Chapter 1: The Girl with Smoke in Her Eyes
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The desert night was heavy with silence — not the gentle hush of sleep, but the kind of silence that listened.
The stars hung unnaturally still over the cracked bones of the Khadari dunes, and the crescent moon burned with an amber glow, as if it too bore witness to what stirred in the temple below. The air was thick with incense, bloodroot, and the faint metallic tang of prophecy.
Inside the last chamber of the Temple of Vahni, twelve priestesses stood in a perfect circle, robed in ash-white linen. Their heads were bowed low, shadows cast from their torches dancing across the ancient mural behind them — the mural of a woman whose face had been worn away by time, and yet whose eyes still seemed to shimmer with grief.
In the center of the circle, atop black stone veined with starlight, a girl was being born.
The midwife whispered sacred syllables as she caught the newborn in her arms, and for a moment, no one breathed.
There was no cry.
Only the slow, deliberate blink of the child — and the strange, colorless mist clouding her eyes.
"Is she blind?" one of the younger priestesses whispered, her voice tight with fear.
"No," said the High Flamekeeper, stepping forward. Her voice was a low rasp, like wind over coals. "She sees… but not us."
The child turned her head toward the wall — toward the forgotten mural.
Then she opened her mouth and spoke.
Not a cry. Not a wail.
A name.
One name. One syllable.
"…Kael."
The torches flickered. The stone beneath them trembled, as if the name had awakened something long buried beneath the temple. Several of the priestesses gasped and stumbled back.
"That name…" one of them whispered, her face drained of all color. "That name was erased from the Archives of Fire. Seven centuries ago."
The High Flamekeeper stared at the child.
Her eyes narrowed. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She had heard that name once — in a dream, in another life, in a moment stolen from fate.
"This girl," she said, her voice nearly inaudible. "She's not just a seer."
"She is the Echo."
And outside, in the dead night sky, the stars shifted — ever so slightly — to mark the return of something the world had sworn to forget.
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End of Chapter 1
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