14.1 – Before the Fire Took Her
Sera remembered the scent before anything else.
Warm cedar. Burnt lavender. A trace of bitterroot tea steeped too long over the coals. It drifted through the haze of her memory like smoke clinging to skin, pulling her back to a night she hadn't spoken of in years.
She had been small—maybe seven, maybe younger—curled beside her mother in the hollow behind their house, beneath the sloping boughs of the twinfold oak. Her mother's hands were stained with dye from the cloths she wove by firelight. She always wove at night. Said the silence helped her listen to what the threads wanted to say.
"Someday, you'll hear them too," her mother had whispered, threading a strand of copper through the loom. "But only if you're patient. Fire rushes. Stone waits."
Sera hadn't understood then. She only cared that her mother's voice made the dark less heavy.
That was the last night before the fire.
Now, standing alone beneath a similar sky, Sera let the memory settle on her like ash. She didn't flinch. She didn't cry. But her jaw tightened, and her fingers curled around the hilt of her blade like she might find comfort in its bite.
Her mother had died protecting the village. Not in battle, but in betrayal. Someone had set the fire—someone from within. And though the clan never found the traitor, Sera remembered the scent of burnt lavender clinging to the hem of a cloak as a shadow fled the flames.
No one had believed her. She had been too young. Too scared. Too confused.
But she remembered.
She always would.
And now, as the trees whispered around her and dusk threatened to fall, Sera wondered—for the first time in years—if the shadow from that night still walked somewhere beneath these same stars.
If it watched her now.
If it remembered her mother, too.
14.2 – The Shape of Her Voice
The scent of damp earth clung to Sera's cloak as she stepped deeper into the hollow grove. It was quiet here—too quiet—but not in the way that made her hand instinctively reach for the hilt of her blade. This silence carried a different weight. It was the stillness of memory, of things once said and never forgotten.
Leaves rustled overhead, not from wind, but from something else—a soft echo pressed into the soil by time.
Sera stopped walking. Her boots sank just slightly into the softened path, and she glanced to the left, where a pale tree leaned unnaturally. It had been there for years, bent in mourning like the rest of this forgotten part of the forest. She didn't come here often. Not since that night. Not since the fire.
She crouched low, brushed her fingers across the moss-covered roots, and closed her eyes.
It wasn't deliberate. The memory came for her like a tide.
—
She had been seven. Maybe eight. Her mother's voice had been the first thing to fade, long before her face. She could no longer picture the lines of her jaw, or the shape of her hands, but the voice—it clung to her like the smell of blood.
"Always walk with your back straight, Sera. No matter who's watching."
She had said it just after the confrontation with the Elders. Sera didn't remember the words exchanged that day—only the anger in the room and the strange look her mother wore after: not sadness. Something quieter. A kind of resignation.
That night, they sat under this same tree.
"Why do they hate you?" Sera had asked, with the honesty of a child.
Her mother had smiled, lips drawn tight. "Because I told the truth before they were ready to hear it."
Sera remembered wanting to ask more, but the words wouldn't come. Instead, she curled against her mother's side and listened to her heart beat under wool and leather. A soft, steady rhythm that didn't belong to warriors or liars.
Just a mother. Just her.
Then the silence. The fire. The night it all disappeared.
—
Back in the present, Sera exhaled slowly and opened her eyes.
There was no one left to remember her mother. No records. No stones carved with her name. Even the tree had changed. But still, Sera came here. Still, she remembered. Because someone had to.
The wind shifted. A brittle crack sounded in the woods behind her.
She stood, hand on her blade before thought caught up.
It wasn't Kael. It wasn't anyone familiar.
Something was moving. Watching.
She turned toward the sound, heart steady, body still. Her mother's words echoed again.
"No matter who's watching."
Sera squared her shoulders.
And waited.
14.3 – Where the Light Fades
The sound came again—closer this time. Not loud. Not urgent. Just… careful. Intentional.
Sera didn't move.
