The candles screamed before she did.
They erupted into blue fire, then black, smoke curling like accusing fingers across the cracked mirrors that lined the temple walls. Vines strangling the window lattice writhed as if recoiling from something older than sunlight something that had waited centuries for this exact breath, this exact heartbeat. In the center of the smoke-choked shrine, Mother Crenna gasped awake.
Her back arched unnaturally, spine bowing like a drawn longbow. Skin glistened with sweat that shimmered faint gold, as though starlight had been trapped beneath her flesh. Her mouth opened to cry out but only ash poured from her lips instead, gray and glittering, drifting like burnt stars onto the cold stone floor. Acolytes scattered from the altar in panic. "She's seizing again!"
"Get the flame-oil quick!" "No… no, that's not her flame! That's not ours!"
None dared touch her. No one touched a Seer when the old fire took hold.
Crenna's bones clicked as she rose, joints grinding like stone forced back into shape after centuries buried beneath prophecy. Her eyes, once fogged with age and gentle kindness, now glowed faint white milky, terrible, all-seeing. The shadows around her leaned closer, listening, as if the darkness itself had ears.
Her voice came in pieces, rasping, fractured, torn from somewhere deeper than lungs.
"She breathes… flame that forgot itself…" "The girl walks…" "And she is… not alone."
Then she fell forward onto her knees, palms slamming into the ash she had vomited. Fingers trembling, she began to draw.
A spiral sigil slow, deliberate. A burning eye at its center. A girl crowned in ruin and light.
The air shivered. The walls whispered in languages no living tongue remembered. The mirrors pulsed with visions she had not yet seen visions of a girl walking through shadow, carrying worlds in her small, mortal hands.
One acolyte whimpered, clutching her robes.
Another whispered, voice trembling, "Is that… the flame-lost goddess?"
Crenna answered without looking up, voice hollow:
"No." "That is what she was."
Her eyes widened in horror. The sigil shifted beneath her fingers, reshaping itself into something darker: a mark that warned of fire remembered, of an omen walking, of a destiny too vast for the world to hold without breaking.
"And what she is becoming," Crenna whispered, voice trembling like broken wind, "will terrify even the gods."
Her hands shook violently. "Send for the sisters. Wake the covens. The Tear has flinched. The fire remembers. The world will not survive her birth twice."
A tremor ran through the temple stones. Shadows slithered up the walls like living things with purpose. The air itself waited, knowing prophecy had just unfurled its first thread.
Crenna looked to the shattered mirrors. In them she glimpsed a figure not yet fully born, yet already walking. For the first time in her long life, the Seer's heart stuttered in recognition.
An omen had arrived. He stepped from the bark of a dying tree like a ghost born from rot.
Sahlon did not walk he flowed. Shadows unraveled from him like spilled ink on wet parchment, pooling at his feet before slithering forward to taste the ground.
Thornspire hissed around him. The forest knew what he was. Or worse what walked inside him.
He knelt in the place where the forest had cracked itself open to eat. The grass still bore the echo of a girl's heartbeat fast, frightened, divine. Roots twitched beneath the soil, tasting her lingering fear like wine.
He placed a hollowed flame-sigil on the ground twisted iron, rusted, edged in teeth that looked almost human. It pulsed once, hungry.
A low, rattling laugh slipped from Sahlon, half amusement, half disbelief.
"Well… this is interesting," he murmured, voice like wet smoke curling from a fresh grave.
His fingers twitched, etched with inverted runes that crawled when no one watched. He pulled a glass shard from beneath his cloak thin as a fingernail, glowing faint red. Inside it, a sliver of Kaelen's broken light pulsed like a dying eye.
A voice moved inside him, not his own. It spoke in wet breath and smoke:
"Not again. Not when the fire was swallowed."
Sahlon's eyes glimmered, teeth half-rotted in a slow, terrible smile.
The forest bent inward, trees bowing as if in reverence or surrender.
He lingered, savoring the shift in the air. Some things were better watched before they revealed their shape.
Then he vanished into shadow, leaving only the sigil burning quietly in the dirt.
One evening, as pale winter light kissed the rooftops of Eldermere, Maria saw him again.
The nobleman.
He stood at the market's edge, silver-threaded cloak catching the last rays like spider silk, eyes sharp not with hunger or cruelty, but with something worse: recognition.
Maria's heart pounded against her ribs. She gripped her breadbasket until the wicker creaked.
I should walk away. But her feet moved anyway, drawn by a pull she did not understand could not name. She crossed the square, stopping a breath away. "Who are you?" she asked, voice taut as a drawn bowstring. The man's smile was faint, amused… and sad. "I go by many names," he said softly. "But that's not what you truly want to know." Maria tensed. "What do you know about me?" He stepped closer, voice dropping to a whisper that brushed her ear like frost.
"Only what you've always feared: you are not who you think you are."
A chill ran down her spine, as if the shadows around them trembled in recognition.
"Nonsense," she said, but the word came out weak. "I've lived here all my life."
"Have you?" he murmured. "Then why do you dream of towers you've never seen? Hear names no one's spoken? Why does the wind sometimes answer your thoughts, and the fire tremble when you pass?"
Maria's breath caught. "How… how do you know about my dreams?"
His eyes glinted, silver like the edge of a knife held to moonlight.
"Because dreams are echoes of what is meant to be. And yours… do not belong to this village. They belong to a world that has been waiting for you."
He stepped back, leaving a silence that thrummed like a heartbeat.
"The truth will find you, Maria. Whether you're ready or not."
And then, like smoke caught in sudden wind, he vanished.
Maria's fingers went to her chest, where her heart raced and a strange warmth pulsed—a shadow of flame she had never known.
She did not yet understand. She only knew her life had begun to unravel, and from the ashes of the familiar, something far older and darker had awakened.
Far beyond the mountains and rolling hills, the nobleman lingered in shadow, silver-threaded cloak catching the last light of dusk. He smiled not with warmth, but with the knowing cruelty of one who glimpses the shape of fate before it unfolds.
Fate had taken its first step. The game was set in motion. And in the quiet that followed, the world held its breath.