*Jiselle*

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“They’re not just dead,” Eva said, her voice tight as she knelt by the scorched trail. “They were incinerated.”

I stood over her, hand on my stomach though the child wasn’t inside me anymore. My body still felt stretched thin from thebor, as if her me hadn’t just left me–but had taken something I couldn’t get back.

“She didn’t scream,” I murmured. “Didn’t cry.”

Nate stood further ahead, tracking the ash prints that curled like smoke patterns across the forest floor. The edges of each print glowed faintly, still warm despite the early morning frost settling on the branches above us. He didn’t look back as he spoke.

“She didn’t have to.”

Ethan had been silent since we left the stronghold. His expression unreadable, his steps haunted. But now, his hand lifted slowly, pointing.

“There,” he said.

The clearing ahead was ringed by ckened trees, the bark stripped to bone. The snow that had fallen the night before was gone here–melted or burned away, reced with soot and cracked earth. At the center of the hollow, where light couldn’t quite seem to reach, she sat.

The baby.

My baby.

Unharmed.

Unmoving.

Wrapped in the same woven ash cloth Eva had wrapped her in just days ago–but no longer quiet, no longer fragile. She sat with her legs tucked beneath her, upright, small hands resting on her knees. Her hair was curling now, wild and short and dark, framing a face that looked… knowing.

Too knowing.

She turned her head.

Saw us.

And didn’t flinch.

I moved before the others could stop me, ignoring the tremor in my knees, the ache in my hips, the fear curdling in my throat. I walked into the circle without waiting for permission–because I didn’t need it. I was her mother.

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The closer I came, the colder the air became, despite the faint shimmer of heat still lifting from the ground.

She blinked.

I sank down in front of her.

And only then did I notice them.

The bodies.

Hollow–born. At least seven of them, maybe more–it was hard to tell. Twisted shapes, some fused to the earth, some nothing more than shadows etched into the scorched soil. Their mouths hung open, some mid- scream. Others didn’t even have faces left to scream with.

But none of them had touched her.

Not even close.

They’d died before they could.

“She did this?b” /bI breathed.

Eva stepped into the clearing behind me, her hands trembling. “She didn’t just defend herself.”

“She erased them,” Nate said, his voice t, like he didn’t know whether to be afraid or awed. “She’s… what is she?”

“She’s a child,” I said.

“She’s a weapon,” Ethan corrected softly.

“No,” I whispered. “She’s both.”

I reached for her.

The moment my fingers touched the edge of the cloth draped over her chest, the fire beneath us pulsed. A slow, deep thrum that vibrated up through my bones.

Her gaze lifted to mine.

And for a moment–just one small, impossible moment–I wasn’t seeing my daughter.

I was seeing something older. Something that remembered being more than a child. More than a me.

I was seeing a memory wearing skin.

Her lips parted.

“Ethan,” she said.

The sound of his name from her mouth–clear, unshaken–cut the world in half.

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He froze. Took one step closer. Then another.

“Did she just Nate began, but couldn’t finish.

The baby didn’t wait for confirmation. She reached out.

Not to me.

To Ethan.

Her hand rested over his chest.

His breath caught.

And his knees gave out.

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He crumpled to the dirt without ceremony, legs folding beneath him like a marite with cut strings. But he didn’t fall entirely. He knelt.

In front of her.

The same way he had three days ago after her birth, possessed and trembling, whispering words that weren’t his.

But this time–this time it was different.

This time, it was him.

“I feel her,” he whispered. “In every part of me.”

“Ethan,” I warned, reaching for him. “Don’t-”

“She’s stronger than all of us,” he said.

And she was.

I could feel it–not just in my gut or my bones or the ces inside me that still hadn’t fully healed–but in the air itself. It shimmered around her like something alive, tugging the ash along invisible currents that circled her body without ever touching her. Every fleck of soot moved like it recognized her. Like it was pulled toward her not by gravity, but by purpose.

Even the leyline beneath this ce, which had once pulsed unevenly through the forest floor, now ran smooth and sure, no longer fractured or angry–but obedient. Shifted. Realigned. As if some ancient force had bent at the knee the moment she opened her eyes.

She hadn’t been born of the leyline.

She was the leyline.

Eva dropped to one knee beside Ethan, her palm pressing t against the scorched earth like she needed to feel the truth with her own skin. “The magic’s not fractured anymore,” she said, her voice barely louder than

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the rustling leaves. “It’s fusing.”

“To what?” I asked.

The question hung between us like smoke. And no one answered.

Because we were all starting to understand.

She wasn’t just a child–not in the way children are held, or feared, or loved.

She was a tether. A living thread connecting everything we thought was separate–wolf and Hollow, realm and realm, power and prophecy. She was what the Gate had been trying to be for centuries. She was what it had waited for. Not a vessel. Not a Sovereign.

A bridge.

And whoever reached her first… whoever taught her what to be, how to wield what she carried–that person wouldn’t just win the war. They would write the ending.

Ethan leaned in, his hand trembling slightly as he brushed her cheek. It should’ve felt unnatural. It should’ve been too much. But she didn’t pull away.

She leaned into his touch with a softness that didn’t belong to a weapon or a me or a prophecy. It belonged to a daughter. To someone who still remembered what love felt like.

Her eyes fluttered shut for a single heartbeat, then opened again–wider this time. Brighter. As if the world made more sense now than it had a moment ago.

Then she spoke again.

Not a name.

Not a whisper.

A warning.

“He is not the beginning.”

The words didn’t just fall from her lips–they broke the clearing in half. They rang like prophecy, like a truth too old toe from someone so small. But it came anyway, and we all heard it. Every tree. Every shadow. Every lingering trace of Hollow–born blood on the earth.

The mes that still flickered along the edge of the clearing bowed inward as though kneeling. As though listening.

Eva gasped and scrambled back a step, her face pale and damp with fear.

Ethan flinched, and for a moment, I saw something flicker behind his eyes–recognition or dread, I couldn’t tell which.

The sky above us, streaked with ash and bruised with the weight of magic, rippled. A thin shimmer of heat

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pulsed through it like a heartbeat–slow, deliberate, ancient.

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I stood slowly, every part of me aching, every breath dragging through my chest like smoke through broken lungs. My eyes swept the clearing.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was thick. Full of something heavy and unspoken. The scent of charred bodies and sacred fire mingled with the scent of her.

The child.

The one who sat motionless in the center of it all, wrapped in nothing but ash and firelight. Small. Solid. Unmoved. She didn’t cry. She didn’t fidget. She just looked at us like she’d seen this moment before.

And maybe she had.

Maybe she’d already lived this, again and again, waiting for us to finally catch up.

I swallowed, the heat wing at the back of my throat.

Nate’s voice came behind me, rough around the edges, hesitant in a way that made it worse. “What does that mean?”

I didn’t turn to him.

“I don’t know,” I said, but the words tasted like ash. Because some part of me–some fractured, flickering part -was beginning to guess.

She wasn’t finished.

She hadn’t been born just to change what came next.

She’d been born to reveal what had always been hidden.

Because if he–whoever he was–wasn’t the beginning…

Then she?

She might be the end.

And gods help us all if we didn’t figure out which side of that ending we istood /ion.