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Chapter 2 - 2. The Light That Banished Me: Kaela

The cliff was silent. The wind whispered low over jagged stone, carrying the sharp scent of salt and earth. The people behind her were not silent.

Kaela stood barefoot on the cold rock. The chill bit into her skin, rising up her legs like a slow poison. Her wrists felt hollow where her cuffs of magic had once gleamed, delicate bands of silver that sang when she moved. Now they were gone, as if erased by cruel hands. Her bare arms trembled, not from cold, but from the weight pressing on her chest.

She did not turn around.

"Kaela of no House," the High Priestess declared, her voice a hollow echo that carried across the gathering. "You are hereby cast into the Argyle. May the stars show you mercy."

Kaela laughed. It was quiet, bitter, a sound like cracked glass.

"The same stars that called me cursed?" she said, her voice sharp enough to cut.

The crowd murmured, voices rising and falling like a restless tide. Some shifted nervously, others stared wide-eyed and uncertain. Even now, they feared her words. They feared her.

She glanced over her shoulder.

Mira stood among the faithful, frozen, her mouth slightly parted in shock. Her eyes were wide, like she had just seen a ghost. Her best friend, the one who once laughed with her beneath the silver moonlight, was silent now, trembling behind a veil of piety.

Eron, her fiancé, stood a few steps away. His gaze was cast low, jaw clenched tight. He did not meet her eyes. He could not.

They had once danced beneath the moonlight. Their hands had touched, fingers entwined, promises whispered in shadows. They had sworn to stand by her, no matter the storms to come.

And now?

Now they watched her exile in silence, arms folded, lips pressed thin. Their faith had turned brittle, broken like thin glass.

The High Priestess stepped forward. Her white robes billowed in the breeze, stiff and cold as death. She held a shawl soaked in dark, dried blood, the same shawl that had wrapped Kaela on her mother's lifeless body when they found her.

"You know what was written," the priestess said, "on the blood-stained cloth."

Kaela's throat tightened. She did not answer. She had memorized the words by heart. She had never seen that night herself. She was only a baby then, too small to remember the flames, the screams, or her parents' lifeless bodies.

But she had been told the story a thousand times, how her mother's blood had soaked the cloth, how the priests whispered in fear when they found her barely breathing among the ashes. How the prophecy had branded her from the very beginning.

She will shake the world.

It had hung over her life like a storm cloud. She was a relic child, born from ruin, found breathing on her mother's corpse, a sign of hope or danger. A symbol. A curse.

Kaela's legs trembled, but she stood firm. The anger that had simmered inside her all her life boiled to the surface. The injustice. The lies. The betrayals.

She looked out at the crowd, feeling the sting of every gaze. They saw her as broken, dangerous, a threat to their fragile order.

"Do not return," the High Priestess warned, her voice cold. "Even light cannot find you in the Argyle."

Kaela closed her eyes. For a moment, the weight of her exile pressed down like a mountain. Her heart ached for the life she was losing, the friends she was losing, the family who had turned their backs.

She thought of her mother. Or what she imagined her mother would have looked like if she were alive. She pictured the warmth in her eyes before the cold took her. She remembered dreams whispered under a sky full of stars, as her mother rocked her to sleep.

Imagination or not, those thoughts calmed her a bit.

But those dreams were ashes now.

Kaela's eyes snapped open.

She stepped to the edge of the cliff.

Below, the Argyle stretched out like a wasteland swallowed by mist. Gray fog rolled over broken trees and jagged rocks. A silent graveyard for forgotten souls.

She did not scream. She did not hesitate.

She stepped off the ledge.

For a moment, she felt weightless. The cold air whipped around her, pulling her deeper into the cursed lands.

She vanished.

***

The Argyle was a place no one spoke of except in hushed whispers. It was a land erased from maps and memory, where the sun seldom pierced the heavy clouds. Where the dead whispered secrets and the living lost themselves.

Kaela landed on the cold earth, pain blossoming in her legs but quickly fading. She stood, shivering, alone.

The mist wrapped around her like a shroud, thick and suffocating. She could hear distant howls, wolves or worse, but the cold fire inside her refused to die.

She pressed her hands against the earth, feeling the pulse of the land. A land cursed by the gods, yet strangely alive. The magic she once wore like a crown was gone, but something else stirred inside her.

Fury.

And hope.

She had been cast out, stripped of title, name, and magic. But they had not broken her spirit.

Not yet.

A memory came crashing back, the night Eron kissed her beneath the moonlight, whispering promises of forever. The way Mira had squeezed her hand when the whispers began, before they turned to silence.

They had all abandoned her.

But Kaela would rise.

She would shake the world.

The prophecy was not a curse. It was a promise.

She whispered to the Argyle, voice steady despite the cold. "I will survive."

***

Days passed, though time felt unusually weird in the Argyle. The gray skies bled into the land, draining color from everything. Kaela wandered through forests of twisted trees and fields of thorny weeds. Each step was harder than the last. The earth dragged at her feet.

Her body ached. Hunger gnawed like a fierce beast. The silence pressed on her like a weight.

But Kaela walked.

Her thoughts circled like vultures. Why had her people cast her out so easily? Had they truly believed she was the curse? Or had fear blinded them? Had they feared her power more than loved her?

She clenched her fists, nails digging into her palms.

Her magic had been stripped away, but something inside her was still burning. It was real. She could feel it humming beneath her skin, waiting for the right moment to ignite.

On the fifth night, beneath a sky riddled with fractured clouds, Kaela curled beneath a dying tree. The wind kissed her skin, carrying a lullaby she almost remembered. It reminded her of the nights when someone used to sing to her.

She closed her eyes and saw her mother's face, not a memory exactly, but a feeling. Fierce. Warm. Protective.

"You will not fall," her mother's voice echoed in her mind. "The light in you is stronger than any shadow."

Kaela had started hearing her mother's voice when she turned eighteen. At first, it had sounded like her own thoughts, barely louder than a whisper. But over time, she had realized it wasn't coming from her. Not truly. It came in the heavy moments, when her heart was breaking or when the fire inside her threatened to go dark.

Kaela opened her eyes, swallowing her tears and rose to her feet.

The Argyle would not consume her. She would learn its secrets. She would bend its curse into power.

Because she was not just a castaway.

She was a storm waiting to break.

And soon, the world would know her name. Kaela.

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