Chapter one hundred and thirteen: the sword that shouldn't be

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• The cursed mate's return    One hundred and twenty six: rising beneath us

  Fiona's pov "You feel that?" Finnick asked, voice low, reverent.We were still on our knees, some of us still trembling. I pressed my hand to the cracked stone floor. It was warm.“Yes,” I whispered. “It’s gone.”The Sanctum’s voice had faded, leaving only silence not empty, but full. As if a thousand screams had finally exhaled their last breath and found peace.Kye sat back against a pillar, rubbing his face with both hands. “That was... we actually chose.”“And something changed,” Mira said, her fingers curling into the fabric of her sleeve. “But we don’t know what.”“Maybe that’s the point,” Rowan said, his voice hoarse. “We weren’t meant to see the new world. Just give it room to breathe.”I stood slowly. My knees ached. My shoulders ached. My soul ached but I was standing.“It still hurts,” I murmured. “I thought choosing would fix something inside me.”Kye gave a short, bitter laugh. “We chose mercy, Fiona. That doesn’t mean we get to feel it.”I looked at them, my broken, be

• The cursed mate's return    One hundred and twenty five: One fracture mended

  Fiona's povI stood at the edge of the Sanctum’s judgment, the light from the cracks in the void casting fractured shadows across our faces. The weight of the voice’s decree hung in the air like a blade held to our throats.It should have been simple. There were answers I’d carried in my chest for years, truths sharpened by regret. One wrong made right? Of course I knew what I wanted. The moment my voice had summoned the storm that shattered the Bastion… I’d played god, and the world had bled for it.But looking at the others, Mira’s trembling hands still clutched in mine, Rowan’s clenched jaw, Finnick’s rare stillness, Kye’s haunted eyes. I realized something cruel and holy. I wasn’t the only one who had paid.The Sanctum had shown us more than guilt. It had shown us the cost.“What happens,” Mira asked, her voice barely above a whisper, “to the rest of the past, if one piece is changed?”The voice didn’t answer right away. Instead, a ripple passed through the darkness, and for the f

• The cursed mate's return    One hundred and twenty five: what we broke

  Fiona's pov“We do,” I answered into the dark.I didn’t know where the words came from. My mouth moved, but my mind had splintered into a thousand pieces, each falling in a different direction. We were surrounded by nothing, no sky, no stone, no ground. Just black, swallowing everything.A low hum pulsed through the air, like the sound of a heartbeat too ancient to still exist. It wasn’t a place we’d fallen into. “You are not welcome,” the voice said again. It wasn’t loud, but it filled every corner of thought. I felt it against my ribs. Inside my teeth.“Yeah, well,” Kye said, or tried to. His mouth moved, but no sound emerged. Still, I understood him.I felt Mira’s hand grab mine, harder this time. She was shaking. No, I was shaking.Then a light bloomed ahead.A scene unfolded in front of us like a curtain drawn back on an old wound.It was me.Not who I am, but who I was. Standing on the balcony of the Bastion, watching it burn. The Night of the Fracture. The first betrayal.My h

• The cursed mate's return    One hundred and twenty three: last lie

  Fiona's pov “You sure about this?” Finnick asked, adjusting the straps of his armor.“No,” I answered, pulling my cloak tighter around my shoulders. “But that never stopped us before.”The path ahead twisted into darkness. The Sanctum of Silence didn’t just resist sound. It devoured it.“Why do they call it silence?” Kye asked. “Because it’s quiet or because nothing comes back out to tell the tale?”Mira shot him a look. “Both.”We stood on the jagged lip of a ravine, the last known trail to the Sanctum winding like a scar into the dead earth below.Rowan knelt at the edge, dragging his fingers through the ash-laced soil. “No prints. No tracks. Nothing’s been through here in years.”“Or it’s been erased,” I said.Finnick tilted his head. “You think the Sanctum is awake?”I didn’t answer. Because we all felt it like the pressure behind your eyes before a storm. The earth trembled ever so slightly, a warning not from nature, but from memory itself.“We go in fast,” I said. “And stay

• The cursed mate's return    One hundred and twenty two: the god's remember

  Fiona's pov “You’re shaking,” Finnick said.“I’m remembering” I replied. “And so are they.”Rowan looked around warily, hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “Who’s they?”Before I could answer, the mountain groaned. A deep, world-shifting sound that made the stone beneath our feet feel like it might shatter. The Ash Paths behind us were gone sealed, consumed, or just… rewritten. The Hollow Flame’s light was dim now, not gone, but resting.Mira stepped beside me, her eyes hard but her knuckles white. “You said they weren’t the enemy. The Seven that we made them monsters.”I turned slowly to her. “They were gods but once, Then we caged them in memory, sealed them in the worst of ourselves. They don’t know who they are anymore. Just what we feared they’d become.”“That makes them dangerous,” Rowan said, voice like steel scraping stone.“It makes them wounded,” I snapped. “And waking a wound is always messy.”We stood on the threshold of something older than truth. Emberdeep was quiet

• The cursed mate's return    One hundred and twenty one: Flame under the name

  Freya's pov I didn’t fall, I was the fall.There was no air in the Hollow Flame. No heat, no sound, no light yet I was being burned and screamed at and forged all at once. I thought I’d known pain. Thought I’d understood what power cost.No.This was not pain. This was unmaking.Every part of me that had a name, a memory, a voice, it was peeling away like old skin. My fingers dissolved. My legs crumbled. My thoughts bled out into fire.I forgot what it was to have lungs. To breathe and to love.Then, the fire spoke but not in words.In loss.My mother’s hands, broken from work. My father’s eyes, gone cold in the snow. My brother’s laughter the last time he hugged me.I relived every goodbye I never gave. Every scream I never released.I wanted to call out. To claw my way out of the flame.But there was no voice left in me.Because here, in the Hollow Flame, names meant nothing.Only truth survived.You carry our wound. The voice was all around me. Soft and cruel, gentle and merciless