The forest whispered her name.
Or maybe it was the wind through the dead trees — hissing, broken, scorched by the fire she couldn't remember lighting.
Seren ran anyway.
Barefoot. Blood on her hands. Smoke in her hair. The air behind her still shimmered from the heat she'd unleashed.
Ashgrave was gone.
Nothing left but blackened bones and the silence of things no longer breathing.
Her heart pounded like it was trying to escape her chest. She didn't know where her feet were taking her, only that she had to keep going — because if she stopped, she'd remember what she'd done.
> She'd screamed.
The soldiers had laughed.
Then the sky turned gold — and they turned to ash.
The power had come from inside her, but not of her. Something ancient had cracked open inside her veins. Something that didn't belong in a girl raised in mud and ruin.
She collapsed by the edge of a stream, gasping, trembling. The reflection in the water wasn't hers.
Golden eyes.
Scorched skin.
Faint outlines of wings behind her — just shadows, flickering and gone.
> "What am I?" she whispered, her voice hoarse.
The answer came not in words — but in pain.
Her shoulder burned. She pulled down the torn fabric of her tunic and saw a mark glowing beneath her skin: a circular sigil, edged with fire and written in dragon runes she couldn't read.
It pulsed with her heartbeat.
It wasn't a wound.
It was a brand.
---
Night fell like a curtain of ice.
Seren hid in the hollow of a dead tree, wrapping herself in the cloak of a soldier she hadn't meant to kill. The forest was too quiet — no birds, no bugs, no howling wolves. Just the faint hum of plague-ridden silence spreading from the west.
And yet... something stirred in the roots below.
> "Firechild..."
The whisper was not hers.
A dream. A memory. A voice wrapped in thunder and sadness.
> "The Thorned Crown must be broken."
Her eyes flew open.
In the sky above the treetops, something moved — wings. Not her own. Vast, rotting, and filled with smoke. Not a dragon. Not a bird. Something worse.
A Blightbeast. Twisted by plague. Drawn to heat. Drawn to blood.
It circled once, then screamed.
And dove.
Seren had no time to think. She ran.
Branches clawed at her skin. Roots grabbed her ankles. Her breath burned her lungs.
> You can't outrun it, something inside her warned. You have to burn it.
But she didn't know how. The fire had come once — like a storm, a scream, a loss too heavy to carry. Now it was gone.
The beast crashed through the trees behind her, snarling. One wing broken. Its eyes glowing white with infection.
Seren tripped.
The beast lunged—
And a sword flashed in the dark.
Steel met bone.
The creature howled, twisted, then crumpled.
A figure stood over it, cloaked in deep gray, breathing heavily. Seren reached for a stone, ready to fight—
But then the figure turned.
Eyes the color of winter fire. Fangs half-bared. A vampire. A royal.
> "You don't know what you are," he said, voice low.
> "Stay away," Seren spat, lifting the rock.
But he just stared at her mark.
> "I'm not here to kill you," the vampire said. "I'm here to make sure you don't destroy everything.