feel it again.

A breath, but it doesn’t come from him. Or me.

It comes from behind the air. Like the wall itself exhaled.

Like something on the other side finally noticed we were here.

My skin prickles. The fine hairs on my arms lift.

The light overhead dims because the shadows are shifting.

Sliding into corners they didn’t occupy before.

Refusing to stay still. It’s not a lighting issue or a trick of the eye.

The shadows are moving . And they’re doing it on purpose.

“Don’t move,” Riven says. His voice is tighter than I’ve ever heard it, low, strained, full of something close to pain.

Not physical. Existential . I stay exactly where I am.

The gold veins in the stone walls pulse once.

Then again. Then…nothing. The hallway hums. A low, resonant vibration I can feel in my bones.

Like the place is holding its breath, and I’m standing inside its lungs.

Then something changes.

The wall just ahead of us begins to ripple like glass, forming from stone. A sliver of mirror appears, elegant and thin, where there was only rock a moment before.

And in the reflection, she’s waiting. Not me. Her.

The not-me that’s been bleeding into dreams, sliding through visions, staring back from mirrors with eyes just a few shades too dark.

This time, she’s not smiling. Her mouth is red-stained, not painted.

Her grin splits wide and wicked, like it’s trying too hard to stretch into human shape.

She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t tilt her head in curiosity or mimicry.

She lifts her hand and presses it against the other side of the glass.

And mine starts to rise to meet it, purely out of instinct.

Like my body’s trying to answer a question my mind doesn’t remember being asked .

Riven reacts fast. One arm snaps around my waist while the other catches my wrist in a grip just shy of bruising. He yanks me backward so hard I collide with his chest. My breath leaves my lungs in a rush I can’t recover from. “Don’t fucking touch it,” he snarls.

“I wasn’t…”

“You were.”

The mirror shivers. Her hand twitches. Then she bares her teeth in something that wants to be a smile but isn’t.

The floor cracks beneath us. A sound, like a bone splitting down the middle.

It’s not small or subtle. It’s a fault line tearing through the stone floor like it’s paper.

And from the widening fracture, light seemingly bleeds out. Although it’s not light.

It’s black and violet and pulsing. A cold kind of glow that doesn’t illuminate, it erases . The memory of fire without heat. A reflection of stars that have already died.

My vision doubles from reality splitting in two.

I see the hallway and I see something else overlaid with it. Towers made of bone. A sky like black glass. Ash drifting like snow. And at the center, a throne carved from shadow. Empty. It feels like it’s watching me. Like it’s been waiting.

A voice curls inside my skull, smoke and static and something older than words. Lux. “Say your name,” Riven barks behind me.

“What?” I breathe.

“Your name. Now. Full,” he demands.

I open my mouth. It sticks. I force it out.

“Lux…Lux Avery Marlowe.” The effect is immediate.

The mirror explodes. Glass vanishes midair before it can hit the ground.

The crack in the floor seals in reverse.

The shadows stop crawling. Everything resets, now quiet and still.

Like we had awakened something. And now it’s watching.

Riven’s breathing hard behind me. He doesn’t speak or meet my eyes. He places both hands on the wall like he needs it to hold him up, or maybe he’s trying to hold it back. And for the first time since I met him… He looks afraid.

Not afraid for me. Of me.