The memory did not arrive on the gentle tide of sleep.
It invaded.
Ella was deep in the recuperative trance Aaron had taught her, a state between waking and dreaming where the mind could process the day's brutal training while the bond stabilized her overtaxed spirit. She floated in a warm, dark void, the only sensation the distant, comforting thrum of the mansion's heart and the faint, cooling ache in her shoulders from holding nine perfect flames.
Then, the void tore.
It was a silent, psychic rip, like velvet being shredded from the inside. The comforting dark dissolved into a searing, overwhelming rush of sensation.
Sight: A sky that was not blue, but a layered, blinding tapestry of gold, white, and molten silver. Not a sky one looked at, but a sky one swam through. Clouds weren't vapor; they were condensed light, solid enough to bank against.
Sound: A roar that was not wind, but the song of solar plasma and bent gravity. It was a deafening, glorious symphony of velocity.
Touch: A pressure so immense it was ecstasy. Not the pressure of air, but of reality itself flowing over and under her form. And beneath that, the profound, bone-deep rightness of massive, powerful limbs extending from her back, catching the currents of creation.
Smell: Ozone, yes, but also starlight, cold void, and the distant, iron-rich scent of a world far below.
Taste: Freedom. Pure, unadulterated, terrifying freedom.
She wasn't dreaming of flying. She was remembering it.
The memory had a physical anchor: a white-hot agony between her shoulder blades, a tearing, reshaping agony that was also a birth. In the memory, she didn't fight it. She embraced it, screaming not in pain but in triumph as something that had been folded away—sealed, locked, forgotten—exploded back into its true form.
Her wings.
Not the delicate, luminous constructs of energy she had manifested in her room. These were real. Vast, powerful, and utterly, physically part of her. Their structure was impossible—both feather and membrane, solid and light, layered with scales that shimmered like abalone and veins that carried not blood, but liquid sunlight. They were weapons and instruments and shields, and they were hers.
She banked in the memory, a movement as instinctive as breathing. The world below was not Earth. It was a patchwork realm of impossible geography—floating mountains tethered by glowing ley-lines, forests of crystal, seas of mercury reflecting the chaotic sky. And in the distance, a citadel of obsidian and pearl, its spires reaching up as if to claw her from the sky.
Belonging. A sense of home so profound it was a physical ache in the memory-her's chest. This was her domain. This sky. This fractured, beautiful, dangerous world.
Then, the memory twisted.
A voice. Not heard, but etched directly into her soul. It was not one voice, but a chorus, cold, solemn, and heavy with regret.
"The Convergence cannot hold. The Pattern frays. You are the fracture. You must be unmade."
Panic, sharp and venomous. Not her own panic in the bed, but the panic of her past self, reverberating down the years. A vision of the same glorious wings being bound by chains of singing silver light. The chains didn't hurt. They felt like… sorrow given form. A necessary, devastating mercy.
A face swam into focus. Not Aaron's. A face of androgynous beauty and unbearable age, eyes like dying stars. Love and grief warring in that gaze.
"You will forget. You will sleep. You will be born small, and perhaps… perhaps you can learn to be a note in the symphony, not the shattering chord. It is the only way to save you from them. And to save them from you."
A choice was offered. In the memory, she understood it. To fight meant annihilation—for her, and for the world below she loved. To accept meant dissolution, amnesia, a reduction into something that could hide.
The grief that followed the choice was an ocean, and she drowned in it.
The memory-her reached out one last time, her magnificent wings already dimming, folding in on themselves, the substance of them dissolving into light, then into memory, then into nothing. She watched the spires of the citadel recede, not because she was flying away, but because she was falling—falling out of that sky, out of that life, into a long, designed darkness.
A final, whispered thought from her past self echoed into the void:
Remember later.
The memory snapped.
Ella's body jackknifed in her bed, a silent scream locked in her throat. She wasn't breathing. Her lungs refused to work. Her back was a continent of fire, every nerve ending shrieking with the phantom pain of wings being ripped away. The bond inside her convulsed, not in alarm, but in recognition—a wild, keening note of homecoming and loss so acute it was metaphysical.