Whoever was watching wanted her to react first. A snap of twigs, a rustle, then stillness. They were testing her. Measuring the silence the way a hunter measures distance before a strike.
She let the moment stretch.
Let them think she hadn't noticed.
And then she moved.
A pivot of the heel, the twist of her weight—blade out in a breathless draw, sharp and low to the ground. She caught only a flicker: the edge of a cloak, dark green, slipping behind the broken bark of a fallen tree.
Not one of theirs. Not Clan Dravien. And definitely not one of her own.
She took a step forward. Then another.
"You've had your moment," she said, her voice low but calm. "If you meant to kill me, you missed the chance. So speak, or run."
A long pause.
Then: "You sound just like her."
Sera froze. Her hand tightened around the hilt.
A figure emerged slowly from the shadow of the trees. Thin, cloaked, older—face worn by time and wind. Not quite a stranger.
But close enough.
The woman's eyes were sharp, sharp enough to carve something out of the past. "Lireya's daughter," she said softly, almost with a kind of reverence. "Didn't think I'd ever see you grown."
Sera didn't lower her blade. "You knew my mother."
"I followed her," the woman said. "Not as a friend. But close enough to know her name, and why they burned her out of history."
Sera's throat felt tight. "And why would they do that?"
The woman stepped closer. "Because she stood against what they wanted to become. She saw the corruption before anyone else dared to name it."
A wind swept through the grove. The tree branches groaned.
"I don't know who you are," Sera said carefully, "but if you're lying, I will cut your tongue from your mouth."
The woman gave a small nod. "Fair. My name is Elrah. I was her shadow, once. They called me a spy, but your mother—she saw me."
She reached slowly into her cloak, and Sera's blade twitched up.
"I said—"
But the woman stopped, hand held open. In her palm was a small, scorched medallion. Twisted. Cracked. But unmistakably marked with the old clan crest—one that hadn't been used since the purge.
Sera's heart slammed against her ribs.
"That was hers," Elrah said. "She gave it to me before they came."
Sera stepped forward, slow, disbelieving. She took the medallion with shaking fingers. The metal was warm, as if it had been pressed to a pulse.
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
"Nothing," Elrah said. "Only to say that you're not alone. That the same rot your mother saw is still growing. And that if you're not careful, you'll end up buried beside her."
A beat of silence passed between them.
"Why now?" Sera asked. "Why not come to me before?"
Elrah looked away. "Because it was easier to hide. And because I thought you wouldn't become her."
She turned, slipping back into the trees.
"But you have," she said over her shoulder. "Gods help you."
Sera stood there, breath uneven, the medallion clutched in her fist.
And for the first time in years, she felt her mother's voice again.
Not in memory. Not in dreams.
But right there, beneath her ribs.
Burning.
14.4 – What the Silence Carries
Sera didn't move for a long time.
She stayed beneath the tree with her mother's medallion pressed against her palm, watching the forest darken at the edges. The woman—Elrah—had vanished the way ghosts often did: not suddenly, but with a kind of quiet conviction, as if returning to some shadowed realm she'd always belonged to.
But what lingered was louder than absence.
The wind, the woods, the long hush of memory creeping in—Sera couldn't shake the sound of that voice. Not Elrah's. Lireya's. Her mother's, not as she had sounded in death, but as she once was: strong, clear, steady. A voice that had once told her stories of flame and frost, of old paths and new truths.
"They'll twist the truth until it chokes you, little flame. Don't let them."
She swallowed hard.
In her mind's eye, Lireya was still half-shadowed: long hair loose around her shoulders, eyes like tempered iron, hands always covered in soot from the forge. She hadn't been soft. But she had loved with a fierceness that left echoes behind.
Sera hadn't thought anyone else remembered her that way. Not since the day the fire took her.
Not since the accusations. The silence. The burial no one spoke of.
Sera's hand tightened around the medallion until the cracked metal bit into her skin.
She hadn't cried at her mother's death. Not when she was burned. Not when the Elders came and took what remained of her memory. Not even when the stone that bore her name was quietly removed from the clan's ancestral grove, as if she'd never existed.
