CHAPTER:2 Ashes in the Mirror
The office was silent, but Liam Carter's mind was a storm.
Wynna's name was scrawled across the autopsy report, filed under "Unsolved."
He'd already erased every trace of her name from the city's police database, but her face still lingered in the corners of his memory. Her eyes — the moment she realized she had died for the wrong man.
He stared at the security footage. Over and over.
She ran toward him.
She smiled.
She fell.
"Why?" he whispered.
The ring pulsed on his finger again, and for a split second, his reflection on the black screen wasn't his own.
It was a child's face—scared, scarred, alone.
And then it was gone.
Miles away, Elara stood at the market edge, clutching her bag of stolen herbs. The apothecary would never sell to someone like her — marked by frost-magic, hunted in two provinces.
But it wasn't the guards that chased her.
It was the dream. The fire. The ring.
And now, a man in black had begun following her.
Not a soldier. Not a thief.
Something else.
When she cornered him in an alley, he vanished. No sound. No trace.
Except for a symbol scratched into the wall — a crown cracked in half.
"What is happening to me?" she breathed, the silver ring glowing faintly beneath her glove.
In a chamber beneath the ruined cathedral, Aria Blake knelt before an ancient stone mask.
Around her, demon-fire shimmered in bowls of bone.
"They've awakened," she murmured, eyes closed. "Both of them."
Behind her, Damien Voss's eyes flickered open — and for the first time in weeks, he spoke.
"Shall I kill her?"
Aria smiled, twisting the black ring around her finger.
"No, not yet. She must see what he becomes. The boy from the orphanage needs to remember what made him strong."
That night, Liam dreamt of fire again.
But this time, the fire spoke back.
"One ring made you."
"The other will break you."
He awoke with blood in his mouth and frost on the windows.
The war hadn't begun yet.
But the monsters had started moving.