The sky split open on the night she was born — a jagged wound of light across the heavens.
Storms howled like spirits gone mad, and the earth trembled as if rejecting what was coming. In the back chamber of a cold palace, a maid screamed — not from the pain of childbirth, but from fear.
She knew what this meant. She had felt it for months. The power inside her child… it wasn't natural.
And then, with one final cry, the child emerged — and the world responded. Winds crashed against the palace walls. Thunder cracked like a war drum.
> "This child will bring ruin," whispered a voice outside the chamber. "She's cursed… a monster. Just like her mother."
But the maid didn't listen. With trembling hands and tears in her eyes, she pressed a kiss to the baby's damp forehead — whispering the forbidden incantation that would seal away her power.
Her lifeforce dimmed instantly. Half of it given — burned into the glowing seal etched on the infant's chest. The magic crackled briefly, then sunk into the skin like ink in parchment.
The storm stopped.
The kingdom did not thank her. Instead, they feared her more.
> "Banish them both. Before the child brings the wrath of the heavens."
They said the gods turned their faces from the world the day Ivyra was born. They weren't wrong.
The sky had split open — not with light, but with an endless rift of darkness, leaking shadows no one could name. Thunder didn't roll. It screamed. And at the heart of it all, a newborn cried… once.
Not again.
In the dim chambers behind the palace walls, her mother lay pale and trembling. A lowborn maid, cast aside by royalty after bearing the seed of a prince too cowardly to own his sin. He had left her to rot in the claws of his vengeful fiancée — a woman with power, pride… and poison in her smile.
But the maid—Elynn—had loved her child. And in her final act, as storms cracked the heavens, she had whispered words forbidden even among the oldest tongues:
> "Seal her. Not to save the world… but to save her from it."
Light had poured from her chest. Her soul fractured, sealed within her daughter.
The storm stilled. The silence that followed was not peace — it was fear.
---
The next morning, the sentence was passed. Without trial. Without voice.
Elynn, still weakened from the ritual, was dragged through the palace halls, the newborn in her arms swaddled in torn linens. Guards refused to look her in the eye. Servants whispered and stepped aside. None dared help. Not when the princess-to-be — the prince's furious fiancée — declared the child an omen of doom.
> "Let them live, if they must… but not within these walls. Not within these lands."
That decree, signed in gold, became their exile.
They were cast beyond the palace gates, beyond the kingdom's outer rim, into the forgotten reaches of the Frostmourne Forest — a place no map claimed.
Elynn never begged. She clutched Ivyra close and walked. Bruised, bleeding, half-limping — she walked.
The forest did not welcome them. Nor did it devour them. It simply watched.
They wandered for days. Then weeks. The pathless wilds bore witness to the child's silence. Ivyra never cried. She simply stared with silver eyes too still for an infant.
Elynn whispered lullabies through cracked lips, her voice like broken glass. She taught Ivyra to listen to the wind, to move in silence, to never trust a smiling stranger.
Seasons bled into each other. Ivyra grew.
She learned to set traps. To read the sky. To sense when the seal inside her began to burn.
Some nights, Elynn would wake screaming from dreams she never remembered. Other nights, Ivyra would wake with eyes glowing faintly — until her mother's trembling fingers pressed against her chest and the glow faded again.
The seal held.
But barely.
One night, beneath a sky veiled in violet clouds, Elynn coughed blood into her hands.
"Not yet," she whispered, gazing at her daughter with hollow eyes. "Please… just a little longer."
The next day, they stumbled upon a village nestled between broken hills and creeping fog. The people there were wary — dirt-stained, silent, but watchful. When Elynn healed a dying child with barely a chant, the villagers bowed not in thanks, but in need.
Healers were rare. Especially ones with royal techniques.
They let her stay. Not out of kindness — but utility.
Ivyra was ten by then.
She did not speak often. She did not laugh. She watched. Always watched.
The children called her ghost-girl. The adults whispered of cursed blood. Only the elder midwife — blind in one eye and sharp of tongue — dared speak to her like she mattered.
> "You don't belong to this world, child. But neither do you belong to the stars. That makes you dangerous. And necessary."
Ivyra
said nothing.
But the seal pulsed under her skin. And something ancient… remembered her name.shadows."