The wind over the Hollow Vale carried no scent. No warmth. Just ash.
Serelith stood alone at the edge of the ruined meadow, cloak clutched tight at her throat, her boots dusted white with frost. Nothing moved in the field below her—no deer, no birds, not even the whisper of magic. The silence was the kind that followed a scream.
She didn't know why she'd come here.
Only that she had come before.
Beneath the bones of trees long dead, she felt it again—the pull. That faint tug beneath her ribs, deep and quiet as breath. The same feeling she'd had as a child when no one was watching. As if something just beneath her skin was listening.
Waiting.
But for what?
She lowered herself to her knees in the brittle grass. The sky above was pale with early morning, a dull white dome stretched thin. She touched the soil with one gloved hand. It felt...wrong. Not cold, exactly. But empty.
"You're not real," she whispered. "You're not mine."
It was something she said sometimes, when the dreams returned.
The ones with the black-winged figures.
The voices calling her name—not the one she used now, but another. A name she never remembered upon waking, only the ache it left behind.
Behind her, in the high trees, something moved. A shape. A whisper.
Serelith spun around, heart leaping. But there was nothing. Only branches, brittle and bare. Only silence.
Again.
Always silence.
She stood, brushing ash from her cloak. It was time to return. Time to play the part again—the quiet girl in the village near the Hollow border, the one who fetched herbs and never caused trouble. The one no one looked at too closely.
It was safer that way.
But as she turned to go, the wind shifted—and this time, it brought sound.
A voice.
A woman's, distant and cold as the void between stars.
> "I see you, child of the Veil.
And soon… you will see yourself."
Serelith's breath caught.
And before her eyes, the meadow shifted.
Ash turned to frost.
The sky darkened. The trees bled shadow. And for a heartbeat, just one—
Serelith stood in a throne room of stone and bone, beneath a canopy of gold-veined obsidian.
A pale woman in a crown of hollow glass sat upon a jagged throne, eyes empty as death. Around her, cloaked courtiers stood motionless, faces hidden.
And Serelith—
Serelith was no longer a girl.
She was fire and night and forgotten stars.
Then, it was gone.
She staggered back, gasping, heart racing.
The meadow returned.
Empty.
Still.
But something inside her had changed.
Something had awakened.