Page 8 of The Scars of War (Of Ruin and Fire #1)

And Then There Was Fire

The note is still in my pocket when I spot him in the VIP section.

Back corner. Riven fucking Vescari. He’s alone.

Of course he is. He sits like a king in exile.

All tailored black and bone-deep stillness, one hand wrapped around a lowball glass, the other draped over the armrest like this place belongs to him. Like I do.

It’s not me he's watching, for once. His eyes are fixed on someone else. A guy, early twenties, maybe. Lanky frame, hollow eyes, hoodie two sizes too big. He’s pacing near the pool table, clenching his fists like he’s psyching himself up to do something stupid.

The bar hums around us, unaware. Unbothered. Like no one else can feel the danger pressing down through the air like gravity. I stare at Riven.

He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t even blink, but I move anyway.

Across the floor. Past the regulars. Straight into the eye of the storm.

I slide into the booth beside him, not across from him.

Right next to him, like I’m daring him to react.

To lie. To pretend this isn’t what he’s been angling for since the beginning.

“Stalking’s a bold move for someone who claims not to pull strings,” I say, low and sharp.

His gaze doesn’t shift. Not even a millimeter.

Still locked on the guy with the hoodie.

“He isn’t going to do it,” Riven murmurs.

I blink, “What?” He lifts his glass, sips.

“The knife’s in his jacket. Sewn into the lining.

” My stomach flips. “How do you know that?”

He finally turns to me, just slightly. Enough to catch the full weight of those eyes.

“I know a lot of things I’m not supposed to.

” His hand moves. Slow…intentional. He takes my hand, the one clenched in my lap, and gently rests it on his thigh.

Anchoring. I should pull away, but I don’t.

“He came in planning to stab someone,” Riven says.

“He doesn’t even know who yet. He just wants to hurt.

” The words lodge in my chest like a shard of glass. “Then stop him,” I plead.

“I already did. ”

The guy with the hoodie stumbles mid-step.

He looks up, right at us. His shoulders tense, like something in him buckles.

He shifts direction, veering for the door instead of the bar.

“Don’t look away,” Riven says. So, of course I do.

My hands shake as the world breaks open.

The light goes cold, sounds warp and stretch.

..suddenly I see it. The man in the hoodie, lunging at a stranger, knife flashing in his hand, blood blooming across someone’s chest. People are screaming, glass is shattering, and a body hits the floor.

Silence.

It’s like the rewinding of a film. The image collapses on itself. The color returns. The sound resets.

The man is just…walking out. Calm. Hands in his pockets.

The blade was never drawn. I blink hard.

My breath is ragged. “What in the actual fuck was that?” Riven doesn’t answer.

Because he doesn’t need to. To anyone watching, we didn’t speak.

We didn’t move. We didn’t do anything. I slide my hand out from under his, stand up, and walk away.

Every step feels like a lie I’m telling my body, pretending I still understand gravity, ti me, reality.

Pretending I didn’t just see something that hasn’t happened. Something that should’ve?

I don’t look back. I feel him watching. And somehow, that’s worse.

The back alley is quiet, slick with rain and shadow. I step into it like it might offer answers, but all it gives me is space to shake. My hands won’t stop. Neither will the memory. It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t a daydream. It wasn’t mine. The man. The knife. The blood.

It felt too real. Too sharp. Like I could reach into it and come back with someone else’s trauma under my nails. I lean against the brick wall, forehead pressed to stone, breathing like I just ran ten miles uphill with a collapsed lung. This is bad, really bad.

The note said I was being watched. Riven’s been inside my head.

And now the fucking future is bleeding through my brain like a cracked pipe.

My fingers dig into my thighs. I focus on the pressure, on the pain, on anything that keeps me here.

You’re not broken. You’re just…God, what?

Awakening? Haunted? Losing your goddamn mind ?

I sink down onto an overturned milk crate behind the bar’s dumpster.

The scent of rot and old grease wraps around me like a second skin, but I don’t care.

I’ve seen people stabbed before, in documentaries, on news clips, through glassy screens.

It never felt like this. Never smelled like copper and panic.

Never made me feel like I was holding the knife too. What did he do to me?

I replay it in my mind again. His hand on mine.

His voice in my ear. “Don’t look away.” “Not a request. A command.” Riven Vescari gives commandments like scripture; low, sharp, and unshakable.

