“Have you ever forgotten your own name?”
“Has a wound ever bled gold?”
“Have you kissed the dark and not recoiled?”
“I don’t—” My voice falters. “No. I do not know. None of that makes sense.”
“Neither do you,” one of them says. “Yet here you are.”
“I didn’t ask to be,” I snap, before I can stop myself.
A long, humming, awful silence. One of the flames behind me sputters. Another flares. Something shifts in the runes beneath my feet, and I feel it like heat licking the edge of my spine. But it doesn’t burn. It just waits.
“You feel nothing,” says the first voice again. “And yet everything listens.”
One by one, the hooded figures step back.
None turn. None speak again.
The central brazier flares blue.
And from the shadows, a different voice says—flat and final—
“She does not burn. But she is not unkindled.”
The room exhales. The flames dim. And the door behind me opens again.
I don’t move. My legs feel like they belong to someone else. My chest is tight. My skin prickles with heat that isn’t heat, like the afterglow of lightning or the moment right before a burn that never comes.
She does not burn. But she is not unkindled.
I don’t know what the fuck that means, and frankly I don’t really want to. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it feels like a line drawn in ash. Like someone etched it into the record books of this place and underlined it twice.
Not one of them. Notnotone of them either. Just wrong enough to be noticed. I exhale slowly and step backward. One foot, then another. No one calls after me. No one follows.
I make my way back to the big stone door, The brazier flames are dim now, casting long, warped shadows across the black floor. The seven figures are already retreating to the benches along the outer walls, their robes folding into the dark like wings.
By the time I reach the threshold, it’s like they were never there. The hall outside is still empty. Still cold. I lean against the wall just past the arch and scrub a hand down my face. I wasn’t touched. I wasn’t harmed. But I feel… unmade. Like their words carved me open in places I didn’t know were soft.
I don’t know how long I stand there, but it’s long enough that I start replaying the questions in my head.
Have you ever forgotten your own name?
Has your shadow ever spoken back?
I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to turn around and scream that none of this makes any damn sense.
But instead, I whisper, “What the hell are you people?”
The wall doesn’t answer. Neither do the flames. But I swear—for one terrible second—I feel something hum behind my ribs.
Not heat. Not pain. Pressure.
Like something in me is waking up. Or waiting.
I hear the footsteps before I see him. Not the hard-soled echo ofguards or the deliberate sweep of Caziel’s quiet power. This is something softer. Sharper. Almost amused. I lift my head just as he rounds the corner—tall, lean, dressed in storm-colored robes with bronze cuffs and a braid in his white hair so precise it makes my own messy curls feel like an insult.
“I’m heading back to my…” dungeon? Chamber? Hotel suite?
