Two Flames, One Shadow
NYX
The first time she tasted blood, it wasn't her own.
It was warm and coppery on her tongue, a splatter from the general's blade as he slit a man's throat beside her. She was thirteen, trembling in her too-large armor, watching as life drained from a body like water from a cracked bowl.
He had told her to watch. He had told her to learn.
And so she had.
Nyx of House Valeria died that day. Not with flame, not with glory—but in silence.
What remained was shadow.
A girl who never flinched. Who never cried. Who never asked why the gods had left her behind. She only whispered to the fire that lived in her veins, let it burn without a name.
The general raised her like a blade. He shaped her with bruises and silence, carved her into something elegant and brutal and obedient.
But beneath the stillness, the fire never went out.
Someday, she would return what he gave her. Someday, she would burn down everything he built.
And when she did, she would not mourn.
She would not look back.
KAI
The spirit first spoke to him when he was six.
A whisper on the wind. A shimmer in the air when no one else was watching. It didn't speak in words—it pulsed, like breath through the earth, like water through stone.
He didn't tell Hailey, the woman who raised him. She already worried too much.
She called him gentle. Special. Too soft for the world outside their little hut on the edge of the eastern wilds. But Kai knew that wasn't true.
He wasn't soft.
He was just… listening.
By twelve, he could sense things no one else could. Grief trailing behind the dying like smoke. Anger folded into the ground where a man had once fought and bled. Whispers in the trees that warned when the rogues came too close.
He didn't call it power. Power meant danger. Power meant being taken.
He called it spirit. The old kind. The kind that lived before packs and kings and laws.
But even the spirit could not protect him forever.
The night the rogues came, it screamed.
Not in words. In terror. In fire that had no flame. In the tremble of his bones as hands seized him and dragged him into the dark.
That night, the bond had not yet stirred. The name Ramon meant nothing to him.
But something deeper had felt the shift.
A tether—long buried, dormant—had begun to wake.
TOGETHER
One burned in silence. One listened in shadows.
One was forged in war. The other hidden in peace.
But fate, cruel and unrelenting, was moving.
And soon, two broken souls would collide—
Not as saviors.
Not as saints.
But as weapons waiting to be drawn.