Caged ( Survival )

Chapter 1

The Night the Stars Hid.

The storm did not knock.

It broke the sky open.

It came from the north, black-bellied and furious, dragging winter behind it even though spring was supposed to have arrived weeks ago. Lightning clawed across the heavens as though the gods themselves were trying to rip a hole in the firmament and drag something back through. Thunder followed so close it felt like a second heartbeat inside the manor walls.

Wynnehold had stood for four hundred years against war, plague, and siege, but that night it trembled.

In the birthing chamber on the third floor, the fire had gone out twice. The maids kept relighting it with shaking hands. Blood steamed in the copper basin. My mother’s screams had long since turned to hoarse animal sounds, then to nothing at all.

I was born at the exact moment the eclipse swallowed the moon.

No one marked the hour. The clock in the corridor stopped at 3:17 and never started again. Later, the priests would call it proof. Later, the midwives would swear the candles bled wax like tears.

But in that instant, there was only silence.

I did not cry.

Old Marit (hands knotted with rheumatism and superstition) lifted me from the bloodied sheets and held me toward the single candle that still burned. The flame guttered, stretched sideways, then snapped upright again as though someone had slapped it.

Marit’s breath fogged in the sudden cold.

“She’s marked,” she rasped. “Look at the eyes. One storm-grey, one star-silver. Born the moment the moon died. This one carries ruin in her bones.”

Lightning forked outside the window, turning the room corpse-white. In that flash every face looked flayed: the two younger midwives clutching their rosaries, the physician wiping his spectacles over and over though they were already clean, my mother—Lady Amalia Wynne—lying spent and pale, her golden hair dark with sweat, her famous beauty cracked open like porcelain.

Amalia turned her face to the wall.

“Take it away,” she said, voice raw. “I do not want to see it.”

It.

The physician cleared his throat. “My lady, the child is—”

“Take. It. Away.”

No one argued with Amalia Wynne when her voice sounded like that. Not even the storm.

Marit wrapped me in linen that had been meant for a boy (blue silk embroidered with silver serpents, the Wynne crest). The fabric was too big; I vanished inside it like a secret.

Boots in the corridor. Measured, impatient. The door opened without a knock.

General Frederic Wynne filled the frame the way an eclipse fills the sky.

Rainwater dripped from his black cloak, pooling on the ancient rug. His medals clinked softly when he moved. He smelled of gunpowder and winter air and something metallic that might have been someone else’s blood. He had come straight from the northern border, they said later. A skirmish with Eldorian raiders. He had ridden three days without sleep to be here for the birth of his heir.

He looked first at my mother. Something flickered across his face (relief, maybe, that she still lived), then shuttered again.

Then he looked at me.

I have been told the moment lasted an eternity.

His gloved hand rose, hesitated an inch from my cheek. The leather creaked. I learned later that his palms were scarred from holding reins too long, from gripping a sword until the hilt cut. But in that moment the scars might as well have been fear.

He studied my mismatched eyes the way a soldier studies a map of enemy territory.

“Another girl,” he said at last. The words fell like stones into deep water.

Marit tried to place me in his arms. He took one step back, almost stumbling.

“My lord—” she began.

“Burn sage,” he ordered. “Salt the windowsills. I want no record of the exact hour. Tell the priests the birth was at dawn.”

He turned to leave.

“Amalia. Are you—?”

“I am tired,” my mother said to the wall. “Leave me.”

Father’s jaw worked. For one heartbeat I thought he might insist. Instead he gave a curt nod, the same nod he gave captains before sending them to die.

He left without touching me. The door closed with the finality of a coffin lid.

Marit looked down at me, her wrinkled face folding into something that might have been pity.

“Poor wee bastard,” she muttered. “Born with every door already slammed in your face.”

She carried me down the servants’ stairs so no one important would see. The corridors of Wynnehold were paneled in dark oak carved with battles my ancestors had won. Their painted eyes followed us. I would learn those eyes well; they never warmed, no matter how many fires burned below them.

In the nursery that had been prepared for a boy (blue again, more serpents), Marit laid me in a cradle too large. She lit a sprig of sage despite the general’s orders and wafted the smoke over me three times widdershins.

“For protection,” she whispered, though we both knew it was already too late.

Then she did something no one else would do for nineteen years.

She touched my cheek with one crooked finger, gentle as falling ash.

“Listen well, little ruin,” she said. “The world will try to teach you that love is a debt you owe for existing. Don’t believe them. Love is a weapon. Sharpen it.”

She left me there, alone with the storm and the silent portraits and the single star that had dared to appear once the eclipse passed.

It hung above the manor like a cold white eye, watching.

I stared back with my strange, mismatched gaze and made no sound.

But something inside me (something small and feral and already wounded) opened its eyes too.

And it remembered everything.

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Years later, when the bards sang of the night the Black Serpent’s Bride was born, they would speak of omens: ravens falling dead from the sky, rivers running backward, a wolf seen walking the battlements on two legs.

They never mentioned the simplest truth.

That a mother turned her face away.

That a father walked out without touching his child.

That a storm raged for hours and no one thought to close the nursery window, so the rain soaked the silk canopy above my cradle until it dripped onto my face like tears no one else would shed for me.

They never mentioned that when Old Marit came back at dawn to check on me, the sage had burned down to a single coal, and the coal had etched a perfect circle into the wooden floor around the cradle.

A circle that looked (had anyone cared to notice) exactly like a serpent devouring its own tail.

But no one did notice.

They were all too busy preparing for the victory feast.

General Wynne had returned from the border with Eldorian heads in sacks, and the king himself had sent congratulations on the birth of a new Wynne heir.

No one corrected His Majesty’s assumption that the heir was male.

By the time the mistake was discovered, the invitations had already gone out, and my father decided it was easier to let the kingdom believe what it wanted.

I was registered in the family bible as “Child, female, unnamed” and then the page was blotted with ink so thoroughly the letters drowned.

They named me Elara two weeks later, when the priest insisted a soul could not be christened without one. Elara (short, forgettable, already crossed off the list of names meant for sons).

I learned to answer to it the way a whipped dog learns to come when called.

But that first night, in the night the stars hid, I had no name at all.

I had only the storm, the silent cradle, and the cold white star that refused to leave its post above the manor roof.

And somewhere, far beyond the Veil, in a kingdom where the sun had not risen for a thousand years, something ancient stirred in its sleep.

A serpent with eyes like molten emberstone opened one lid.

It tasted the air with a tongue made of shadow.

And it knew (before even I did) that the wheel had begun to turn again.

The eclipse had chosen its sacrifice.

The curse had found its next bride.

And nineteen years from now, on the night of the next black moon, I would be delivered to the monster who waited beneath an eternal midnight sky.

But that was nineteen years away.

For now, I was only a silent, unwanted girl with strange eyes and a heart already learning how to break without making a sound.

Sleep, little ruin.

The dark is patient.

It will wait.

Turn the page, reader.

This is just the beginning