*Jiselle*

They called it the quiet before the war.

But it didn’t feel quiet.

Not really.

The halls of the stronghold hummed with tension like a wire pulled too tight. Boots moved with urgency down corridors that had once been silent. Doors mmed. Chants echoed from the ritual rooms. Armor was sharpened and fitted, des inspected. Food rations were being counted and spells rehearsed. Every corner whispered of what wasing, even if no one dared speak it out loud.

And in the center of it all–was her.

My daughter.

She sat in myp, eyes wide and watchful, a tiny thing wrapped in ash–dyed cloth and mystery, whispering words no child her age should know. They weren’t full sentences. Sometimes they weren’t even words iat /iall- not in our tongue, anyway. But the cadence of them, the rhythm… it wasn’t nonsense. It was memory. Ancient. Repeating like breath. Like prophecy.

Eva thought it might be an ancestralnguage, one that hadn’t been spoken in centuries. But none of us knew for sure.

Nate knelt across from me on the floor, his eyes never leaving mine as he reached into his shirt pocket. He didn’t say anything—not right away. He didn’t have to. The mark was already glowing faintly across the skin of his palm, the one she had touched. The one she had healed.

But now… now there was something else in his hand.

A piece of leather.

Etched with a rune I had never seen before.

He held it between us. “This is for you,” he said, voice low.

“What is it?”

“A vow,” he said. “A bond. Not a mate mark, not a ritual. Not something the gods gave us. Something we

make.”

I stared at him.

At the sharp edges of his features, the tired hollows beneath his eyes, the blood that still stained the stitching on his shoulder from where he’d shielded me during thest attack. He was everything I knew. Everything I feared. Everything I loved.

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“You don’t have to do this,” I whispered.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Because I was always yours. And now… I’m hers too.”

He reached for my hand.

Not to press the rune to my skin. But to ce it in my palm.

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I felt the warmth of it the second it touched me. Not heat like me, but heat like promise. It pulsed against my skin once, then again, and then I felt the bond weave between us–subtle, unseen, but unmistakably there.

“I’m with you,” Nate said. “No matter what choice you make.”

And gods help me, I believed him.

So I leaned forward, cupping the back of his neck and pulling him toward me.

And when our lips met–it wasn’t hungry, or rushed, or desperate.

It was surrender.

It was forgiveness.

It was loveid bare beneath all the ash and ruin.

I breathed him in like it was the first time. And maybe, in some way, it was. Because we’d been through too much to be who we were before. We weren’t the same girl and boy on the border of two packs. We weren’t the broken version of a promise made in the dark.

We were fire now.

And we had chosen to burn.

When we pulled apart, our daughter stared up at us.

No smile. No cry. Just calm, eerie awareness.

“She knows,” I said softly.

“She always did,” Nate answered.

Ethan stood at the far end of the room, arms crossed over his chest, watching. He’d been quieter since the birth. Since the kneeling. Since the mark on his hand had vanished. Sometimes I thought he was still inside that moment–reliving it, dissecting itb, /bsearching for what it meant.

Now, he stepped forward.

“If ites to me,” he said, “then I walk into it.”

I blinked. “What?”

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“You heard me,” he said. “If she’s the one who ends this, then I’ll carry her if I have to. I’ll burn for her if that’s

what it takes.”

“Ethan-”

“No,” he cut in. “No more shielding me. No more hiding things. I’m not just your brother anymore. I’m her uncle. And I won’t stand back.”

I reached for him. Touched his shoulder. “You’ve never stood back, Ethan.”

But something flickered in his eyes. “I have,” he whispered. “More times than I want to admit.”

We didn’t speak after that.

There was nothing left to say.

We sat together, the three of us, surrounding the child who wasn’t just ours–but everyone’s now. Nate wrapped a cloak over my shoulders. Ethan leaned back against the far wall, head tilted toward the faint tremble in the walls that hadn’t stopped since the leyline cracked.

And she…

She murmured again.

Thenguage spilled from her lips like water over stone–quiet but steady, impossibly old. It didn’t echo, but it stayed with you. Etched itself behind your ears and along your spine, like it had always been there, waiting to be heard.

The words were soft and strange, a rhythm more than a sound. Like a prayer. Like a memory. Like a truth spoken before time ever had a name.

She shifted in myp.

Her tiny toes pressed against the stone floor–just barely, just once.

But it was enough.

A glow bled outward beneath her ifoot/i.

Not me.

Not fire.

A pulse.

A wave of light rippled through the stone in every direction, trailing in soft violet gold. It traced lines—no, runes. Ancient ones. Ones I couldn’t read, but felt anyway. They weren’t just symbols. They were a pattern. A map. A mark.

Something old was stirring beneath our feet.

And then-

The voice came.

“Sovereign. I am here.”

It didn’te from her.

It didn’t evene from inside the room.

It came from the canyon.

From the wound in the world that had begun to bleed ever since I opened the Gate.

My heart mmed against my ribs. I bolted upright.

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Nate was already reaching for his sword, hand flying to the hilt with practiced instinct. The metal scraped against the sheath as it cleared, a sharp sound that split the air like lightning through ss.

Ethan spun toward the archway, his palm already lit with fire, eyes scanning the shadows like he expected them to move–and maybe they would.

The baby didn’t move.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t cry. Didn’t even blink.

She simply turned her head.

Her eyes–those eerie, knowing eyes–locked on the stone wall across the room. The wall that separated us from the wild. From the leyline. From the mountain’s edge.

And from the canyon.

Another pulse hit the floor.

Stronger this time. Sharper. It vibrated through my bones and made the windows rattle in their frames. The torches flickered. One of them died.

Then the voice came again.

Lower.

Heavier.

Like it was scraping its way through time itself.

“Sovereign.”

“I. Am. Here.”

My stomach turned. The room tipped sideways for a second, like the earth forgot which direction was up.

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Magic thickened in the air–not hot like it usually was, but cold. Icy. Dense.

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Eva ran in, breathless. Her eyes immediately went to the child, then to the floor still pulsing beneath her.

“What is that?” she asked, voice strained.

“Not her,” I said hoarsely. “Not this time.”

The baby finally blinked.

And smiled.

Not wide. Not warm. Just a small, eerie curl of her lips. As if she recognized the voice. As if it had always been calling to her—and she’d just been waiting for us to hear it too.

Another beat.

Then the room shifted.

The torches along the wall went out all at once.

The windows cracked, spidering with frost from the inside.

And the air?

It burned cold.

I dropped to one knee beside her, holding her shoulders, searching her face for some flicker of fear. Some proof she was still just a child.

But there wasn’t any.

She stared straight ahead, calm and curious, like a queen on a throne made of ash and silence.

Then she looked at me.

And whispered, barely audible above the wind now howling through the cracks in the stone-

“He’s closer than you think.”

Then she looked away.

The floor pulsed onest time.

The rune circle under her red–and vanished.

And I knew.

The Gate wasn’t just awake.

It wasing.