Jiselle*
I dreamed of mirrors.
Not the kind that reflected–but the kind that showed things you were never meant to see.
In the dream, Eva stood barefoot in the infirmary hall. The walls were cracked, the sconces flickering, and every step she took echoed like it was beneath the earth. She reached out to a tall mirror leaning against the wall–dusty, old, the kind I remembered from the Academy’s archives.
Her reflection looked back.
But it wasn’t her.
It was me.
Not just me as I was–but me with eyes darker than they’d ever been, veins threaded with something silver and wrong. I was smiling in the mirror. Smiling like I knew something I shouldn’t,
Eva touched the glass.
The reflection blinked–and cracks spiderwebbed across the surface, slicing through my face.
She gasped.
And then I woke.
Not in my bed.
But on the floor.
Covered in sweat, breath rasping out of me like I’d run. The room was dim, shadows flickering from a low–burning candle. The tree was still in the corner–smaller now, like it had folded in on itself. But the bark still glowed faintly with that name.
Aedric.
The air tasted like ash.
When I sat up, my stomach twisted–not from nausea, but from something deeper. Like the child inside me had shifted. Like something in me had tilted, just a little, off balance.
The knock came seconds later,
Eva.
She didn’t say anything when she stepped inside. Just shut the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands. shaking slightly.
“You saw it too,” I said softly.
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She nodded. “Not a vision. Not one of my usual dreams. This was… something else.”
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “What did you see?”
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“A mirror,” she whispered. “And you. But not you. Your reflection didn’t follow me–it moved first. It looked right at me.”
We sat in silence.
Something deep and hollow settled between us. Not fear exactly–but the kind of dread that coils when you realize you’re being watched by something ancient. Something without form. Something that knows your name.
Before I could respond, Ethan slammed into the room, his hair tousled, his eyes wide. His clothes were soaked with sweat and splattered with ash.
“There’s been an attack,” he said, breathless.
“What?” Eva and I both stood.
“A village to the west–one of the old settlements. Just outside the leyline bend.”
I froze. “How bad?”
“Half burned. The others… I don’t even know how to explain it.” He rubbed at his face. “They said the wolves didn’t speak. Didn’t growl. They just screamed.”
“Screamed?” Eva repeated, her voice a whisper, but it felt like it echoed too loud in the stillness around us.
Ethan nodded. His jaw clenched, his shoulders tense like he was bracing for something worse than the words themselves. “Didn’t shift. Didn’t growl. Didn’t speak. Just screamed.”
Something inside me curled in on itself. My throat went dry, and I didn’t know if it was fear or recognition. But I knew.
Not in theory.
Not in warning.
In my gut.
It had something to do with the name burned into the tree in my room. The one that pulsed like a heartbeat beneath bark.
Aedric.
I pressed a hand to my stomach without thinking. The gesture wasn’t for comfort–it was instinct. Protective. Terrified. Because if that name could call wolves into madness… what could it do to something half–formed and still learning what it meant to be alive?
The conversation moved on around me, but I drifted from it. The moment frayed at the edges, and by the time the group began preparing for the journey west, I couldn’t bring myself to follow. began preparing for the journey west,
Nate didn’t come that morning.
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Not when we gathered supplies.
Not when Eva and Ethan left to track the leyline fractures near the site of the attack.
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Not even when Bastain came by to check on me, quietly asking if I’d had any more visions. He didn’t push when I said no. He just gave me a look–one of those unreadable ones like he already knew I was lying–and left a few herbs and a scroll
on the table.
1 stayed behind. Alone.
The common room was quiet, lit only by the flicker of a single violet candle that refused to burn evenly. Its flame sputtered now and then, throwing light in warped, jittering shapes across the stone walls. I stared at it until my eyes ached.
Still, no sign of Nate.
He was pulling away again.
Not obviously. Not cruelly. But I didn’t need him to say it. I felt it through the bond–the distance, the wall he’d built not
out of hate, but out of fear. Not broken. Just buried.
He thought he was protecting me. Or maybe he didn’t know what else to do. The truth was, neither did I.
But I didn’t want a shield. I didn’t want silence masquerading as safety.
I needed his voice in the dark. His fire in my cold. His hands to remind me I wasn’t going through this alone.
Instead, I had shadows.
Instead, I had that name burning in the back of my mind and a bond that felt like it was dimming by the hour.
So I left the common room and walked the narrow hall to the southern chamber Bastain had carved into the base of the
cliff. It was the place meant for stillness. Meant for listening. He’d made it himself after the Academy fell–a meditation circle directly above the leyline, where the energy of the land ran strongest. Where the old magics still hummed.
The floor was smooth stone, carved in gentle spirals, the center marked by a sigil too old to name. I stepped barefoot onto
it and lowered myself to the floor, crossing my legs, placing my palms against the center of the spiral.
The warmth met me instantly. Gentle. Steady. Like a heartbeat beneath my hands.
I closed my eyes.
- in.
Out.
Just breathe, I told myself.
Don’t think of the third rune.
Don’t think of the tree.
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Don’t think of screaming wolves.
Don’t think of a child who might not belong to just you.
Think of the pulse.
The one that meant you were still here.
imagined the baby inside me–not fire, not veil, not Sovereign or Gatekeeper or Hollow–born. Just a soul. Small.
Unformed. Soft.
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But even as I tried to hold that image, I could feel it shifting beneath the surface of my skin. Something was changing. Not just around me–but inside me.
The bond was no longer just a thread between me and Nate.
It wasn’t even a tether to the child anymore.
It was a network now. A circuit. A hum through my bones that stretched out toward the leyline, toward the runes, toward the hollow places in the world that had been sleeping until now.
It scared me.
Because it meant this wasn’t just magic anymore.
This was invitation.
And I didn’t remember sending it.
I sat like that for what could’ve been an hour. Maybe two. My mind floating somewhere between memory and fear. Between hope and dread.
Until-
A voice.
Not outside.
Not in the corridor.
Not in any language I knew.
But in me.
Not a whisper.
Not a scream.
Just… truth,
“Your flame is not your own.”
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Chapter 192
My eyes snapped open.
And everything was wrong.
The soft leyline blue beneath my palms had shifted. Not like it had dimmed–but like something new had taken its place.
The color was deeper now. Not crimson. Not blood.
Violet.
Edged in gold.
The same shade that glowed from the tree in my room.
The same shade that marked the third rune burned into Ethan’s skin.
I scrambled back from the center of the spiral, my heart hammering like a war drum, breath caught in my throat.
The stone where my hands had been shimmered like water held still too long. It rippled once. Then again. Then something began to emerge.
A shape. A mark.
Not a rune.
Not something I’d seen before.
Not even something I felt I was meant to understand.
It flickered like fire, but it wasn’t burning the floor. It was becoming the floor. Woven in. Etched like a scar waiting to
reopen.
I reached for my chest, my hand clenching over my heart.
“Your flame is not your own.”
Then whose?
Then whose?
But the silence gave no answer.
Just stillness.
And then, in the distance, so faint I almost missed it–a sound.
A crack of thunder.
Not from the sky.
From beneath the mountain.
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A warning.
Not of something waiting to be born.
But something demanding to be let in.
And I…
I didn’t know how to stop it.
Or worse–if I even could.
Sara Lili is a daring romance writer who turns icy landscapes into scenes of fiery passion. She loves crafting hot love stories while embracing the chill of Iceland’s breathtaking cold.
