Sylara Thorne, Age 7
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I never knew why Riftkeep's halls echoed even when no one walked them.
Stone doesn't whisper. But this place did.
And lately… it was whispering to me.
I'd begun to sense things in the world that others didn't. Not with sight or sound, but through my blood. A slow, strange attunement to the air—like I could feel the shape of something old folding itself around me.
Magic, they said, was structure. Flame followed command. Runes bound chaos. Even the Hollow—terrifying and vast—had logic. But what stirred in me? It refused structure. It was not learned. It remembered.
When I touched the stone at Riftkeep's heart, the walls didn't resist my magic. They listened.
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When flameborn children turned seven, they were given their rune-name. A sigil burned into the skin beneath their ribs that tethered their magic to order. Without it, they might fracture, or worse—open to the Hollow.
My ceremony was to be held beneath the obsidian roots of the keep, where the Flameborne rites were old, etched in divine ash. There, one of the Emberlords would brand my name into the weave.
But what if… I had no name that could be bound?
No sigil would settle in my mind when I tried to draw it in the air. The runes buckled under my touch. They weren't rejecting me. They were afraid.
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Three gleams before the rite, I found a book in the Archivium. Hidden behind hollowed-out histories, it wasn't made of paper. It was stitched skin—old, gray, and whisper-warm. The Book of Whispering Flesh.
I never meant to read it. But it opened for me. Its words weren't in script but in pulses, like language woven into heartbeat and bone.
From it, I learned of Myrrh, the Dream-Wolf—goddess of wild magic and forbidden futures. It told me of the children shemarked. Not by blood or fire, but by soul.
Marked not for power. But for memory.
They were dream-bound. Flame-woven. Bearers of Nyx.
I wasn't supposed to read that book.
But the book wanted to be read.
That night, the Ash-Mothers summoned me.
"Sit, child," said Mother Kelhara. "You've been seen."
There was fear behind her veil. Not anger. Not reprimand. Dread.
She spoke of the fallen royal bloodlines—families who had once ruled the Upper Realm through divine right, blood-oaths made to gods now dead. Some of them had merged with the divine. And when those gods fell… their blood didn't.
"It resurfaces. In dreams. In runes that warp," she said, her voice trembling. "In you."
I realized then: I wasn't just different.
I was descended from something lost.
Or worse—something still waiting.
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The Riftguard began watching me closely.
Not openly. But I felt them.
Their mirrored masks hovered at the corners of halls I wasn't supposed to walk. Their presence pressed on my lungs like smoke. Not many children drew their attention. Only threats. Only relics.
I overheard an instructor whispering:
"She bears the wild rune. Myrrh's trace. If she awakens, we will not be able to stop her."
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Magic bloomed in me in strange ways.
I no longer had to speak to break a rune's lock. I only had to wish. I once accidentally silenced a boy's voice for a day by feeling his lie. I didn't know how I did it.
Even Riftkeep's fire—normally obedient and bright—twisted near me. Turned silver at the edges. Flared without fuel.
When I asked the Ash-Mothers why, they said:
"Flame has memory. Yours remembers the beginning."
I didn't know what that meant until I stood beneath the sealed arches of the Hall of Burnt Names and heard the voice again.
Nyx.
Not a word. Not a name. But a feeling.
Of fur in snow. Of teeth in shadow. Of stars bleeding into the sky.
The voice inside me didn't speak in language.
It spoke in hunger. In protection. In promise.
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On the day of the binding, I stood in the pit, bare-chested, arms splayed as the Emberlord raised his brand. The other children watched from the red-arched balconies, their own names still glowing faintly in their skin.
The brand came down—
And the rune shattered.
The metal exploded in the Emberlord's hand.
Screams. Fire. Chaos. The ritekeeper's staff combusted. One of the walls cracked with a sound like thunder.
But I didn't move.
The fire circled me, silver-orange, as if dancing to an old memory.
When the dust cleared, I heard the Riftguard speak to each other in their unvoiced tongue.
"She is Unbindable."
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I wasn't named that gleam.
And that was the moment they began to fear me truly.
The girl whose magic would not obey.
The child with a god-wolf sleeping inside her soul.
The flame not cast but called.
And somewhere deep in the Hollow,
something old turned its gaze toward me.
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