Selene
The pain was different this time.
Not the sharp, sudden shock of the mark's awakening—but something slower, deeper, like her bones had begun to remember lives that weren't hers.
She knelt in a circle of runes, carved into the stone with Kael's blade. The torchlight danced along the lines, flickering like it feared what it illuminated.
Kael stood just beyond the edge.
"This magic," Selene said hoarsely, "it feels like… a cage."
He nodded once. "That's what it is. You are the lock. I'm trying to teach you how to hold the key."
Selene closed her eyes.
And for a moment, she wasn't there.
She was standing in the middle of a battlefield. Her hands were bloodstained. Around her, men knelt. Not in defeat—but in worship. Her voice rose in a language that made the air ripple.
When she opened her eyes, the runes beneath her glowed crimson.
The stone cracked.
Kael moved instantly, catching her as the ground beneath her trembled.
"You saw it again," he said.
Selene nodded, shivering. "I was her."
"The Blood Queen," he said. "Your first life."
She looked up at him. "What did she do?"
Kael's jaw clenched. "She almost ended the world."
---
Kael
He hadn't meant to get this close.
He wasn't supposed to care.
Selene was a vessel. A thread in a web spun by liars and gods. He had every reason to use her—every reason to hate her.
But when she bled, something in him pulled.
He remembered chains. Fire. Her face as it was a thousand years ago, when she ordered his death.
And yet now…
She was so human. So stubborn. So certain she could still choose who she wanted to be.
He envied it. He feared it.
And when the sky cracked above the crypt and the crows screamed…
He knew they had come.
---
The Hunters
The first of the wards shattered like glass.
The lead Hunter stepped over the threshold, dagger drawn. The smell of Kael's curse was thick in the air.
But there was something else now.
Blood magic. Royal.
The girl was changing.
The second Hunter flared with dark light, drawing from the mark carved into his back. He vanished in smoke, reappearing deeper inside the temple—only to be met with a blade through his throat.
Kael stepped from shadow, eyes glowing red.
"No further," he said.
The Hunter crumbled into ash.
But more followed.
Six remained.
---
Selene
She felt it. The disturbance. The invaders.
The power inside her screamed, rising like a tide, clawing its way through her limbs.
Let me out, it whispered.
She stood.
Kael burst into the chamber, blood smeared across his jaw. "There's no time. We have to move."
But Selene didn't run.
She stepped into the runes.
Lifted her hands.
And called the flame.
---
The ceiling trembled. The floor split.
A scream not entirely hers tore from her throat as fire laced with shadows erupted from her palms, carving through the stone as if seeking something ancient, something buried.
Three Hunters died in the blast.
The others retreated.
Kael stared at her, breathless.
"You shouldn't be able to do that yet," he said.
Selene turned to him, her eyes glowing gold and red.
"Then maybe I'm not who you think I am."
---
Elsewhere
In the ruined catacombs of the north, a figure in silver armor stirred as the flames from Selene's awakening flickered through a distant mirror.
"She's awakened," the knight said.
"And now," a voice whispered from the dark, "the gods will return."