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Embers in the Ash

Author: Hallie Shoemaker
last update Huling Na-update: 2025-10-04 03:54:43
The forest pressed close around her, oppressive in its silence.

Mirra stepped carefully between roots that writhed like veins beneath the soil, their once-steady thrum now a feverish pulse that made her teeth ache. The air hung heavy with the scent of rot and metal, so sharp it coated her tongue with the taste of blood. Every breath was an intrusion, every heartbeat an echo of decay.

It was not just death she felt. Death was natural, part of the endless cycle she had always served. This was worse. This was desecration.

The trees groaned with it. Their bark split open in black wounds that oozed sap like tar, their leaves crumbling to ash before they touched the ground. Mushrooms that should have glowed with gentle luminescence had shriveled into brittle husks. Even the moss beneath her bare feet felt lifeless, crunching instead of springing back.

The forest mirrored her dread.

And the whispers did not let her forget it.

You are failing.

Your roots rot with the rest.

What protector allow
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  • Fractured   The Mercy of Staying

    SeleneThe word free lingered long after the whisper faded, curling through Selene’s thoughts like smoke that refused to disperse.Freedom.It had never sounded so gentle.The clearing was quiet again—too quiet. Not the heavy, pressurized silence of the entity’s presence, but something softer, more dangerous. A lull. The kind that invited reflection when exhaustion made resistance thin.Selene closed her eyes despite herself.She saw it immediately.A small tower of pale stone perched high above a forested valley. Shelves lined with books she’d never finished reading. Long nights spent alone beneath an open sky, the moon her only companion. Her magic clean and uncomplicated—no need to calibrate, no need to negotiate. Just silver light answering her call, perfectly obedient.No fear of disappointing anyone.No fear of being misunderstood.No fear of losing herself in someone else’s gravity.Her chest tightened.It wasn’t the power that tempted her most.It was the quiet.She inhaled sl

  • Fractured   The Weight of Power

    MirraMirra had always known the earth listened to her.It listened now.The whisper slid beneath her skin like a fault line waking after centuries of stillness. It did not shout. It did not rush. It waited—patient, geological, inevitable.You are the foundation.The words settled into her bones, heavy and familiar. The earth beneath her feet responded, not violently, but with a deep, resonant agreement, a subtle tightening of the ley lines that webbed the clearing.She saw it then.Not a vision imposed with force, but one offered with reverence.A world held perfectly still.Mountains unmoving. Rivers obedient. Forests aligned in precise harmony. No erosion. No chaos. No unpredictable tides dragging coastlines into the sea. No lunar pull stirring restlessness in stone.She stood at its center, immutable. Eternal.No negotiations. No compromise.Order, the voice murmured. At last.Mirra’s breath slowed. The temptation was not loud. It was reasonable.“You have always been the one who

  • Fractured   What We Choose to Hold

    RonanRonan watched her in the quiet that followed the ritual, watched the way Selene stood as if she’d just laid something precious and breakable on the ground between them and stepped back to see whether it would survive.The fear she’d shown—of being swallowed, erased, softened into something unrecognizable—still echoed inside him. Not because he agreed with it, but because he understood the shape of it.He knew what it was to fear becoming nothing more than a force.“Selene,” he said at last, his voice low, steady, chosen. He didn’t move toward her yet. He didn’t reach. He let the words carry first. “When you showed us that vision—of yourself fading—I felt something snap in me.”Her gaze lifted to his.“Not fear,” he clarified. “Anger.”The ocean stirred inside him, not violently, but with a deep, rolling presence, like a tide drawing breath. “Because that version of you doesn’t exist. And it never will. Not with me.”He finally stepped closer, slow enough that she could stop him

  • Fractured   The Crucible of Truth

    SeleneThe moment she finished speaking, the clearing felt smaller.Not tighter exactly—more intimate, like the world had leaned in to listen.Selene stood with her hands loose at her sides, silver light pulsing faintly beneath her skin. Saying the fear aloud hadn’t weakened her the way she’d always imagined it would. It hadn’t collapsed her. It had stripped something raw and living to the surface, and now it throbbed there, exposed.She didn’t look at Ronan at first. She couldn’t. The vision she’d shared—of herself fading, thinning, becoming an echo—still hovered in the back of her mind like a bruise pressed too hard.The silence stretched.Then she felt him.Not through the bond alone—though that hummed too, unsettled but attentive—but through the simple, physical fact of him stepping closer. Close enough that she could feel his warmth at her back, the steady heat of him anchoring her to the present.“You’re not a reflection,” Ronan said quietly.His voice didn’t boom. Didn’t carry

  • Fractured   The Threefold Oath

    SeleneThe air in the clearing didn’t go back to normal so much as it stopped pressing on her ribs.Selene stood with Ronan’s hand still in hers, feeling the aftershocks of what they’d just done—how they’d pushed back not with force, but with refusal. Refusal to believe the worst. Refusal to let the entity rewrite their story.The cloying sweetness was mostly gone, but not completely. It lingered in thin pockets, like someone had spilled something rotten and tried to cover it up.Ronan exhaled slowly, and Selene felt the way the breath eased him because she was still too connected to him not to. His shoulders stayed squared, but the hard line at the back of his neck softened.“It’s… less,” he said, voice rough. “The whispering. It’s fainter.”Selene didn’t let herself mistake that for peace.“It’s still here,” she said, and she meant it. Not in the air alone. In the seams. In the places where their magic touched. “It pulled back. That’s all.”She glanced down at their hands. His skin

  • Fractured   The Last-Resort Lie

    RonanRonan didn’t move his feet, but his body shifted anyway—like every part of him decided, all at once, that stillness was no longer an option.Selene’s hand was in his. Mirra was close enough that he could feel her steadiness without needing to look. The seal pulsed under the ground like a restrained heartbeat. The nexus held, but the air didn’t.It had that wrongness again. Not perfume this time. Something sharper. Like metal after lightning.The entity wasn’t whispering comfort anymore. It had tried the soft lie. It had tried the door back to who they were. They’d refused it.So now it did what desperate things always did.It threatened.Ronan felt it come before it spoke—like pressure behind the eyes, like a thought that wasn’t his trying to push into the front of his mind.You want to keep each other, it murmured, and there was almost a laugh in it. Then watch what that costs.The vision slammed into him with a violence that made his breath catch.Not his shore.Not solitude.

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