Page 28 of The Scars of War (Of Ruin and Fire #1)

Riven’s sigil, War. It’s drawn in heavy lines like a brand—sharp, rigid, and symmetrical.

Last time, it looked old. Cold. Lifeless.

Now? It’s cracked. A jagged fracture down the right side, thin but deep, like a pressure fault split the stone, and no one dared seal it.

I run my fingers over it. It feels hot. Alive.

As if the bond between us lives here, too.

As if this place remembers the moment I let him in.

“Is this what I am to you?” I whisper. “A fracture?” The sigil doesn’t answer.

Although I swear the crack glows faintly as I pull my hand away.

The next monolith is darker, Famine. The sigil carved into the blackened stone is more fluid, like a serpent coiled around a broken stalk of wheat.

But something’s wrong with it. The lines aren’t clean.

The grooves are wet. I crouch low and look closer.

The carving is leaking. Black liquid, ink, or something worse…

trickles down the stone in hairline streams. It evaporates before it reaches the base, but the effect is sickening.

Like the stone is crying, bleeding, decaying from the inside out. I straighten and move on .

Pestilence’s sigil is carved into something bone white.

Something softer than marble or quartz. Maybe ivory—yellowed, and cracked.

The symbol itself is intricate, a perfect ring, almost a halo, with delicate veins branching outward.

It pulses and vibrates at a pitch I can’t hear but I can feel in my teeth.

A heartbeat that doesn’t belong. A sickness that wants to spread.

I don’t touch it. Elias was the first one to leave a mark on my mind.

I thought it was Riven, but no. The virus snuck in earlier. Quieter. Through my dreams.

And now this, the sigil? It’s waiting. I can feel it watching.

It doesn’t need me yet. But it will. I move to the last monolith, Vale.

The sigil is different than the rest. Simpler.

It’s a vertical, hourglass-like form, two broken crescents meeting at their tips, like an eclipse cracking down the middle.

At first glance, it looks stable. Still.

Peaceful. The longer I stare, the more it seems to fade.

As if the stone itself is forgetting how to hold the shape.

As if it knows what’s coming and no longer wants to be a part of it. I step close.

“Why did you really tell me?” I murmur. “Why not let me break on my own?” No answer. Just the soft hum of a sigil trying to vanish before the world ends. And then, finally, I look down.

The fifth, Oblivion. Etched directly into the floor, at the dead center of the room. Before, it was inert. Cold. Subtle. Just a design carved into the stone, overlooked and unnamed.

Now, it’s bleeding light. A slow, inky glow pulses from the lines. The kind of glow that doesn’t illuminate but devours. It casts no shadows, because it consumes them. It bends the edges of the chamber, warping the space around it, as if reality is struggling to contain it.

My feet move on their own. I stand at the edge, breathing slow, heart pounding. The longer I stare at it, the more the glow seeps up around me. As if it’s trying to shape me in its image. And then, quietly…I hear my voice. Not aloud. Not in memory. In the echo of the stone. “Open the door.”

I stumble back one step. Then another. Although it follows, I am not a stranger here. I am the one it’s been waiting for. With each step back I take, the glow beneath me flares .

The lines in the floor ripple, just slightly, like the stone is water and I’ve cracked the surface tension. No sound accompanies the shift. No warning. Just the feel of something waking up, something bigger than the room, bigger than this place, bigger than any of them.

I blink, and for a heartbeat, the sigils around me move in a subtle lean toward the center of the room. As if they’re not just monuments anymore, but observers. Leaning in. Listening.

I don’t breathe. The pulse from the floor crawls up my calves, humming beneath my skin like static. The bones in my feet vibrate against the stone. My skin prickles. My blood slows.

I open my mouth to speak, to scream, to deny this…but I freeze. Because the voice I heard before wasn’t just memory. It speaks again. “You are the gate.” I clench my fists. The sound is everywhere. In my chest. My teeth. My fucking spine. “Let us through.”

“Who?” I whisper. “Who is us?”

There’s no answer. Just that pulse. That humming. That shifting weight says the veil is thinner here. The sigils were carved to contain it, but now they’re responding to me in a bad way.

The air smells off now. As if someone’s stolen the scent from the oxygen.

I stagger sideways, reaching for the nearest monolith, Pestilence. I don’t think, I just reach. My fingers touch the carved ring, and…pain.

