## CHAPTER 14: _"The Curse Evolves"_
Lysia awoke in a chamber soaked in candlelight and worry. The silence was too careful. The air too thick. She knew without asking—something inside her had changed.
She sat up, blinking. Arien sat beside her, his hand resting just near hers, but not touching.
> "You've been asleep for two days," he said.
> "I wasn't sleeping," she murmured. "I was… listening."
Her fingertips burned faintly. Not pain—power.
---
Orrin arrived shortly after, robes tattered and eyes wide.
> "Your magic is no longer bound by lineage," he said.
> "What does that mean?" Lysia asked.
> "It means you are no longer cursed. But you are also no longer only human."
She felt it too. The shift. She could hear the roots beneath the palace. The breath of the wind two valleys over. She wasn't just *of* Elira now—she *was* Elira.
> "The curse didn't leave," she said. "It adapted."
> "As did you."
---
In the days that followed, her connection to magic became... wild. She healed a boy's broken leg with a whisper. A tree bowed when she walked by. The stars above Elira aligned into a spiral the night she touched the palace altar.
The people feared her.
And worshipped her.
> "This is dangerous," Arien said one night. "They don't see *you* anymore. They see a goddess."
> "Then I must remind them I bleed."
---
But the transformation didn't stop.
Lysia began having visions. Not dreams. Memories. Of other lives. Other women who had carried the curse.
The First. The Second. The Ninth.
> "You're the Thirteenth," a voice whispered once in the dark.
> "And the Last."
Each vision left her shaken. Each one carved a rune along her spine. The curse, now evolved, wasn't just survival—it was legacy. And it was waking in full.
---
Meanwhile, in the north, another power stirred.
Not Forgotten. Not bloodless.
But the *Bound*—mages once chained by Queen Altheira, now free and vengeful.
They had heard of Lysia's rise.
And they wanted it for themselves.
Their leader wore blackened bone and called himself **The Archivist of Ruin**.
> "She has rewritten the curse," he hissed to his followers. "But we shall edit the ending."
And he marched—not for war.
But to claim the curse.
To claim her.
And Lysia, standing in the candlelit tower once again, whispered only this: