Sylara Thorne, Age 7 | Riftkeep
I found the relic on a day the sky bled fire.
They called it a Flamefall—when one of the upper isles fractured and drifted too near the sunline. Chunks of obsidian sky cracked off and rained molten stone over Riftkeep's outer wards. We were herded into the Lower Holds, beneath the fortress, where the real bones of the keep lay hidden in black dust and echo.
I slipped away. I don't remember planning it. Only the way my hands moved on their own, tracing glyphs I had not been taught. A door opened. A whisper followed.
Down there, beneath the stone heart of Riftkeep, the air pulsed differently. It was alive. The light didn't move right—it bent inward, as if drawn toward something unseen.
That's when I found it.
A relic wrapped in cold flame and sealed behind runes I instinctively knew. A hand-sized mirror, silver-rimmed, dark as still water. Not enchanted. Not dormant.
Breathing.
When I touched it, the runes didn't flare. They bowed.
A rush of images flooded me: wolves beneath eclipsed moons, a girl with white eyes standing in a forest of ash, symbols written in blood that shimmered orange-silver.
I dropped the mirror. It didn't fall. It waited. Hung in the air like it had a choice in the matter.
That night, I heard her voice for the first time.
Not aloud. Not fully formed.
But inside me.
Soft. Cold. Older than anything I'd known.
"I am your shadow. Your hunger. Your last howl."
---
After that, things changed.
I could taste lies. Feel them in my teeth.
When someone cast a fire-sigil near me, the runes twisted. Not broken—rewritten. I didn't try to do it. It just happened. My magic was not fire or air or even Hollow-touched.
It was echo. Emotion. Essence. Will.
I understood it one night while watching the ember-crows feed on dream-ash near the gates. They moved in patterns. Perfect geometry. But one twitched—stepped out of line—and the whole flock scattered, reacting to that one ripple.
That was my magic. Not casting flame. Not wielding power.
Rewriting the pattern underneath it.
I could make magic forget its purpose. I could make intention unravel.
I began to listen to the runes differently. They weren't just words—they were living veins. The world pulsed with them. I didn't just read them—I felt where they resisted, where they ached to change.
That's when I realized: my power wasn't flame at all.
It was unmaking.
Not destruction. Not chaos. Not even shadow.
But undoing—the breath before a word. The silence that follows.
---
When the Ash-Mothers wrote to the Riftkeep masters, I was summoned to the High Archive. They spoke of "fractures," of "unauthorized communion with deep-script."
I told them the truth.
"I didn't break your runes," I said. "They broke themselves. For me."
That silenced them more than any lie would have.
From then on, I was no longer permitted near the upper wards unsupervised. They assigned a watcher to me—an old warden with bone eyes and a mask carved from mirrorstone. He said nothing, but I felt his fear.
They were afraid of what I hadn't yet become.
Not a flameborne. Not a hollowbound.
But something between.
Something woven.
---
I dreamed of her more clearly now.
In dreams, I ran on all fours, my breath a ribbon of frost, stars snagged in my fur. I stood beneath ancient arches carved with Myrrh's sigil, howling through time itself. I saw a city in ruin, and a throne of teeth. A girl whose name I didn't know—but whose voice was mine.
When I woke, my bones ached.
And I whispered the name I had never been taught, yet always known.
"Nyx."
Something shifted.
The mirror I had hidden beneath my bed pulsed once, and the shadows in my room grew teeth.
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