bChapter /bb223 /b

Jiselle*

The world didn’t end the day the Gate split. But it didn’t go back to how it was, either.

It shifted.

And so did we.

I stood beneath the remnants of the once–majestic observatory tower, now fractured from crown to base, its frame swallowed by stubborn vines and heat–weathered stone. Time had chipped away at what fire left behind–but it hadn’t taken everything. From the ash, new roots had grown. Thend was different now. Wilder. Not broken… just rewritten.

And she was its author.

Sra Vale–barely a year old and already walking on steadier legs than most warriors. Her hair, a wild halo of silver–burnished auburn, caught the wind like me even when there was none. Her eyes–those ancient, ember–streaked eyes–blinked open to truths most of us still didn’t know how to name. She didn’t babble like other children. She spoke. Softly. Rarely. But when she did, it was innguages the rest of us had only ever read about in fragments. Forgotten tongues. Starfire dialects. And sometimes… words that weren’t words at all, but sounds that bent the air like music being yed from inside the bones of the earth.

Sra remembered things before they were told to her. Names. Stories. Wounds.

She remembered people.

Like the woman from the mountain pack who’d arrived just this morning, her shoulder scarred with an ancient curse mark she’d spent a lifetime hiding. Sra hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t asked.

She’d simply looked at her, and said: “It hurts less when you stop pretending it doesn’t.”

And the woman had wept in silence.

That was the kind of child she was.

That was the kind of Sovereign we were raising.

The stronghold had be a sanctuary in the wake of so much ruin. Not a kingdom. Not a fortress. A crossing point. Between power and restraint. Between hope and consequence. Between what we used to believe… and what we had to believe now if we wanted to survive.

Magic didn’t follow the old rules anymore.

It flowed differently. Through leyline fractures that pulsed to new rhythms. Through bloodlines that had been dormant for centuries. Through wolves who’d once been deemed powerless–and now found themselves burning from within.

And in the center of it all, quiet and strange and radiant, was a little girl who had named herself in fire.

b7:47 /bbFri/bb, /bbSep 26 /b

Sra Vale.

Some called her the meborn.

Others, the Sovereign Unbound.

To me, she was just my daughter.

“Careful,” I murmured now as she reached for the edge of the table, her fingers glowing slightly where they brushed the wood. “That’s not cooled yet.”

“I know,” she said, not looking at me. “It won’t burn me.”

I exchanged a nce with Eva across the room, who raised an eyebrow but said nothing. She was seated on the floor, sketching again, herp covered in scrolls and half–formed prophecies. Her hand still bore the remnants of the Moon sigil, even though her visions had slowed these past few months.

“The wolves from the southern valley will be here by dusk,” she said, not looking up.

“Another pack?” I asked, lifting Sra into my arms.

Eva nodded. “Word’s spreading. The girl who lit the sky… they all want to see her.”

“They want more than that,” I muttered. “They want to know which side she’ll choose when the next wares.b” /b

Eva didn’t deny it.

Nate found us on the south wall before the sun dipped low enough to kiss the canyon’s edge.

“North border’s holding,” he said, pressing a kiss to the crown of Sra’s head when she rushed to him. “But the ground near the Hollow is shifting again. Bastain said he felt a pulse yesterday.”

“Did it reach the stronghold?”

“Not yet.”

We stood there in silence. Me. Him. Our daughter between us, humming quietly to herself as she drew swirling patterns in the dirt with her foot. They pulsed faintly–glowing–not dangerous, just… alive. Breathing through the earth itself.

“She shouldn’t be able to do that,” Nate said softly.

“No,” I agreed. “But she can.”

“She’s changing thend.”

“She is thend.”

He didn’t argue.

b7:47 /bbFri/bb, /bbSep /bb26 /b

We both knew it was true.

At night, we gathered in the old tower. A ce once used forbat drills, now repurposed into something gentler. A ce for councils. For coalitions. For wolves with gifts they never dared reveal–until the Gate shattered, and secrets poured through the cracks.

