The night they came for me, the stars bled.
I should have known the prophecy wasn't just folklore whispered around dying fires, warnings etched into crumbling stone by witches long turned to dust. I should have listened when the elders said our bloodline carried a debt written in shadow and sealed with sacrifice. But I was young then, foolish enough to believe love could rewrite destiny, brave enough to think I could protect my daughter from a fate the universe had already decided.
I was wrong.
The smell of smoke reached me first, acrid and choking, curling through the stone corridors of our sanctuary like fingers reaching for my throat. Then came the screams. My sisters, the last of the Shadow Witches, dying as vampires tore through our defenses and demons poured through rifts we couldn't close fast enough. We'd known they were coming. The vision had shown me three nights ago: fire and blood, fangs and claws, the only alliance between ancient enemies our world had ever seen. United for one purpose. Our extinction.
I ran through corridors I'd walked my entire life, my daughter pressed against my chest, her tiny heart beating against mine like a trapped bird. She was barely three months old, too young to understand that her mother was about to make sure she'd grow up never knowing her name, never knowing her face, never knowing the power that sang in her blood. Elena. My Elena. The last hope of our dying line.
The ritual chamber appeared before me, and I slammed the iron door shut behind us, throwing every ward I had left across it. My magic was nearly depleted from the fighting, from keeping the sanctuary standing as long as I had, but I had just enough. Just enough for this one last spell, this one last desperate act of a mother who refused to let her daughter burn with the rest of us.
I laid Elena in the center of the binding circle I'd drawn weeks ago in preparation for this moment. She looked up at me with eyes too old for her infant face, shadow magic already swirling in their depths. She didn't cry. She never cried. Even now, she seemed to understand.
"Forgive me," I whispered, my voice breaking as I knelt beside her and pressed my palm to her forehead. "Forgive me for making you carry this burden. Forgive me for binding your power so deep you'll forget what you are. Forgive me for leaving you alone."
The door shuddered behind me. They were close. So close.
I began the incantation, words in a language older than human civilization, older than the Veil itself. My blood dripped onto Elena's skin, mixing with her own as I cut her palm, our bloodlines merging in the ritual bond. The shadows in the room responded, writhing and gathering around us like living things. This was Shadow Witch magic at its purest, the kind that could reshape reality itself if you were willing to pay the price.
And I was willing to pay everything.
"Your power sleeps now, little one," I chanted, watching as the shadows sank into her skin, disappearing like water into sand. "Hidden so deep no spell can find it, no vision can see it. You'll live as human, as ordinary, until the time of choosing arrives. When you turn twenty-four, when the world needs you most, when the war has brought them all to the edge of extinction, you'll wake. You'll remember. And you'll choose what kind of world rises from the ashes we leave behind."
The door exploded inward. Vampires poured through first, all fangs and inhuman speed, followed by demons wreathed in shadow flames. At their head stood two figures I recognized even through my tears. Malakai, the Demon King, his face a mask of cold satisfaction. Theron, the Vampire High Lord, his eyes empty of mercy.
"Elara," Malakai said, and I heard the ghost of something that might have been regret in his voice. Once, lifetimes ago, we'd been something to each other. Before I'd chosen my people over him. Before his love had curdled into this hatred that would end my line. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be. Give us the child."
"Never." I rose to my feet, placing myself between them and Elena. The ritual was nearly complete. Just a few more seconds.
Theron moved faster than my exhausted eyes could track. Pain exploded through my chest as his hand punched through flesh and bone, closing around my heart. I gasped, blood filling my mouth, but I kept chanting. Kept pouring the last drops of my magic into the spell that would save my daughter even as it killed me.
"The binding is done," I managed, each word agony. "You're too late. She's hidden now. Hidden so completely you'll never find her. But she'll find you." I smiled through the blood, savage and fierce. "When the world you're building burns, when your war consumes everything you've ever loved, she'll return. My daughter's daughter's daughter. And she'll choose your fate."
Malakai's face twisted with rage. He moved toward Elena, but the moment his hand touched the binding circle, shadow magic exploded outward. It threw him back, threw them all back, and when the light faded, Elena was gone. Transported somewhere far from here, somewhere even I didn't know, her power locked away and her destiny set in motion.
"What have you done?" Malakai roared.
"I've given her a chance," I whispered as darkness crept in from the edges of my vision. Theron's hand was still inside my chest, still holding my dying heart. "Something you never gave me. Something none of you give anyone. A choice."
The last thing I saw before the world went black was Theron's face, and for just a moment, I thought I saw something like shame flicker across it. Then there was nothing. No pain. No fear. Just the knowledge that my daughter would live, would grow up free, would one day stand where I couldn't and make the choice that would reshape everything.
The prophecy had begun.
And twenty-four years from now, it would end with blood and shadows and a girl who didn't yet know she'd been born to save or destroy them all.