||•~•~|| Sera POV ||~•~•||
Sleep had always come easily to me.
But tonight, it dragged me under like a storm tide.
At first it was nothing—just the familiar darkness, the quiet weight of dreams pressing at the edge of thought. But then the silence cracked. Literally cracked, like a sheet of glass breaking apart, letting a pale, silver light spill through.
I was standing in the middle of nowhere. Not my bedroom. Not even Earth. The ground beneath my feet shimmered like it was made of stone and starlight, fractured lines glowing faintly blue, stretching endlessly in every direction. Above me hung a sky split open into five burning shards. Each piece pulsed with a different hue—red like a thousand flames, white like blinding snow, green like forests breathing, blue like oceans rising, and pale gold like the breath of the wind.
I wanted to breathe, but the air felt sharp, alive, as if I were inhaling someone else's heartbeat.
Then the snow began to fall.
Not ordinary snow. Each flake shone as though carved from crystal, glowing faintly as it touched the ground and vanished. The cold brushed my skin, soft at first…until it burned. My wrist ached.
I looked down—and nearly staggered back.
The snowflake mark, the one my parents always whispered about, was glowing. Not faintly. Not subtly. It shone so brightly I could see the delicate veins of the symbol crawling under my skin, alive, pulsing in rhythm with something beyond me.
"Chosen…"
The voice was low, distant, curling through the air like smoke. My eyes darted upward, searching.
"Who's there?" My voice cracked in the silence.
The only answer was a sudden flare of fire on the horizon.
I froze. Far away, on the fractured plain, flames burst upward as if the earth itself had caught fire. The blaze reached high, gold and violent, and in the middle of it…a figure. Tall. Blinding. Wreathed in fire that didn't consume him, only crowned him. His silhouette was sharp and regal, movements slow, powerful—like he belonged to the fire, or maybe the fire belonged to him.
I didn't need my parents' bedtime stories to tell me who he was.
Solarius. The King of Fire.
My chest tightened.
The flames didn't scorch the earth; they danced, spiraled, painting the cracked sky with streaks of light. Even from a distance, the heat rolled toward me. But it wasn't the suffocating kind of heat—it was alive, magnetic, like it wanted to pull me closer.
My wrist burned colder. The snowflake glowed brighter, as if answering him.
"No…" I whispered. "This is a dream. Just a dream."
And yet my feet moved.
I stepped forward, and the fractured plain rippled under my shoes like water disturbed. The closer I drew, the more the air changed. The flames softened into warmth, the snow grew sharper, and suddenly I could hear other sounds—wind rushing, water roaring, earth rumbling low beneath my feet.
All five. All here.
But not whole.
The sky above me trembled. The shards of color—the red flame, the blue sea, the green forest, the white snow, the golden wind—wavered as though fighting each other. The fractures widened, splitting further apart. Light leaked through the cracks, but the light was wrong.
It was black.
And from that blackness, shapes moved. Shadows twisting into figures, too human to be beasts, too cruel to be gods. They laughed without mouths, whispered without voices, and their presence was a weight on my chest.
The snowflake burned so fiercely I dropped to my knees.
Then I saw it.
Thecity.
It rose suddenly in the distance, a vision beyond the horizon, shimmering like a mirage. Towers of silver and stone, trees that glittered like glass, rivers flowing with light itself. Veyrion. It had to be Veyrion. The place my parents had sworn existed only in storybooks.
I wanted to cry at how beautiful it was.
But the vision shattered.
Flames swallowed it whole. Not Solarius's fire—this was darker, crueler, leaving nothing but smoke and ruin in its wake. People screamed. I couldn't see their faces, but I heard them. The sound clawed at me.
And in the middle of it all, one figure stood at the city's gate. I couldn't see her clearly, but she glowed like snowfall against the fire. Glacielle. I just knew. She raised her hand, and the flames bent away, dying against her power.
But even she was trembling. Even she looked afraid.
My heart pounded so hard I thought it would tear me apart.
"No…" I whispered again. "This isn't real. This isn't—"
The voice returned, closer this time. Right at my ear.
"The Veil is thinning."
I turned sharply. There was no one behind me. No one at all.
The ground shook. The cracks widened under my feet, spilling blackness like ink. Fire and snow and earth and wind and water—all of it rushed together into chaos. The fractured sky shattered completely, shards of color raining down like broken glass.
And then I saw him.
Solarius. No longer a distant figure in fire, but right before me. His golden eyes burned through the smoke, too sharp to belong in any dream. He raised his hand—not toward me, but toward the mark on my wrist. The snowflake flared, answering him, and for one terrifying second, I swore the two powers—his fire and Glacielle's snow—connected in a blazing arc between us.
It seared me to the bone.
And I woke up screaming.
The room was dark. My sheets were tangled, my body drenched in sweat. My heart wouldn't stop pounding.
It was a dream. Just a dream.
Except…
My wrist still glowed.
Faint, silver light pulsed under my skin, cold and relentless, like the dream hadn't ended at all.
And deep inside me, I could still hear the whisper—low, warning, endless.
The Veil is thinning.