But now—now there was this.
This small, scorched thing.
This proof that Lireya had not been wrong, only inconvenient.
And the thought that someone had followed her mother, had believed her enough to carry this relic for all these years—it made Sera's chest ache in a way no wound ever had.
She exhaled slowly, eyes rising to the stars breaking through the treetops. The silence felt heavier than before, not empty but full—of questions, of buried truths, of things waiting to be unearthed.
Behind her, something shifted.
Not in the woods. Not in the wind.
Within.
A weight that hadn't been there before. A new edge to the resolve she carried. Not Kael's, not Dravien's, not even her clan's. Hers alone.
She turned, stowed the medallion in the fold of her cloak, and walked back toward the flickering watchfire.
There were voices up ahead—low, murmured, tense.
As she emerged, the sentry—Niall—straightened. His face tightened when he saw her, but he said nothing.
"Sera," came a voice from deeper in the camp. Familiar. Controlled.
Taren.
He stepped forward, arms folded, eyes sharp beneath his hood.
"I heard you wandered off."
She shrugged. "Needed air."
"And found something worth sharing?"
The pause between them was deliberate.
Then: "No," she said flatly.
Taren stared a moment longer before nodding once. "We move at dawn. There's unrest near the southern border. Something's stirring."
Sera tilted her head. "What kind of unrest?"
Taren's jaw clenched. "The kind that smells like fire, but leaves no ashes."
Sera didn't respond.
He studied her. "If there's something I should know—"
"There's not."
Another beat.
Then he turned and left without a word.
Sera watched him go.
Later, beneath her bedroll, she pulled the medallion back out and held it in her hand beneath the blanket, tracing the broken crest with her thumb.
They'll twist the truth until it chokes you.
Her mother had known this path would come. Had feared it. Had fought it.
And now Sera had to decide what to do with the pieces she'd left behind.
Not for vengeance. Not even for justice.
But because if she didn't, no one else would.
And that silence—the kind that tried to swallow legacies whole—wasn't something she could bear anymore.
14.5 – The Fracture Beneath the Stone
By morning, the mood across the camp had shifted. There was no announcement, no raised voice, no crack of warning thunder—but people moved like something had broken in the dark. Whispers twisted through the air. Not just about Dravien anymore.
About the border.
About the ones who had vanished.
And about a shape in the fire that shouldn't have been there.
Sera tightened her cloak and pulled her hood low. The weight of the medallion was tucked beneath her tunic now, its edges pressing into her skin like a reminder. A question.
Who still remembered?
Who still feared?
They marched in a tight column southward, across frost-brittle hills and lowland brush, toward the stretch of forest known as the Hollow Teeth—called so because the old trees stood in twisted, silent rows, their bark hollowed and blackened by a fire that no one claimed, a fire no one explained.
It was the kind of place stories were born. Or buried.
Sera moved near the rear, beside Niall, whose eyes hadn't left the shadows since dawn. He was younger than most of the scouts, but sharper than he let on. He hadn't asked about her night walk. He hadn't spoken at all.
Until now.
"You knew that woman, didn't you?"
Sera didn't answer right away.
"She said my mother's name," she said finally. "That's not something people just guess."
Niall nodded, his voice low. "The old ones say Lireya could make blades that sang when drawn. That the Dravien stole her forge secrets and left her to burn."
"She wasn't a sorceress," Sera said tightly. "She was a smith."
Niall looked ahead again. "Sometimes that's worse."
They passed beneath the burned trees, boots crunching over blackened roots. The forest here was silent in a way that felt deliberate. Like it was listening.
Taren gave the signal to halt. Ahead, a shallow gorge cut through the trees—thin, dry, and marked with rust-colored stains that hadn't come from water.
"Something came through here," he said, crouching by the edge. "No footprints. No scent. But the ground's wrong."
Sera approached. The earth wasn't just disturbed—it was twisted. As if something heavy had moved beneath it, not above. Her stomach clenched.
