The first thing Caera learned was that silence did not mean safety.
There were moments—rare, fragile moments—when the battlefield slept. When the sky dimmed from burning crimson to a dull, bruised violet. When the screams faded into echoes that clung to memory rather than air. In those moments, the survivors would breathe as though granted permission to exist.
Those moments never lasted.
Caera learned this before she learned her own name.
As an infant, she did not cry often. Not because she was calm—but because something in her understood that sound invited death. The women who carried her from ruin to ruin whispered about it in fear, crossing themselves with trembling fingers.
"She watches," one murmured, staring into Caera's unblinking eyes.
Another replied, barely audible, "She remembers things she's never lived."
They did not know how close they were to the truth.
The sanctuary was not holy.
They called it that because the word refuge had lost its meaning. It was a half-buried fortress carved into the bones of a mountain, its halls reinforced with wards etched by hands long since turned to dust. The stone smelled of damp iron and old prayers.
Caera grew there—if survival could be called growth.
The walls shook constantly, shedding dust like dead skin. Each tremor reminded them that the war was not outside the world—it was pressing in on it. Children learned to sleep through the sound of collapse. Adults learned to wake instantly, weapons already in hand.
Caera learned to walk holding onto sword hilts.
They gave her no toys.
Not because they were cruel—but because toys required imagination, and imagination required a future. What they gave her instead were shapes carved from wood: blades, shields, broken crowns. Lessons disguised as games.
"Again," the old warrior said, pushing the wooden sword back into her hands.
She was four.
Her arms trembled as she lifted it, the weight wrong for her small body. She staggered, nearly falling. The warrior did not help.
"If you fall," he said, voice like stone scraping stone, "you die."
Caera clenched her teeth and stood.
She did not understand the words fully—but she understood the tone. Final. Unforgiving. Like the world itself.
That night, her hands blistered. Her muscles burned. She lay awake on cold stone, staring at the ceiling while the fortress groaned around her. Somewhere deeper within the mountain, a child screamed from a nightmare and was abruptly silenced.
Caera did not cry.
She closed her eyes and dreamed of chains tightening around light.
The first time she killed, no one told her to.
The Outer Being had slipped through a weakened ward—just one, thin and starving, its form flickering like a dying shadow. It crept into the lower tunnels where the children slept, drawn by warmth, by life.
Caera woke before the alarms sounded.
Something in her chest pulled, sharp and urgent. She rose without fear, bare feet silent on the stone. The darkness parted for her as though it recognized her claim.
She found the creature crouched over a sleeping boy, its formless limb stretching toward his face.
Time slowed.
Caera did not scream.
She picked up the knife left carelessly by a guard—a real blade, chipped and dull. It felt heavy in her hand, but familiar, as though it had always belonged there.
She drove it forward.
The Outer Being shrieked—not in pain, but in denial. Light burst from the point of impact, raw and uncontrolled, tearing the creature apart from the inside. It dissolved into smoke that burned Caera's lungs and stung her eyes.
When the guards arrived, weapons raised, they found her standing alone amid drifting ash.
The boy slept on, unharmed.
Someone whispered, "She did it."
Another said, "At five.
No one asked if she was afraid.
That night, they stopped pretending she was a child.
Word spread quickly.
Not beyond the sanctuary—there was no beyond that mattered—but through the broken network of surviving strongholds and warbands. A child of divine blood. A girl who burned monsters from existence. A light born in ruin.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
People began to look at her differently. Not kindly. Not gently.
Expectantly.
They brought her wounded, begging her to heal them. When she couldn't, they turned away in disappointment. They brought her to battlefields still warm with death, urging her forward like a charm against extinction.
She grew accustomed to the weight of eyes.
At seven, she learned tactics.
At eight, how to endure pain without sound.
At nine, how to channel power without letting it consume her entirely.
Every lesson carved something away.
By ten, she understood that light was not warmth.
It was pressure.
Sometimes, late at night, when exhaustion softened the edges of her discipline, Caera felt something else—something distant but constant, like a pulse beneath reality.
Her parents.
She did not know their faces. But she felt their presence like a wound that never healed. When she reached for her power, it responded too eagerly, as though desperate to be used, to justify its existence.
Once, during meditation, she asked the question she had never voiced aloud.
Why me?
The answer did not come in words.
It came in pain.
Chains tightening around unseen light. Screams stretched into eternity. A sense of regret so vast it crushed her breath from her lungs.
Caera doubled over, gasping.
From that moment on, she stopped asking.
The world outside continued to rot.
Outer Beings adapted, growing more cunning, more cruel. They learned her presence, learned to retreat when they sensed her coming. Some began to hunt her, drawn not by hunger but by challenge.
Each encounter hardened her.
Each victory isolated her further.
She stopped eating with the others. Stopped speaking unless necessary. Her laughter—if it had ever existed—faded into something theoretical, like peace or mercy.
And yet.
Despite everything, she still believed in light.
Not because it was kind.
But because darkness had already taken everything else.
Far away, in the sealed prison beyond time, something shifted.
A tremor passed through the chains that bound the fated gods. Not freedom—but awareness. They felt her grow stronger. Felt her bleed. Felt her loneliness like a knife pressed against their own hearts.
And deeper still, where chaos coiled and waited, an ancient presence took notice.
The child had survived.
The war had found its center.
And fate, once broken, had begun to move again.