Now they came freely. Packless. Exiled. Hidden warriors with trembling voices and unfamiliar eyesb. /bThey came for answers. For shelter. And more than anything–for her.

The Sovereign child who never cried.

The girl who, even nowi, /isat perched on a stone ledge and stared into the fire like it whispered only to her.

“She’s listening again,” Ethan said as he joined us at the back of the chamber. “Hearing things we can’t.”

I looked at him. “You okay?”

He didn’t answer right away. Just leaned against the wall, arms folded. His shoulders still carried weight. But his me didn’t flicker like it used toi. /i

“Sometimes,” he said eventually, “I think she hears my thoughts before I even form them.”

“She probably does,” Eva muttered from nearby. “She’s a mirror, remember? She reflects the pieces we’re afraid to say aloud.”

“She’s more than that,” I whispered.

And I wasn’t wrong.

Because in the space between heartbeats, Sra turned toward us and spoke.

“I don’t like the Hollow,” she said, simply.

Nate blinked. “You’ve never been there.”

She shook her head. “But it’s loud. And it’s angry. And it’s… waiting.”

My spine stiffened, and I found myself asking, more from instinct than reason, “For what?”

Sra tilted her head to the side, her small fingers brushing the earth. “For me,” she said quietly, though her gaze didn’t flinch. “For all of us. But mostly… for me.”

And then she smiled–softly, deliberately.

It wasn’t the kind of smile you’d expect from a child so young, and it certainly wasn’t one born of innocence. It wasn’t yful, or cruel, or even confused. It was the kind of smile that understood more than it should. The kind of knowing that felt older than any of us in the room.

I told myself not to read too deeply into every word she spoke. I tried not to obsess over the way herughter echoed—not once, but twice—first through the air and then somewhere deeper, somewhere I couldn’t quite ce. I tried not to tense each time she pointed at wolves she had never met and spoke truths about their

b7:48 /bbFri/b, bSep /bb26 /b

bpasts /bthat no one had shared aloud.

She bwas /bstill bjust /bba /bchild. Still learning, still growing.

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But beven /bchildrenb–/bespecially children born of fractured prophecy and wild me–could carry the weight of the world.

Later that night, after the stronghold had gone still and only the wind moved through the empty halls, I found myself sitting beside Nate at the edge of the training field. We said little, letting the silence stretch while we watched Sra dance along the mossb–/bcovered stones, chasing sparks that seemed to rise to meet her.

“She’s different,” I said eventually, my voice barely more than a breath against the night.

Nate didn’t look away from her. “She always has been.”

“I mean now. I mean fromst week. Even fromst month,” I murmured. “There’s a kind of… grounding in her now. Like the wildness inside her bis /bstarting to choose what it wants to be.”

“That might be a good thing,” Nate offered, though I heard the hesitation buried beneath his calm.

“Or,” I said quietly, watching the sparks bend toward her feet, “it might mean the Gate is closer than any of us thought.”

Nate’s jaw tightened the way it always did when fear slipped past his control. I didn’t need him to answer. I already knew the truth of it.

Because thest time the Gate opened, we didn’t just risk everything.

We almost lost it.

The scream came just before dawn–sharp, piercing, and so unnaturally twisted that it stopped every heart in the stronghold mid–beat.

It didn’te from within our walls.

It came from the far side of the canyon.

From the edge of the Hollow.

And it wasn’t a wolf’s cry.

It was something else entirely. A sound that once might have belonged to a voice–but had since been broken, btwisted /binto something unrecognizable. It didn’t call for help. It didn’t seek blood.

It warned.

We all froze in ce, the sound still ringing through the morning haze like a de dragged across stone.

And when I turned to Sra, I didn’t need to ask what she had heard.

bIt /bwas in her face. In her eyes.

b7:48 /bFrib, /bbSep /bb26 /b

There bwas /bno fear there.

Only recognition–quiet and cold.

As if whoever had screamed wasn’t a stranger.

As if she’d known them all along.

And as if she understood, with a certainty that made my stomach clench-

They weren’t done.

And they were never going to stop.

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