First-Person: Nyra
The air tastes of iron and dust when I wake.
Kael is already gone. Only the dying glow of his campfire remains, a few embers clinging stubbornly to life in the ash.
For a moment, I think he's left me — until I hear the echo of his boots somewhere deeper in the ruins.
I follow the sound, heart tight in my chest. The mark burns faintly under my skin, as if tugged toward him.
He's standing in another chamber, smaller than the first, half-hidden behind a fallen pillar. The walls are lined with relics sealed in crystal — scrolls, blades, fragments of armor blackened by age. But it's the central plinth that holds his attention.
A stone tablet, cracked clean down the middle.
He doesn't hear me at first, his eyes fixed on the carvings, his hand trembling as he traces the words.
"Kael."
He startles slightly, turning to face me. His expression is wrong — too calm, too empty. "You shouldn't be here."
"Since when do you get to decide that?"
He exhales, the fight draining from him. "This isn't a place for hope, Nyra."
"Then what is it for?"
He hesitates, and that's when I see it — the faint shimmer of energy running through the cracks in the stone. A pulse, soft but steady, in rhythm with my heartbeat.
I step closer. "It's about the Blood Marked, isn't it?"
His jaw tightens. "It's more than that."
He looks down at the tablet again, then reads aloud, voice barely a whisper:
When the Vessel is born of blood and shadow, the Flame will bind to flesh. One carries the mark. The other carries the end.
I feel the words before I understand them. The mark beneath my skin burns, sharp and demanding.
"The end?" I echo. "As in—death?"
Kael doesn't answer right away. He runs his fingers over the final line, and I can see the moment the truth settles into him like a blade.
The Vessel does not choose. The Vessel is chosen.
My mouth goes dry. "You think it's me."
"I know it's you," he says softly. "The mark reacts to the ruins, to this magic. It feeds off it."
"So what does that make you?"
He finally looks up at me, and something in his gaze breaks. "The one it will consume to survive."
The silence between us is unbearable — the kind that feels like it might split the world in half.
I shake my head. "No. You don't know that."
"Nyra—"
"No." The word tears out of me, sharp and shaking. "I didn't ask for this. I didn't want any of it."
The mark flares again, hotter this time, and the ground trembles beneath us. Cracks snake across the floor, spreading from the plinth outward.
Kael moves fast, pulling me back as a surge of red light bursts from the tablet. It floods the chamber, wrapping us both in the same burning glow.
The mark on my skin burns so bright I can see it through the fabric of my shirt — the lines twisting, shifting, spreading.
I can hear the whisper again — clearer this time, closer.
One carries the mark. The other carries the end.
And underneath that, faint but unmistakable:
Choose.
Then everything goes black.