Lumira's Room,
Duskbane Estate
Moments later, the clock in the hall downstairs chimed a deep, resonant two o'clock in the morning.
The rain, which had earlier hammered against the glass like a desperate siege, had softened into a cool, persistent mist. Inside the grand, high-ceilinged room, the candles had long since sputtered and died, leaving the space illuminated only by the faint, angry orange glow of the dying embers in the hearth.
Lumira lay beneath the heavy, purple velvet covers, the ancient Duskbane crest pressing faintly against her skin. She wasn't cold, not precisely; the resurrected body seemed to hold a strange, unnatural heat. But the oppressive weight of the bedding was a comfort, a tangible anchor in a world that felt increasingly ephemeral.
She listened to the soft, rhythmic breathing beside her.
Seraphina slept like a blessed thing, a cherub tucked into a cradle of stormlight. Her golden curls were fanned across the linen pillows, catching the ember-glow and turning them to spun silk.
Her small hand rested loosely over Lumira's arm, not clutching, but simply there, a featherlight weight that nonetheless felt like the heaviest, most necessary anchor to this harsh, cynical world.
In the faint, shifting light, the girl's round face looked impossibly young, untouched by the shadows and betrayals that had defined Lumira's first life. It was an innocence this world had long forgotten and was, Lumira suspected, the very thing that made Sera's presence so unbearable, and so vital.
Every few breaths, the girl murmured faint, half-formed fragments of dreams — the echo of laughter, a muffled word that sounded like 'Mama,' or perhaps a name she'd once been too shy to speak aloud.
Lumira smiled, but the expression was a faint, weary twist of her lips. Her eyes remained wide open, staring up at the intricate frescoed ceiling where a stylized map of the constellations was perpetually suspended.
"If only I could sleep that easily again…" she thought with a heavy sigh.
Sleep had abandoned her the moment her chest had stopped tasting of marble and started tasting of blood and air.
There was something about waking from the grave — or, more accurately, waking in the body of another person after having died as the die-hard fan of the notorious White Witch of the West — that fundamentally altered one's perception of the hours.
Every second now felt sharper, louder, alive with hidden, terrible meaning. The hours were not a slow river; they were like a high-tension wire, vibrating with the potential for disaster.
The storm outside had quieted, but its ghost still lingered. Water trickled with a monotonous, maddening rhythm from the gutters, and the wind sighed through the iron balconies like a whisper of the dead — or perhaps the whisper of the thousands of witches, mages, and Lycans who'd fallen under the Duskbane banner over the centuries.
She could feel the pulse of magic in the very stones beneath her. It was a low, powerful thrumming, like a colossal invisible heart beating in the earth.
The old wards of Duskbane Estate — built not just by stone and mortar but by generations of powerful and secretive magic — were humming faintly. They were restless, not quite sure how to categorize the 'thing' that lay in the master bed.
Did they sense her resurrection? Were they confused that the old magic signature had returned, but the familiar, crushing weight of her almost adult soul that had replaced the youthful spark they'd guarded decades ago?
Careful not to shift the mattress and wake Sera, Lumira eased herself out of the bed. The heavy velvet covers fell from her shoulders in a whisper of expensive silk and down. The sudden cold air — heavy with the scent of old woodsmoke and damp earth — wrapped around her like silk dipped in frost, prickling the fine hairs on her arms.
Her bare feet curled in discomfort as they touched the cool polished black marble floor. She moved with a preternatural quiet and grace, every step deliberate. The White Witch of the West had been a master of stealth according to the novel, a creature accustomed to gliding through the deep shadows of her ancestral castle. She was shadow flowing into shadow.
At the far wall, between two arched windows overlooking the northern gardens, stood a seamless stretch of ivory stone. It was engraved with faint, almost invisible sigils — protective runes layered over geometric verification scripts — that would be utterly undetectable to the untrained eye, or even the eyes of most low-level mages. Only a powerful Duskbane would be able to recognize the intricate pattern of the family's highest-level defense.
Lumira paused before it, according to her knowledge from the novel. She then lifted her palm, pressing it flat against the cold stone, and whispered the Words of Verification in the ancient, guttural Duskbane tongue. The language was closer to incantation than speech, a dialect of power reserved for the most forbidden spells.
"Aethelred mihi. Sanguis mihi. Locus iste meus est"
Translation: "My will is my own. My blood is my own. This place is mine."
The runes then flared to life in response, not with a blinding explosion, but a soft, controlled silver and purple glow that pulsed once before dimming again into absolute invisibility. It was a silent, magical confirmation.
"Thank goodness it's still untouched," she breathed out, the faintest tremor of unadulterated relief threading through her voice.
The cold air turned her breath into a tiny, brief plume of white mist.
It was her secret vault, the true heart of her legacy.
In her first, doomed life, no one had known about this chamber — not her devoted butler, not her stern grandmother, not even Jaxon, the man she had loved and who had ultimately driven the first dagger into her reputation.
The enchantments layered over this vault were so complex, so intricately woven with ley line power diverted from the estate itself, that even the Council's best sorcerers, the arrogant, silver-robed Arch-Mages, would spend a lifetime trying - and gloriously failing - to unravel them.
Behind that innocent-looking wall lay everything she had hidden away from a world that feared and misunderstood her. There were dusty grimoires forbidden to her bloodline, relics from the devastating First Witch Wars, fragments of enchanted steel forged in dragon fire, vials of priceless phoenix ash, and detailed maps of the deepest ley lines that fed power into their land.
And deeper still, within the heart of the vault, lay her greatest and most terrible secret: a mirror wrapped in chains of silver and runes that pulsed like a living, caged heart. It was a thing of unimaginable power, capable of bending reality and seeing into the myriad timelines of the cosmos.
It was the only thing in this world Lumira truly feared.
But tonight, she did not seek what lay beyond that wall.
Tonight, she simply needed to breathe the cold air and remind herself of the scale of the power they had failed to bury.