A spike of cold, immediate and chemical. Like something injected directly into my veins. I rip my hand back with a hiss, but it’s too late. The world tilts. The vault goes soft at the edges and shifts.

And then I’m falling inward as the world shifts, and I see…I see a hallway lined with plague victims. I see Elias, sharp-eyed and smiling, holding out a vial that pulses like a heartbeat. “You’re the cure,” he says. “Or the infection. You get to choose.”

I blink hard, heart racing. The vision vanishes. The vault rushes back into place. I stumble again, this time toward War’s sigil. I don’t mean to touch it—but I do. And this time, there’s heat. A blade against the soul. A war drum rolling under my skin .

I see Riven. Bare-chested. Kneeling. Bleeding. His sword broken at his side, his head bowed before a field of burning ash. He lifts his eyes. “You want the power?” he says. “Then take the throne. Take me.”

I snap back into myself with a gasp. My skin is clammy. My heartbeat’s too fast. The edges of the room are still leaning, still shifting toward me, and I can’t tell if they’re moving, or if I am.

I spin to face the last sigil, Oblivion.

The light has thickened. The lines in the floor are changing.

Not just glowing, morphing. The shape is no longer the same.

It’s evolving. Spiraling. Becoming something more than a symbol.

Something living. Something aware. And it knows me. It wants me. “Step inside.”

The words aren’t spoken. They’re felt. Under the skin. In the blood. Around the heart. I stagger back. The vault won't let me leave. The door has sealed behind me. I hadn’t noticed it close, but it’s shut. Cold. Solid. I’m alone in here. And the veil? It’s thinning by the second.

My voice is rising in my throat, another scream, another crack, and I’m not sure if I do it…or if something inside me does it for me. But I hear the sound. A sharp, ha unting, echoless cry. A wail that cuts across the chamber like a siren, and every sigil responds at once.

Light. Heat. Pain. Noise.

They flare. They twist. They fucking sing. The room goes white, then black, then something in between. And when it stops…I’m on my knees. The floor is cold again. The sigils are quiet.

The vault door creaks open behind me, but I don’t turn to look because there’s a mark on my palm now. Not a sigil. Not like theirs. It’s a shape burned into the skin—faint, glowing, incomplete.

A circle. Split by a crack. A warning of what’s already inside me, Oblivion .

The vault doesn’t make a noise when I leave, but something behind me hums like a mouth still forming the word stay. I don’t. I can’t.

My steps are slow, unsteady. The outside feels wrong, too light, too clean, like the weight inside hasn’t finished pressing itself into me. The mark on my palm still glows, faint and aching, and I keep my hand curled tight, like I can hide it from the house. From the world. From myself .

There’s a numbness bleeding through me that no amount of adrenaline can fix.

The kind that only comes after a scream too big for the body it broke through.

I walk without direction, but the house shifts around me anyway, doors subtly closing, staircases shortening, turns becoming straight paths.

It doesn’t need me to know where I am going. It already knows.

I end up in the West Wing. A hallway lined in blackened mirrors and rust-streaked trim. One of the few places I’ve never seen people go before. It feels like it’s mine now.

I open the door at the end without hesitation, and inside there is a room with no lights or windows.

It’s not dark….not really. A slow amber glow leaks from the seams in the walls, pulsing like veins beneath the plaster.

There’s a bed. I sit on the edge of it, let my boots fall off with two heavy thuds, and press my face into my hands. And I breathe.

Because if I don’t, I’ll scream again, and I don’t know what will happen if I do. I don’t know who will answer this time. I don’t know if I’ll be the one to open the door…or if the thing inside me already has .

The walls don’t breathe, but it feels like they should. This room doesn’t belong to me. Doesn’t belong to anyone, maybe. It’s carved out of shadow and the kind of silence that remembers things you wish it didn’t. The air hums with low, buried tension—something not seen, but felt.

I sit in the center of the too-large bed, curled against myself like I’m still waiting to wake up in my own apartment. In my own life. With my own skin not crawling from the inside out.

That girl is gone. What’s left of her is smeared in the sheets. Damp with sweat and something older than fear.

The mark on my palm glows faintly. It’s something deeper. Wilder. Something that didn’t ask permission when it took root in me.

I stare at it, unmoving. Until I feel the shift, it’s not the creak of the door or the press of footsteps, it’s the weight. The gravity in the room changes like a storm front rolling in. A presence I’d know even in the dark, Riven.