I broke it without hesitation. He told me not to look away.

So, I did, and the vision cracked open like a bone split clean down the center. I disobeyed, and something answered.

I pull my phone out of my jacket. The screen lights up. No missed calls. No new messages. My wallpaper’s changed. It’s not the default. It’s not anything I remember setting. It’s a photo of a symbol. The same one from the sketches. The same one from the vision. It’s faint, almost like a watermark.

Fucking. Hell.

I drop the phone on the ground like it bit me .

This is spiraling too fast. I need answers. I need air. I need…“Lux?” The door creaks open behind me. It’s Benny. Concern knitted into his eyebrows, a towel slung over one shoulder, and an apron wet from dishes. “You okay?” he asks.

I nod too fast. “Yeah, just needed a breather.”

He hesitates. “Some guy said you were talking to yourself.”

“Some guy should mind his own business,” I snap.

Benny raises both hands in surrender. “Fair. But don’t disappear again, okay? You left the bar running skeleton crew.”

I nod again. Slower this time. “Got it.” He walks back inside. I don’t follow. Not yet. Something is crawling under my skin. A warning. A whisper. It's not just Riven watching.

The note said he wasn’t the only one, and the more I try to rationalize, the more I realize I’m surrounded by people playing games I don’t understand. I pick up the phone. I don’t unlock it. I don’t need to.

The symbol’s still there. Faint. Lingering. Like a fingerprint on my fucking soul.

The second I step back inside, the bar feels off.

It’s almost like everything is sharper. Every sound slices too clean.

Every shadow stretches too far. My boots feel heavy as they hit the floor, gravity trying to bring me back to reality.

Riven hasn’t moved. Still sitting in that velvet VIP seat like the kingdom belongs to him.

Like the throne rose up around him the second I walked away, and he let it.

I walk back toward him before I can talk myself out of it. Before the panic takes hold again and convinces me I imagined the whole thing. He doesn’t look surprised. Of course, he doesn’t.

I sit. This time, across from him. No pretense. No jokes. “What the fuck was that?” I ask, voice low and sharp.

He doesn’t blink. “You tell me.”

“No.” I lean forward. “You don’t get to give riddles. You don’t get to sit here like a goddamn prophet and drop traumatic visions in my lap like party favors.”

“You looked away,” he says calmly.

My jaw locks. “Because I’m not your trained dog. ”

“You disobeyed,” he says, but there’s no heat in it. Just a kind of detached disappointment. It was as if he expected it. As if he counted on it.

“And that gives you the right to hijack my brain?”

He tilts his head slightly. “That wasn’t me, Lux.”

My heart stutters. “What?”

“You disobeyed. And you saw,” he says, lifting his glass again. “You opened that door.” My skin crawls.

“You’re telling me that wasn’t your doing? That I caused that?”

“I’m saying you’re not just some bartender with a sketchbook,” he replies.

My fists clench on the table. “Stop dancing around it.”

He studies me like I’m both a weapon and a wound. Then he sets his glass down and leans forward. “You’re waking up,” he says. “And it’s messy.”

I laugh once, bitter. “THAT is your explanation, waking up?”

“To what you are. What you’ve always been. What they’ve been keeping buried.”

They . That word cuts deeper than it should.

“Who’s they?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. Instead, he says, “That symbol…have you drawn it again?” I don’t answer either. Not at first. The heat crawling up my neck gives me away.

“I don’t know what it is,” I admit. “It’s not in any book or online. It just…keeps showing up.” His eyes darken, just a flicker.

“You’re drawing from memory.”

My throat tightens. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Not in this life.” The words strike me, and I freeze.

There it is again, that sense that I’m living in echoes, shadows, half-remembered screams from a version of me that didn’t survive.

I’ve had these feelings my entire life. They started right after the fire, and I had always assumed that it was the survivor's guilt. Maybe it isn’t? “Why me?” I whisper.

“Because you’re not like them,” he says, while slightly nodding to the bar. “Because something in you remembers the war.” The word feels like a curse. I flinch, forcing him to lean back. And that’s somehow worse, like the moment passes and I’ve already failed some invisible test .

“This isn't about dreams or drawings,” he says. “It’s about blood. History. Prophecy. More than any of that…” He looks at me. And for the first time tonight, I feel like he sees me. “It’s about choice.”

