I do not remember my mother's face, only the scent of burning pine and the soft wail of wind through broken windows. I remember the sky that night—bruised indigo veined with orange lightning, like a wound bleeding light. They said I came to the House of the Orphaned Flame during a storm the old runes did not predict. That alone marked me.
I was three gleams old. Small. Silent. Wrapped in a shroud that felt older than my skin. I did not cry. The others did. I watched.
The House sat perched like a forgotten relic on the lowest sky-isle tethered to the Upper Realm, just above the Hollow Below. Its silhouette was sharp against the stormlight: towers like cracked fingers, windows like unblinking eyes. It was once a temple—now it was home for the unclaimed, the unwanted, the too-strange-to-keep.
Inside, everything smelled of dust and candlewax and the ash of old fires. The Ash-Mothers wore robes of iron-threaded gray, their faces half-covered with runes of silence. They never raised their voices. They didn't need to. The walls listened for them.
It had once been a temple, before the Sundering — tall spires of white-veined obsidian, prayer-rooms filled with floating candles and memory-fountains, holy alcoves for seers who sang to the stars. Now it was a place for what the world no longer wanted: broken bloodlines, forbidden magic, forgotten children.
They called it a haven. But no one arrived there by choice.
The air was different in the Lower Isles — thick with murmuring winds and ash motes that glowed when you whispered truth. The sky was darker, painted in bruised purples and metallic greens, and the sun barely reached this far down. Beneath the orphanage's iron stilts was only the black velvet of the Hollow, endless and staring. Some said you could hear the gods weeping from it on storm nights.
Inside the stonebones of the House, shadows lived like memories: half-wild, half-sorrowful.
The first thing they told me was this: You will forget what you were. You will become what we shape.
But I didn't forget. Not really.
They placed me in the Eastern Dormitory. It was coldest there, a long hall with cracked stone beds and one narrow window that bled red light during dusk. The other children kept away. I did not mind. There was always a hum in my bones. A warmth beneath my ribs, like something breathing inward.
I used to sit with my back to the wall and watch the others sleep. I liked the way their dreams curled from their mouths like smoke. I could almost see their fears, their secrets.
The daily rites were rituals of rhythm. Wake at the bell. Kneel at the runewell. Dip fingers into the cold flame. Speak no lie. Breathe no word without purpose. Shadowbread. Duskfruit. Silence.
But for me, everything felt... out of step. The runes shimmered too brightly when I traced them. The candles flickered when I passed. Once, I whispered to a puddle and it whispered back. I told no one.
There were other children, of course. Twenty-three of them then. Some were strange in their own right.
Mireth was the closest I had to a friend. She sang in her sleep, three voices at once. Her hair smelled like stormflowers. She said I made the air taste like salt and endings. One day, she touched my hand and said, "You hum backwards, like time." The next week, she fell from the East Tower. She survived. Her voice didn't.
Corran was the blood-stitcher. He thought he was fearless. He mocked my silence, threw shadows at my feet, once locked me in the Rune Pit. But the runes turned to me. One inked itself into my skin. Corran wouldn't meet my eyes after that.
The Quiet Circle tried to curse me. I watched them draw their symbols in spit and ash under moonless sky. I did not stop them. In the morning, they were marked with mirror-runes. Reversed. One girl lost her name. Another could no longer lie.
They feared me. I did not know why.
----
There were other things. Whisper-things.
Mirrors cracked when I looked too long.
Dreams flickered like flames.
Sometimes I would feel her—the warmth in my chest, the silver-orange pulse behind my eyes. A presence. A protector. A watching hunger. I did not know her name, only the scent she left behind: moonlight, iron, and frost.
The Ash-Mothers warned me to fear the Hollow. But I felt it call to me in sleep.
I asked one of them once: "Why do the walls whisper my name?"
She did not answer. She only marked a rune on her tongue and bled ash.
By the time I was seven, I knew I would never belong. I wandered places I shouldn't. I spoke to shadows. I carved runes no one had taught me. My silence was not emptiness—it was waiting.
The warmth in my soul grew teeth. I began to dream of wolves.
The Ash-Mothers convened with Warden Voss behind locked doors. I heard only fragments.
"She remembers."
"The old blood stirs."
"We must send her to Riftkeep."
And that night, when the stars blinked in the wrong order, I felt her rise inside me fully for the first time.
Nyx.
Not yet seen. Not yet named.
But waiting.
Breathing.
Mine.