"The first breath was stolen. The first scream never came."
---
The sky tore itself open the night Sylara Thorne was born.
It began with a whisper — not of wind, but of something older. Something beneath breath, beneath time. A thread pulled taut across the heavens snapped, and the Moonvein Eclipse unfurled like an infected wound above the Upper Realm, spilling silver-orange light across the broken archipelago of floating isles.
The clouds bled backward. The stars recoiled. And high above the dreaming world, in a forgotten temple bound in silence and ash, a woman screamed her last.
She had fled the inquisitors. She had fled her own kind. She had fled the truth that bled in her womb.
Aeryn Thorne collapsed beneath the rune-carved ceiling of the Temple of Veyr. The old stone flared dimly around her — dead runes twitching as if called back to life for the first time in centuries. Her hands, slick with blood and frostbite, cradled her belly with the desperation of one who knew she would not see the child's eyes.
The birth was not a tearing of flesh. It was a severing of soul.
The child came wrapped not in blood, but in glow — a cold, spectral shimmer that danced in the silence as if it had always waited for this hour. The runes in the ceiling pulsed in answer, casting their dying light upon the newborn.
Aeryn saw the mark on the child's back — a ring of interwoven runes surrounding a wolf whose mouth devoured its own tail — and wept, not for the child, but for what must come.
The child opened her eyes. They were not human.
Amethyst irises laced with runes stared back at the world for the first time. And the child did not cry. Did not blink. Only watched.
Above her, the final rune flared to blinding life — and cracked.
The temple groaned. The protective wards collapsed. The sky outside fractured, silent lightning spiraling down through the clouds like veins beneath thin skin.
And then... quiet. Not peace — something worse. A hush that sank into the bones of the world.
---
They came three days later. Rune-scavengers. Thieves. Stray disciples turned relic-hunters. They expected to find old glyphs, maybe bones, maybe buried gods. They did not expect the scentless ash. The preserved silence. The eerie calm that hummed beneath their skin the moment they crossed the shattered threshold.
They found the mother's body already faded — not rotted. Absorbed. No heat. No rot. Only a shape scorched into the floor like a warning sigil.
And the child — untouched. Unaged. Eyes open. Watching them.
The mark on her back glowed faintly as they tried to lift her. One man's hands blistered. Another wept without reason.
And the child, curled inside a cradle of shattered stone, her skin marked with something no one dared name.
They did not speak as they took her. The mark on her back — a haloed wolf biting its own tail in runes — shimmered faintly as they carried her from the ruin. One of them tried to cover it with a charmcloth. The cloth burned to nothing.
By the time they delivered her to the Hidden House of Orphaned Flame, the child had not blinked once.
They named her Sylara.
She never answered to it. She only watched. Waited. Dreamed.
They never told her where she came from.
By then, the rune had already sunk beneath her skin.
---
She grew in silence.
The House of Orphaned Flame taught the broken, the cursed, the forgotten. But not her. The sisters whispered of the child who never laughed. The child who never slept. Sylara's dreams did not begin when she closed her eyes — they began when she opened them.
She spoke in tongues no scroll bore. She scratched patterns into stone that moved when no one watched. She walked beneath the moon and sang to it without knowing why.
They feared her. Not for what she did — but for what she uncovered. The priests burned her bedding thrice. The fourth time, she burned it for them — with a thought.
They exiled her to Riftkeep by the time she was seven.
A floating fragment barely tethered to the realm. Cold. Forgotten. It suited her.
She preferred the cliffs. The silence. The sky.
She drew symbols in the dirt with her fingers until the dirt responded. She whispered to birds that had no wings. She dreamed of wolves that did not breathe.
And every so often... she heard it. The howling.
A low, mournful call. Not from the wind. Not from the land. But from within.
It wasn't lonely. It wasn't sad. It was hungry. And it knew her name.
---
Now, on the nineteenth turn of Sylara Thorne's cursed life, the Moonvein Eclipse returns.
The sky cracks again.
The silence begins to stir.
And deep beneath the layers of flesh and rune, something begins to awaken.
It bares its teeth in the dark.
And it waits.