Sylara Thorne, Age 8 – One turn after the failed Binding Rite
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I dream of snow.
But Riftkeep has never known snow.
It's always burning here—torches flickering against obsidian walls, charred incense curling through the air, flame runes pulsing faintly underfoot. Heat is our language. Smoke our lullaby.
And yet… my dreams are cold.
I feel fur brushing my skin. I feel breath fogging against my neck. And I hear paws—four of them—padding softly beside me in a forest of silver trees that does not exist. At least not here. Not in the Upper Realm.
But the forest knows me.
The wolf knows me.
And though she has no name in the dream, I wake each time with one whisper in my mouth:
Nyx.
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The other children no longer whisper behind their hands when I pass.
Now they simply go quiet.
They don't know whether to fear me or pity me. The girl who couldn't be Named. The one whose rite ended in flame and silence and blood. A fluke, the Emberlords say. A dangerous divergence, the guards mutter. A fault line.
But I know better.
I am not broken.
I am remembering.
And remembering, I've come to learn, is often mistaken for madness.
I have always been quiet, but not soft.
I speak rarely, but when I do, I cut.
I observe before I move. I measure silences more carefully than I do words. And lately, the silences around me have been growing longer, deeper… heavier. Like they're pressing against my ribs, testing where I'll crack.
Mother Kelhara says I hold myself like someone older. "Too still," she says. "Too inward." As if thinking were something dangerous. As if silence itself were a weapon.
She's not wrong.
I feel the world shifting beneath the surface of things—beneath my skin, even. I feel it in the way flames lean toward me when I enter a room. In the way my reflection shimmers like water even in polished glass. In the way I can hear heartbeats if I listen too long.
Magic shouldn't feel like this.
It shouldn't ache.
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I've started waking in the middle of the night, breathless. Not from fear. But from… presence.
It's like something vast and wild is curled beneath my skin, dreaming in sync with me. I can feel its paws twitch in sleep. I can feel its hunger—not for food, but for sky, for wind, for hunt.
There are no wolves in Riftkeep.
The only beasts allowed here are caged or dead.
So why do I feel one curled in my chest like a second heartbeat?
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Emotions have become dangerous. When I feel too much, the world reacts.
I cried once, alone, and the mirror cracked into nine even shards.
I laughed too hard at supper, and the salt in the stew turned to sugar.
I touched a boy who was mocking another child—and his voice turned inside out for a day.
Magic, I was taught, is governed by rune and discipline.
But mine follows emotion—the dangerous kind.
The kind that bleeds into everything.
I feel too deeply. I see too deeply. I remember things I've never lived.
And beneath it all, something watches with glowing silver eyes.
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Tonight, I sit by the empty hearth in the eastern sanctum. No fire burns there now. It hasn't since the Rite fractured.
But I see embers in the ash. Only I see them.
I press my palm to the cold soot. My eyes close. My breath slows. And for a moment, I am not alone.
Not entirely.
"You are not fire," something says from behind my heart.
"You are what remembers fire."
I open my eyes. No one is there.
But the ash clings to my hand like paint, forming a crescent curve and four faint claw-marks.
A wolf's print. Too small to be real. Too perfect to be imagined.
And suddenly, I'm no longer afraid.
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I am not quiet because I am weak.
I am quiet because I am listening.
I am not still because I am calm.
I am still because something inside me moves.
The wolf is not yet awake.
But she is watching.
And when she rises, she will not rise alone.
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Nyx is stirring.
Will Sylara finally be able to meet Nyx? How will they react to each other?
Turn the page and find out ;)