The Waking Dream
The voice kept its promise.
It showed Eira how to walk without leaving footprints, how to taste lies on the wind, how to kill without making a sound.
But with each lesson, the world grew stranger.
Shadows whispered secrets in languages she shouldn't understand. The moon pulsed like a living heart. And sometimes—when the hunger gnawed too deep—she caught glimpses of *him* in the corner of her vision.
Kaelan.
Always just out of reach, his golden eyes burning with unspoken warnings.
"A memory," the voice lied smoothly. "Nothing more."
Eira wasn't sure she believed it.
She wasn't sure of anything anymore.
---
The Stranger in the Snow
On the seventh night, she found the girl.
A child, no older than ten, standing barefoot in the snow. Her hair was white as bone, her eyes twin pools of ink.
"You're late," the girl said.
Eira's hand flew to her dagger. "Who—"
"The others are waiting." The girl turned, her nightgown fluttering like moth wings. "Come, Starlight. Before the Hollow Ones hear you."
Against every instinct, Eira followed.
---
The Sanctuary of the Marked
The cave behind the waterfall shouldn't have existed.
Carved into the cliffside and hidden behind a curtain of freezing water, its entrance was etched with the same crescent mark that adorned Eira's wrist. Inside, torchlight revealed a cavernous hall where a dozen strangers knelt in unison.
Their eyes snapped to Eira—all silver-pupiled, all marked.
One stood. A man with bark-like skin and antlers growing from his temples. "You've been called."
Eira's magic coiled tight. "Called by who?"
The girl giggled. "By her, of course."
She pointed to the far wall, where a mural stretched floor to ceiling:
A woman with Eira's face, crowned in starlight, stood over a battlefield.
Beneath her feet lay a shadowy figure with Kaelan's smirk.
---
The First Truth
"They're the Covenant," explained a sharp-eyed woman named Lyria, the only one who didn't stare at Eira like a sacrifice. "Descendants of the Celestial Court's outcasts. We've been waiting for you."
Eira studied the mural's gruesome details—the shadow-man's chest torn open, the starlight queen feasting on his heart. "Why?"
"Because the Forgotten aren't the enemy." Lyria pressed a hand to the painted queen. "She is. Your ancestor. The one who started the war."
The voice in Eira's head went very still.
Lyria leaned closer. "The Forgotten tried to stop her. She slaughtered them anyway—then twisted the story to make herself the victim."
Eira's mark burned. "That's impossible."
"Is it?" Lyria nodded to the antlered man. "Show her."
He stepped forward—and plunged a dagger into his own palm.
Black blood welled.
Not human.
Forgotten.
---
The Second Betrayal
"They're hybrids," Lyria said as the others revealed their own marks—each pulsing with the same eerie light as Eira's. "Half-human, half-Forgotten. The last remnants of both bloodlines."
The white-haired girl twirled. "We've been hiding. Waiting for you."
Eira backed toward the exit. "I'm not one of you."
"Aren't you?" The antlered man gestured to her shadow—stretching unnaturally long, its edges rippling. "The thing inside you isn't a parasite, Eira. It's your birthright."
The voice finally spoke, its tone strange:
"They know too much."
Lyria gripped Eira's shoulders. "The Forgotten didn't put that voice in your head. Your ancestor did. To make you a weapon."
Then she said the words that shattered everything:
"Kaelan Dain is alive. And if you don't wake up, you'll kill him all over again."
---
The Vision
The cave dissolved.
Eira stood in a ruined cathedral, its stained glass depicting her own face laughing as cities burned. At the altar lay Kaelan, his chest carved open, his shadows leeching into the stone.
The white-haired girl appeared beside her. "This is what she wants. What she's always wanted."
Eira reached for Kaelan—
—and the vision twisted.
Now she saw the truth:
Her ancestor, kneeling not in surrender, but triumph, as she plunged the Heart into the first Forgotten's chest.
"They will fear us forever," the ancestor whispered.
The voice inside Eira *screamed*—
—and the world went black.
---
Teaser for Chapter Ten: The Shattered Prophecy
Kaelan is alive.
The Forgotten were the victims.
And the voice in Eira's head is the real monster.
"Don't listen to them,"it begs."I can make the pain stop."