Light—real, mundane dawn light—seared her eyes as she finally gasped, sucking in air like a drowning woman. She was drenched in cold sweat, her hands fisted in the sheets so tightly the fabric threatened to tear. The wing-scars on her back weren't just tingling; they were burning, etched lines of ice and fire beneath her skin.
The door to her chamber burst open. Aaron stood silhouetted in the doorway, not in sleepwear, but fully dressed, as if he'd been waiting for this. His face was pale, his eyes wide with an emotion she'd never seen in him before: dread.
"Ella." Her name was a command and a question.
She couldn't speak. She could only stare at him, her eyes reflecting the dying echo of a sky that wasn't there.
He crossed the room in an instant, his hand hovering over her shoulder, not touching. He was reading the energy, the chaotic aftershocks rolling off her. "A memory cascade," he breathed. "I felt the spike through the mansion's wards. It was… tectonic."
"I had wings," she choked out, the words raw. "Real ones. I could fly. There was… another world. A citadel. They made me forget. They made me choose to forget."
Aaron went utterly still. The color drained completely from his face. For a long moment, he simply looked at her, and she saw the Warden's unshakable certainty crumble into dust, replaced by the horrified awe of a scholar who has just found proof of a myth that should have stayed buried.
"The Lost Aerie," he whispered, the words sounding forbidden. "The Citadel of the First Dawn. It's a legend. A fairy tale the High Council uses to scare novices. A realm where the primal forces—solar, lunar, elemental—once converged in physical forms. Beings of pure potential. They were said to have been… dismantled. At the end of the God-Wars. For the stability of all realities."
He knelt by the bed, his analytical mind wrestling with the impossible. "If what you saw is true… you weren't just given a sun-fire legacy, Ella. You weren't just chosen by a mansion's covenant. You… you are a fragment of one of those primal forces. A Convergence Being, sealed and reduced, cast into the cycle of mortal reincarnation to hide you. The Butterfly Covenant… it isn't awakening something new. It's peeling back the seal."
The implications exploded in the quiet room, more devastating than any flame. Her power, her bond, her rapid progression—it wasn't unprecedented genius. It was remembered divinity.
The fear that followed was colder than any she had ever known. It wasn't fear of the clans, or the Conclave. It was the fear of what she might truly be. And the terror of what would happen when forces older than vampires, older than human magic, discovered that a living piece of forbidden cosmic history was walking among them, slowly waking up.
Her back gave another fierce throb. This time, it wasn't pain or longing.
It was impatience.
Aaron saw the shift in her eyes. He grasped her hand, his grip firm, anchoring her to the now, to the stone room, to him. "Listen to me. This changes everything. And nothing. You are still Ella. This memory is a piece of data, a part of your history. It does not dictate your future. But we must be infinitely more careful. The clans have myths too. If they even suspect… the Conclave won't be about judgment. It will be about harvesting."
The word hung in the air, ugly and final.
Ella slowly unclenched her fists, forcing her breathing to steady. The vision of the silver chains binding her wings was fresh in her mind. A choice made to protect. Now, she faced another choice.
She looked at Aaron, her eyes clear despite the storm within. "I don't want to forget again," she said, her voice gaining strength. "I don't want to be unmade or hidden. I want to know what I am."
Aaron nodded, a grim resolve settling over his features. The Warden was back, but his purpose had transformed. He was no longer just preparing a student for a trial. He was preparing a phoenix, unaware of its own true fire, for a revelation that could shatter worlds.
"Then we prepare for more than a Conclave," he said. "We prepare for a reckoning. And you, Ella, must learn to walk the razor's edge between the girl you are and the power you remember being. If you tip too far in either direction…"
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
Outside, the sun finished rising, casting ordinary, golden light into the room. It felt flat. Pale. A cheap imitation of the glorious, layered sky still burning behind Ella's eyes.
The memory had receded, but it had left its mark. Not just in her mind, but in her soul. The chrysalis of her mortal life had developed a deep, fundamental crack.
And from within, something ancient and glorious was beginning to remember how to see the light.