Chapter 97
Chapter 97
*Jiselle*
It started with a flicker. A breath I didn’t take, lodged somewhere behind my ribs. A thought I hadn’t formed, blooming like frost on the inside of my skull. Not loud. Not violent. Just wrong. Like something had reached through the walls of my mind and left fingerprints behind.
The first time it happened, I was meditating in the lower chamber, the one Kael insted I visit daily now. The walls there were etched with old flame runes–symbols he claimed helped channel internal energy without losing control. The room smelled of ash and cracked stone, and the air shimmered with heat even when the fires weren’t lit. I sat cross–legged at the center, palms open to the ceiling, trying to center myself, trying to feel the hum of power Kael said ran through me like a second bloodstream.
But that day, it wasn’t my magic I felt.
It was sorrow.
Vast. Crushing. Older than memory, and sharper than grief.
And then–an image. A woman I’d never seen before, kneeling in a pool of blood, her hands pressed to a child’s chest. She was screaming a name I didn’t know, but I felt the syllables rattle my bones as if they belonged to me. Her wolf hovered just beneath her skin, a shifting shadow of silver and white. Her hair was braided in warrior fashion, her face streaked with soot and tears.
And just like that–it was gone.
I opened my eyes with a sharp breath, the heat in the room suddenly suffocating, my heart pounding like I’d run miles. The vision had been so vivid I could still smell the copper tang of blood in the air. But there had been no sound. No transition. Just a drop into someone else’s life, then yanked out by invisible hands.
I didn’t tell Kael. Not yet.
I wanted to believe it was residual from the Trial. A leftover flame dream. But when it happened again–this time during sparring, when I blinked and suddenly saw a memory of Kael, younger, dirtier, hands raw from dragging a dead friend from the snow–I knew something was wrong.
They weren’t just visions.
They were memories.
But they weren’t mine.
Kael noticed something was off the next day. He always did. I couldn’t decide whether it made him trustworthy or terrifying.
We stood in the courtyard near the broken pillar, the one we often used as a focus point during training. Heat curled from my palms, dancing threads of white fire, but I couldn’t center them. They spiraled out too fast, too wild, and when I tried to ground them, they flared violently, forcing Kael to raise a hand and dispel the pulse before it scorched the vines growing up the west wall.
“Again,” he said simply.
I shook out my arms. “It’s different now.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t just burn. It pulls.”
He tilted his head, studying me. “Pulls what?”
“Me. Out of myself. Like something’s trying to reach through it.”
His mouth pressed into a line. “The more your power expands, the more it connects to the echoes of those who carried it before.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You knew this would happen.”
Kael didn’t flinch. “It’s part of your evolution.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
His jaw worked, but no answer came. Instead, he motioned for me to begin again.
I didn’t.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in the stone alcove of my room, listening to the faint hum of magic in the walls, the thrum of something deeper beneath the keep–something older than the rogues who lived here. The rogue sanctuary had always felt strange to me, but now it felt haunted. Not by ghosts, but by memory. The collective history of wolves who had tried and failed to hold power
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Chapter 97
like mine. The walls remembered. And now, so did I.
I woke from a half–sleep with a name on my tongue. Not mine. Not Kael’s. Someone I’d never met, yet the syllables made my hands burn as if they’d been carved into my skin.
I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I found Kael in the high library, where the rogue texts were kept under magical wards that I wasn’t yet allowed to access. He stood at a table, flipping through pages written in blood–ink, the candlelight catching on the curve of his jaw. He looked more shadow than man.
“You’re hiding something,” I said without preamble.
He looked up slowly. “Jiselle-”
“You knew this would happen. The memories. The emotions. They’re not just echoes. They’re pieces of lives. Pieces of pain. Why am I seeing them?”
Kael closed the book in front of him and leaned his weight against the table. “Because your fire doesn’t just burn forward- ‘it reaches back.”
I crossed my arms. “What does that even mean?”
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes didn’t flicker. “The Ethereal flame isn’t just energy. It’s legacy. Every bearer
leaves something behind, and when the next one rises, that residue calls to them. Sometimes it’s a whisper. Sometimes… it’ s a scream.”
“Why now?”
“Because your cuffs are gone. Because the Trial cracked your boundaries. Because you’ve begun to change.”
“I didn’t ask to change,” I snapped.
“No one does.”
He stepped closer, his voice low.
“You think you’re here to heal. To rebuild. To be the light in the dark.“.
I said nothing.
Kael’s next words were soft, but they struck like blades.
“You weren’t born to fix the cycle, Jiselle.”
I went still.
He stared into me like he could see the fractures spidering beneath my skin.
“You were born to end it.”
Silence stretched between us like a chasm. My heart thudded once–twice–before the words made sense.
“End it?” I said hoarsely. “You mean… destroy it?”
“I mean sever it. Burn it down to the root, so nothing like it ever rises again.”
“Is that what you want from me?” I whispered. “To be your weapon?”
He didn’t answer. But his eyes–his eyes told me everything.
“I’m not your fire–god,” I hissed. “I’m not your prophecy.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You’re not. But you’re still the end of something.”
I left before I could decide whether to scream or cry.
That night, the whispers came back. Not voices. Not memories.
Feelings.
The terror of a young girl hunted by her own father. The sorrow of a mother forced to sever her pup’s gift to save her sanity. The fury of a boy who watched his mate be claimed by another because he wasn’t strong enough to protect her.
None of them were mine.
And yet they filled me until I thought I would break.
When the fire finally came, it didn’t burn. It sang.
And in the song, I heard something new.
A voice I knew like my own heartbeat. Familiar. Cracked. Desperate.
Jiselle…
My eyes opened in the dark. My hands shook. My magic coiled beneath my skin like a creature waking from slumber.
Chapter 97
It wasn’t a dream.
It was Nate.
And the bond might be gone….
but the scar still bled.
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