My laugh is hollow this time. “Choice?” I say, voice like steel. “You made every road lead to you. You sent the letter. You knew I would show up. And now, you want credit for letting me walk?”

“You came back,” he says. I hate that he’s right. “You could’ve walked out of that alley and never looked at me again. You didn’t.”

I want to argue. I want to scream. Instead, I just say, “You scare me.”

He nods once. “Good.”

The air around us changes. One second, it’s heavy with silence—the kind that presses against your ribs like a held breath—and the next it feels like the walls are pulsing.

I feel it before I see it. That strange pull.

Like gravity…but deeper. Older. Like something under my skin is reaching for something it already knows.

I glance down at the table between us. My sketchbook’s there.

I don’t remember pulling it out or opening it.

It’s open now. And the page that stares back?

It’s the symbol. Drawn in bold, dark ink.

Not the faint versions I scrawled in a daze, or the ghost lines that showed up uninvited.

This one is intentional. Perfectly formed.

A circle of jagged flame wrapping around a broken blade.

Half sun, half wound. His mark. Riven’s.

At the center is a crack of red. It doesn’t look like ink or paint. It looks like something living as it pulses once, and my breath catches. “What the fuck…”

I reach for it. My fingers brush the center of the symbol…

and the world explodes. It’s not fire at first. It’s heat.

Blistering. Internal. Like a furnace opens in my chest and roars to life.

Light slams into the room. Every bottle behind the bar rattles.

Glass trembles in its frames. Somewhere, someone screams. I’m not in the bar anymore.

I’m in a battlefield of memory…it’s mine… only not.

The ground is scorched. The sky is split with red. Smoke rolls across bodies that don’t have faces but feel like they matter. In the center of it all...me…or a version of me.

Armor charred. Fingers slick with someone else’s blood.

A blade in my hand. The same blade I drew in my sketchbook.

The same one I saw in Riven’s office. It hums like it’s alive.

The woman wearing my face raises it high, and the fire obeys.

Washing the battlefield clean. I snap back into myself like I’ve been dropped from orbit.

The bar is in chaos. The VIP chandelier is on fire.

People are shouting, scrambling for exits.

Smoke curls in black ribbons from the ceiling.

And me? I stand rooted to the spot, sketchbook hanging slack in one hand, my gaze locked on the flames curling just out of reach.

They lick the air, close enough to feel the heat, yet they don’t touch me.

Not even a single spark. Across from me, Riven remains exactly where he is, as still and unmoving as if the fire itself knows better than to cross him.

He’s watching me like I just told him his future, and it terrifies him.

“Lux,” he says, voice low. I don’t answer.

Because I’m still burning. And for the first time, it doesn’t hurt.

The sprinklers don’t go off. Somehow, the fire puts itself out, not with a hiss, or a crash, or a surge, but like it simply decides to stop burning.

Smoke clings to the rafters. Ash settles like snow.

And I just… stand there. In the middle of it. Untouched .

Cautiously, people edge back in, one by one, like survivors stepping out of a bunker.

Someone’s shouting about electrical faults.

Someone else is calling it a freak accident.

No one’s looking at me. Not really. Except Benny, with eyes wide from across the bar, mouth opening like he’s about to ask if I’m okay. I turn away before he can.

The sketchbook is still warm in my hands. Pages warped. Edges singed. The symbol’s gone. Just empty paper now, mocking me.

Riven is still seated. His face is unreadable. Too calm. Too collected. Like he’s already moved three spaces ahead on a board I didn’t even know existed. “I didn’t mean to,” I whisper.

“I know.” He rises. Slow. Controlled.

“I didn’t want to…”

“I know.” His voice is soft now. Too soft. Like he’s afraid I’ll break. Or afraid I won’t.

“Get out of my head,” I snap.

“I’m not in your head.”

“Bullshit. ”

He doesn’t argue. Just steps closer. I don’t let him near. “I’m not yours,” I say, not because I believe it, but because I need it to be true.

His jaw tightens. “No,” he says. “But you will be.” I walk out of the booth, out of the bar, out of the wreckage of who I thought I was.

I hit the street and breathe like I haven’t in hours. Like oxygen matters again. The rain’s picked up; misty, thin, laced with smoke. I don’t care. I keep walking. I don’t know where I’m going, I just know I can’t stay. Because something woke up tonight. And it’s not going back to sleep.