The flame inside Elara had begun to flicker.Not outwardly, her steps still commanded rooms, her voice still echoed with the sharp certainty of a queen. But deep within, in the quiet places untouched by fire or throne, something faltered. It was a spark hidden behind the scar tissue of memory, a pulse that whispered in the stillness like an old song half-forgotten.After the Hollow Pact, after she had cast Lucien into the void of forgotten things, Elara sometimes heard it: a soft beat, like footsteps in a corridor long closed. A second heartbeat. Foreign, yet familiar. Hers, but not hers.And then, one morning, a voice rose from the silence.You were never meant to survive me.Elara jolted upright, heart pounding, breath misting in a chamber with no cold. The dawn outside was pale and indifferent. Her back was damp with sweat, her chest tight with something unnamed. She touched the flamebrand above her heart, once a comfort, now an uneasy rhythm. The pulse was slow. Muffled. Like it d
Elara's footsteps echoed like a quiet storm through the Hollow Wards, swallowed by the mossy earth beneath her boots. The soft glow of her lantern danced over twisted roots and the ghostly runes etched into the blackened bark of ancient trees. The air held its breath, the marsh thick with a tension that hummed just beneath the surface, as if the land itself waited for her to speak, or turn and flee. But Elara pressed on, the hem of her cloak whispering against thorn and vine. Around her wrist, a red thread pulsed in rhythm with her heart.She reached the clearing just as the moon broke free from the clouds, casting silver light across a ring of jagged stones and the pool of ink-black water they enclosed. Three witches stood there, veiled in cloaks dusted with moonstone. Their faces were shadows made solid, their presence as old as the marsh and twice as cryptic. Elara felt their gaze settle on her, ancient, unyielding, as she placed her lantern on the altar stone."This is where memor
The war had ended, but Kael Greyfang was not done fighting.He stood at the far edge of the training field just before dawn, clad not in the armor of a general, but in the charcoal-wrapped leathers of the Shadow Vow, Elara’s elite unit for missions too quiet, too dangerous, or too morally grey to exist on paper.Today, he would vanish from the record.Not as a traitor.But as a ghost hunting shadowsElara met him beneath the roots of the Ironwood Grove, where the trees remembered old oaths.She wore no crown, no ceremony, only a single glove on her right hand and a sword at her back. The forest bent toward her when she walked.Kael dropped to one knee.“You don’t kneel to me,” she said.Kael looked up. “I kneel to peace.”The intel had come from Saphira’s southern informants: a vampire cell known as the Crimson Rest, once loyal to the Red Court, had splintered in secret during the war’s final weeks.They had not mourned Selene Vireth.They had waited.Waited for the capital to burn.W
Elara woke just before dawn, the sky already painted in soft hues of ash and rose. The Keep's battered walls, scorched and blackened from the last siege, loomed like tired giants guarding a kingdom on the edge of rebirth. Their stones still smoked faintly, holding memories of fire and fury. Wrapping a coarse woolen cloak around her shoulders, more for dignity than warmth, she stepped into the courtyard where frost clung stubbornly to broken statues and benches, reminders of a time before everything had changed.Kael was already by the fountain, where water once surged in triumph but now sat frozen mid-splash, a sculpture of winter's grip. A trace of her golden healing light still lingered there, faint and flickering against the cracked marble. He had waited there all night, leaning silently against the fountain's moss-covered rim, arms crossed, watchful as always."You managed to sleep?" he asked, not expecting an answer."I tried," Elara replied, lifting her hands. The skin was unmar
Dawn broke over Hollowgate not with triumphant trumpets, but with a silence so heavy it felt alive, thick as velvet, lingering in every shattered doorway, every scarred fountain, every broken statue. The city that had once shimmered like gold in the morning light now lay draped in ash and dust, its grandeur reduced to piles of ruin that whispered of laughter long vanished.Elara Flameborne stood atop the crumbling eastern wall, the wind tugging at her cloak’s singed hem. Below her, the spires lay fractured, their once-proud stones jagged against a bruised sky. Temple roofs had caved in, leaving altars exposed to rain and ruin. Gardens that once bloomed with every shade of flower now smoked in tangled vines of charred ivy. Statues, heroes and gods alike were decapitated, their heads rolled among debris stained with dust and blood. Shards of crimson glass, ripped from cathedral windows, glinted like dying embers in the streets where children’s voices once echoed.And in the midst of it
The dawn that broke over Hollowgate was nothing like what the bards would later sing. There was no triumphant chorus of trumpets, no procession of banners streaming in the wind. Instead, a hush fell upon the shattered capital, thick and suffocating, as though the world itself paused to catch its breath. This silence claimed every broken street, every collapsed wall, every scarred fountain; it settled into the hearts of the survivors, reminding them that life after hell felt more fragile than any moment spent in the blaze.Elara Flameborne crossed the threshold of the newly rebuilt throne room alone. No guards flanked her; no courtly retinue heralded her passage. Her cloak, still singed at the hem, dragged a faint trail of ash across the polished marble floor, ash born of the fires she had set and the inferno she had endured. Each footfall echoed like a confession. She was alive, undeniably so, but every line of her body bore witness to battles that threatened to break her: gouges acro