Chapter 111
Chapter 111
*Jiselle*
It started with the shadows.
Small things at first–details I couldn’t account for. A cut on my palm I didn’t remember earning. A scorch mark on the chamber wall where none had been the day before. Waking up with soot under my nails. Standing somewhere with no recollection of how I got there. It was like my body kept moving while my mind refeed to follow. Like the flame inside me- so recently my ally–had started charting its own path.
I told no one.
Not even Lira.
Not even myself.
Because admitting it would make it real. And I wasn’t ready for real. Not after what happened in the ritual chamber. Not after the fire turned white and the world bowed–not to Kael, not to prophecy–but to me.
And that terrified me more than anything.
Kael pretended it was nothing.
Or maybe he believed that if he ignored the cracks, the foundation wouldn’t fall.
He smiled too much now. Spoke of stability, control, ascension. Every word more polished, more careful, but the desperation behind his eyes frayed like rope in storm wind. He’d begun wearing his old regalia again–the heavy crimson cloak, the obsidian neck–piece carved with Sovereign sigils. The pieces he’d worn before I arrived. Before the fire bent to me instead.
The shift in power wasn’t spoken of.
But it was felt.
And Kael? He was losing control.
Of me. Of the wolves. Of the story he’d written around us both.
So he offered me a choice.
“I want to help you, Jiselle,” he said one morning, his voice low and even as we stood above the leyline pool in the central chamber. “You’re losing time. The surges are worsening. Your flame is raw. Uncontained. If this continues, you’ll destroy yourself. Or worse, burn the sanctuary from the inside out.”
I didn’t argue.
Because he was right.
I was unraveling.
But then he added, “There’s a final rite. One that fuses the Sovereign fully with the leyline. It stabilizes the mind. Anchors the flame.”
“Or binds it,” I said before I could stop myself.
Kael’s expression didn’t change. Not overtly.
But something in his eyes narrowed.
“I wouldn’t do anything without your consent,” he said.
But his magic was already creeping toward me across the floor, subtle and quiet like a snare beneath snow.
And I realized then that I had to leave.
Not just the room.
The sanctuary.
The moment I felt the next blackout threatening–heat climbing my spine, thoughts scattering like ash–I ran.
I didn’t know where my legs were carrying me until I recognized the slanted corridor leading into the leyline tunnels. These were old, forbidden. Built not for travel but for channeling–the arteries of the mountain itself. No wolf ventured here unless guided by Kael himself. No wolf came out unchanged
But I wasn’t afraid of what the tunnels would s
Successfully unlocked!
I was afraid of what would happen if I stayed.
The descent was immediate.
Steep. Cramped. Breathless.
1/3
Chapter 111
The deeper I went, the louder the pulse became–not sound, but feeling. The steady beat of something ancient, something alive, humming through the stone like veins of living fire. My vision blurred with each step, flames curling at the edges of my eyes. The walls trembled with old echoes.
I thought I was alone.
Until I wasn’t.
She stepped from the shadows like she’d always been there, like the mountain had carved her from its ribs and sent her to wait for me.
The rogue elder.
She was small, cloaked in a mantle of weathered bone–thread, her hair white as snow, braided down her back like a spine. Her eyes were silver–not bright, not glowing. Just…. endless.
“I wondered when you’d come,” she said.
I stopped, breathing hard. “Do you know who I am?”
“I know what they call you.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She studied me with a gaze that didn’t flinch. “You’re the spark born at the fracture. The flame they tried to name before it knew how to speak.”
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t need to.
She gestured for me to follow and began walking without waiting for consent.
I hesitated only a moment before trailing after her.
The tunnel widened into a chamber lined with smooth obsidian. The center of the room pulsed with a wellspring of leyline magic–liquid fire churning in a deep bowl of stone. The room breathed with it. So did I.
The elder sat on the edge and motioned for me to do the same.
“You’ve begun to lose pieces of yourself,” she said without preamble.
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re not the first.”
My fingers dug into my knees. “There were others?”
“One.”
I turned sharply. “The first Sovereign.”
She nodded.
“She bound herself to the leyline to stop what she feared she’d become.”
“And did it work?”
The elder’s gaze turned inward. “It stopped her. But not the fire.”
I looked away.
“She left something behind,” I said. “A letter.”
“She left many things behind.”
I hesitated. Then, quietly, “Why am I blacking out?”
“Because the flame no longer recognizes its cage,” she said. “It’s trying to escape. And you keep pulling it back with names. Sovereign. Flamebearer. Queen.”
“That’s not what I want to be.”
“No,” the elder said. “But you keep answering when they call you.”
I swallowed hard.
“What do I do?”
“You stop chasing what they see.”
The leyline hissed behind us, louder now, echoing through the walls.
“And you start asking who you were before they gave you a title.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, voice thin. “I don’t remember.”
She turned toward me fully then.
Chapter 131
Her voice softer.
“It’s not the fire that kills” she said. “It’s who you let feed it?
The words sank into me like blades.
I closed my eyes and felt it–the memories I’d tried to bury, the hunger had ding my s voice had started threading through my decisions
It wasn’t the magic that made me dangerous.
It was what I was becoming to please the ones who feared what ready was
I stood.
The elder didn’t stop me.
“You’ll return,” she said as I turned toward the tunnel. “They always do But sen sme, jy’s too go
I didn’t ask how she knew.
Because maybe she was right.
Maybe the fire hadn’t forgotten me.
Maybe I’d just stopped listening to the part of it that whispered–not in tongues, not in prophesy but to my own
Jiselle,
Not Sovereign. Not Vessel. Not Queen,
Just a girl with fire in her chest and too many voices trying to make it their own,
And this time, I would choose silence.
Until my fire could speak for me.
E
Subscribed
