Chapter 24

LEAH

The air was thicker that night. It pressed against my skin like invisible fingers, cold and insistent.

Sleep had become a myth, an illusion that slipped further away the more I chased it. My dreams, when they came were fragmented, filled with blood, fire, and eyes that glowed like dying stars.

But tonight, there were no dreams. Only the call.

It started as a pull deep in my chest, like a tether yanking me from the safety of my bed. I sat up slowly, heart racing, as the soundless whisper continued to tug at me, beckoning, urgent, ancient. I knew this wasn’t a hallucination. Not anymore. Not after what happened with the caretaker.

I got up, pulled a cloak around my shoulders, and stepped into the dim corridor, barefoot. The castle was sleeping, its halls soaked in shadow. Only the flickering torches dared to breathe.

I didn’t know where I was going only that my feet knew. I moved as though possessed, guided by something older than logic, deeper than fear.

Down the west wing.

Past the training hall.

Through a narrow servant’s passage I’d never seen before.

And finally, to a stairwell that coiled into the earth like the spine of a dead god.

The stones beneath my feet grew colder with every step. The air smelled of dust, decay... and something else. Something metallic. Ancient. Power that had been buried so long it had forgotten how to speak.

I reached the bottom and stopped.

A door stood before me, if it could be called that. It was more like a barrier made of interwoven roots, stone, and shadow, pulsing faintly as though it had a heartbeat of its own. Symbols were etched across it in a language I didn’t understand, glowing faintly with silver light.

I raised my hand.

The moment my fingers brushed the surface, the door sighed open, its vines curling away like smoke retreating from flame.

The room beyond wasn’t a room at all.

It was a chamber. Circular. Vast. Silent. Lit only by soft, floating motes of light that shimmered like starlight caught in glass.

And on the far wall... the mural.

My breath caught.

It stretched from floor to ceiling, carved and painted in painful detail. A girl stood at its center, her hair the same fierce red as mine, eyes glowing gold. Wolves surrounded her, some snarling, some bowing, some broken and bleeding. And behind her... shadows. Not just any shadows, but creatures born from them, clawed hands, serpentine eyes, wings that dripped with ash.

But she didn’t cower. She stood between them.

Mediator. Weapon. Curse.

The words slithered into my mind like a whisper I hadn’t invited. My knees trembled.

Beneath the mural, there were fragments of stone tablets arranged like puzzle pieces across the floor. I knelt, brushing dust from the surface. The script was unfamiliar but... not. Something in me remembered.

“Blood of dusk and dawn…” I murmured, reading aloud what little I could piece together. “Bearer of balance… Key to the locked veil… She will walk in fire and shadow, and both shall kneel... or burn.”

I recoiled.

The whispers in the chamber grew louder.

I turned slowly, my chest heaving, and found that the lights had drawn together, forming a circle around me, pulsing in time with my heartbeat.

And then it hit me.

A pulse of energy erupted from the floor, shooting up my spine, cracking through my bones like lightning. I screamed silent, breathless as visions poured into me.

Fire.

Ash.

Wolves howling as they were ripped apart by beasts with no name.

A throne made of bone and obsidian.

A girl standing at the edge of a cliff, watching a city burn beneath her.

She turned.

And it was me.

I staggered backward, my vision swimming. My heartbeat was no longer my own. It echoed with something else older, louder, like the heartbeat of the world itself.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered, hands clutching my head. “What am I?”

The chamber trembled in response.

The roots along the walls began to pulse with silver veins. The mural shimmered, the painted girl’s eyes glowing brighter alive, watching.

“Stop!” I shouted, not knowing who I was begging myself, the power, the ghosts of the past.

But it didn’t stop.

The lights collapsed inward, flooding me.

And I collapsed with them.

The world fell away.

And then I was falling.

Not in the physical sense. Not through space or time. But through memory, through blood, through something far more terrifying than any nightmare I had ever known.

I landed in a world on fire.

Everything around me burned.

The sky was black, filled with smoke and the smell of death. Buildings crumbled. Wolves hundreds of them fought shadows that moved like liquid knives. Screams split the air like thunder.

And there I stood, in the center of it all.

Not a girl anymore.

A force.

My hair whipped around me, crackling with energy. My eyes glowed gold and silver, mismatched and wild. In one hand, I held a sword made of light. In the other, a crown of thorns dripping with blood.

Salvation.

Destruction.

They bowed before me. The wolves. The shadows. All of them.

And then...

A voice.

Not Dante’s. Not mine.

One that shook the very dream around me.

“Awaken, child of twilight. Your blood will decide the end.”

My chest convulsed.

My hands opened.

The dream shattered.

And I woke up, gasping, back in the forbidden chamber.

But something had changed.

My skin glowed faintly. My heartbeat throbbed with power that wasn’t mine... but now lived inside me.

The mural’s girl no longer had glowing eyes.

Because I had taken them with me.

And the chamber?

It was now completely silent.

But I knew it was watching.

Waiting.

And so was the world.

Because I was no longer just Leah.

I was the girl from the mural.

And the prophecy had just begun.

My entire body jolt awake and I completely covered in sweat as tears poured from my eyes, what in the world was that?

I looked into the mirror and I realized my eyes has a little shimmer of red. I was sick of this prophecy. First it was Dante's lies, Elias appearing out of no where while being consumed by dark magic and the dream?

My head turned to the left where Dante's spot was now empty, it was ten in the morning and there was no doubt that felt he sorry that I had to go through hell yesterday

The door pushed open and I raised my head from the bed to look at him, he must have felt my panic

"Are you ok?" My eyes blurred in tears and he immediately ran to my side