Kael would have known what this meant. Would've said something about the old blood magic, the kind that burrowed like worms beneath the skin of the land.
She said nothing.
"Form perimeter," Taren ordered. "No fires."
They obeyed, quietly.
As night fell, a strange hush deepened again. But this time it wasn't just fear. It was expectation. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
And that's when it began.
A scream.
Sharp. Sudden. Then cut off.
Not far.
They scattered—silent, blades drawn, signals passed without words. Sera followed Niall into the hollow trees, the air growing colder with each step.
They found the body near a dead oak.
One of theirs. No blood. No visible wound.
Just a wide stare and a mouth frozen mid-breath.
And on the bark beside him—
A mark.
Clawed into the blackened wood.
A circle crossed with three jagged lines. Not from any known clan. Not from Dravien.
Niall stepped back. "That's not a warning."
Sera stared at the mark. Her pulse pounded.
"It's a claim," she whispered.
And far off, in the belly of the woods, something growled.
Not animal. Not human.
Something waiting.
Something ancient.
They weren't alone in the Hollow Teeth.
And whatever else was out there… it knew their names.
14.6 – Where the Ashes Remember
They burned the body at first light. No rites. No words. Just flame and silence, and a growing sense that the forest was watching.
The mark on the tree hadn't vanished with the night. If anything, it had deepened—its lines darker, the bark around it cracked open like skin pulling away from a wound. Sera stared at it as the smoke curled above them, choking out the pale morning sun.
Taren gave no speeches. He just pointed south.
They didn't ask where they were going.
By midday, the Hollow Teeth gave way to jagged hillstone, a ridge line cracked open by time and old fire. The ground shifted with each step. Loose shale. Dry wind. The kind of place where voices didn't carry—where even screams might fall flat against the earth and disappear.
Sera walked beside Niall again. He didn't speak.
He didn't have to.
They were all thinking the same thing.
This was not the Dravien's work.
And that made it worse.
Half a league out, they found another sign. A fire pit, still warm. Small. Unseen from the trail. Hidden. Not abandoned in haste—deliberate.
But no tracks. No scent. Just a single strand of dark red cloth caught in the rocks.
Not one of theirs.
Not Kael's.
Older.
Taren turned the cloth over in his hand. "Whatever this is," he said, "it's not hunting us."
Sera frowned. "Then what is it doing?"
Taren looked up, eyes hard. "Marking a path. One we're not supposed to follow."
But they did.
Because the scouts that turned back never returned.
Because silence had begun to feel like its own kind of death.
Because answers were owed.
They crossed the ridge at dusk. Below them stretched the plains—barren, vast, and scattered with bones.
Not human.
Old hunting grounds, said the maps.
But the fire pits were new.
So were the stakes.
And the shapes tied to them.
Taren swore and called the halt. The line broke as scouts fanned out. Niall moved carefully. Sera kept her eyes on the horizon.
That's when she saw the silhouette.
One figure.
Alone.
Standing on a rise a hundred yards away.
Not armed. Not masked.
Just waiting.
A woman, maybe. Or a man with hair too long to tell. But the stance was calm. Straight-backed. As if they'd known this moment would come.
Sera stepped forward, slowly. Taren hissed at her to stop, but she didn't listen.
The figure didn't move.
Not until Sera raised her hand—not in greeting, but in recognition.
Because she knew that face.
Even across the distance, even half-hidden in shadow and wind.
She knew.
The figure turned, cloak whipping wide—and vanished into the rocks.
But not before dropping something behind.
Sera ran for it, ignoring Taren's curse, ignoring the shouts behind her.
The bundle was small. Wrapped in black silk.
She unwrapped it with trembling fingers.
A medallion.
Not hers.
Not Kael's.
Her mother's.
Lireya's sigil burned on the metal, barely worn, untouched by time.
Sera fell to her knees.
And in the dying light of day, she understood—
Her mother hadn't just been taken.
She had been part of something larger.
And whatever was waking now from the deep cracks of the world…
…had never forgotten her.