Selene woke up suddenly.
The candle by her bedside had long since gone out, leaving only a trail of curling smoke. Her chest rose and fell quickly. The sheets clung to her skin, damp with sweat, but she felt no chill.
She felt burned inside.
As if something had poured through her—light, pressure, memory. Her head ached. Her hands shook. The echo of something not quite a dream lingered in her mind.
It hadn't felt like sleep.
It had felt like a fall.
She remembered walking barefoot through stone halls that weren't real.
The air felt heavy and glowed faintly red. The path ahead was lined with carved eyes, half-closed, etched into black stone. Banners, long forgotten, clung to cracked columns, displaying a symbol she didn't recognize: a star split by lightning, surrounded by two circles.
She moved downward, and torches lit up as she walked without any flame.
She didn't question where she was.
Only that she belonged there.
She reached a chamber—circular, vast, and filled with an aura caught in frozen motion. In the center, a body floated within a dim red light.
A woman.
She was tall and pale, with wild silver hair. Her bones showed beneath translucent skin, and her veins glowed like molten gold. Her eyes were wide open, no longer human. She wasn't dead, but she wasn't alive, either.
And Selene knew.
She was looking at herself.
Or someone she could become.
From the corpse's shattered chest, a swarm of red butterflies burst out—flickering silently around the room, spiraling up into nothing. Their wings shimmered with residual aura, leaving particles of light that never reached the floor.
They circled Selene, brushing her skin gently.
In that moment, everything else fell silent.
No breath.
No heartbeat.
No thought.
Just the whisper.
"You were not the first."
The voice was her own.
She didn't remember waking up—only finding herself at the edge of her bed, eyes wide, hands gripping the bedsheets tightly enough that her knuckles turned white.
She looked down.
There were no red butterflies.
No ancient halls.
No sealed vault.
No corpse.
Just the faint scent of scorched paper.
Her hands were blackened with soot. On her desk, a sheet of parchment had burned through its center.
A circle had been drawn in ink before the fire spread. She hadn't written it. But her pen lay there, still uncapped, its tip resting where the ink had bled too dark.
She stood up unsteadily, reached for her cloak, then paused.
Where would she even go?
Nowhere. She had never left.
But it had all felt real.
Too real.
Her mind spun. If the vault hadn't existed, what had she seen? If the corpse wasn't hers, then whose was it? A memory? A warning? A hallucination? A glimpse of the future?
Or worse: a truth buried so deep only aura could bring it to light.
By sunrise, she sat still in her study, staring out the window as Langley came to life.
She hadn't told anyone—not Elias, not the scholars. Not even herself. Not aloud.
But her eyes wandered to her reflection in the glass.
Her silver hair.
Her bloodline that had never been real.
Her aura, clawing its way from beneath her skin.
And in her reflection, behind her—
A butterfly.
Just one.
Silent.
Hovering.