Page 147 of The First Scar
She looked up at me. Her eyes were wet. Terrified. The ink had bled past her knee now, soaking into the fabric. She didn't notice that either.
"The prophecy," she rasped. "It's changing."
I looked down at the parchment.
For a breath, it wasn't there.
The paper flickered—solid, then translucent, thengone, like it had never existed. My fingers closed on empty air. Then itsnapped back, heavy in my grip, the edges curling like they'd been singed.
"Veil-Loss," Serenya whispered, her voice stretched. "It's getting worse. The instability—it's bleeding into everything now."
I watched the page. The ancient script shimmered. Blurred.
Andreformed.
The soul shall stitch what gods have torn.
The only words I had that said I was fixing the world, not ending it.
They dissolved. Bled into new shapes. New letters.
The soul shall tear what gods have stitched.
The cold that washed through me had nothing to do with the wind.
"That's not—" My voice came out breathless. Thin. "That's not what it said. That's not—"
The groundheaved beneath us. The Rupture groaned—a raw, guttural sound that vibrated through me.
Time was rewriting itself. Fate was unraveling.
And I was standing at the center of it, wondering if I'd ever been meant to save anything at all.
Brannick stepped between me and the Rupture. Just planted himself there, big enough to blot it out, close enough that all I could see was the scuffed leather of his chest plate and the vein hammering at the base of his throat.
"Hey." His voice was strong. "Whatever that paper says—it doesn't know you. It doesn't know what you're capable of."
I stared at his collar. Couldn't make it to his eyes.
"We're fighting for the ones who can't fight for themselves, little flame." He ducked his head until I had nowhere else to look. "That's all that matters. The rest is just words."
Just words. I didn't answer. I folded the parchment and handed it back to Serenya where I didn't have to look at it.
We had work to do.
Rebels swarmed the site like ants defending a dying hill.
Some hauled fallen debris into makeshift barricades, stacking obsidian slabs and broken stone. Others hammered void-iron rods into the cracked earth, the metal keening as it bit into stone. Glyph-wards guttered along the perimeter—thin, fragile. They were built to repel, but not built for this.
Everyone moved with purpose. No one looked at the sky.
At the epicenter, Kaelen worked.
He crouched at the edge of a massive basalt platform, fingers dragging through the dust, tracing glyphs in a wide circle around its perimeter. The symbols glowed faintly as he completed each one—silver, then black, then a bruised shimmer that was both. Conduits of pure Veil energy snaked from the earth around the platform, black-silver flames licking along their lengths, converging on the altar like rivers feeding a dark sea. Tendons strained against his collar, his full focus on the work in front of him—seeing patterns the rest of us couldn't.
Brannick's hand found my shoulder. "This way, little flame."
He guided me to the center of the platform—the heart of Kaelen's circle. Void-iron rods jutted from the stone around me like blackened bones, already thrumming with contained power.
