The forest did not have a name.
It had once — in the long-forgotten tongues of the Old Kingdoms — but time, wind, and silence had erased it from maps and memory. It stretched across leagues of land, ancient and unyielding, breathing with its own will. Trees older than cities loomed like gods, their branches whispering secrets in a language only the wind understood.
In the heart of this forest lived a girl named Kaelara.
She had never seen a city. Never touched stone shaped by human hands. Never tasted anything that came in glass or tin. The forest fed her, taught her, raised her. Her home was a hollowed tree older than history, carved with runes she could not read. Her bed was woven moss and feather. Her light was firefly and moon.
And her only companion was a wolf.
Ash-grey, with one blind eye and a scar that curved like a crescent moon over his snout. She called him Shade, though she did not know if that had always been his name or if it had come from the dreams that sometimes spoke it into her ears.
He had been with her since she could walk. She had no memory of him arriving. Like the forest, he simply was.
The only other soul Kaelara ever saw was Maelna, the forest-witch.
She came with the fog, veiled in roots and bone, skin like bark and eyes pale as river glass. She brought no kindness, only survival — taught Kaelara to listen to the trees, to taste poison in the air, to kill with stone or silence.
But never with fire.
"Fire is not yours yet," Maelna had said once, voice like wind over frost. "Not until the stars open again."
Kaelara had never questioned her.
She had been told the world outside was poisoned, that humans burned what they did not understand, and that her soul belonged to the forest.
"You are not like them," Maelna had whispered.
"You are older than them."
At night, when Kaelara lay beneath the wide belly of the moon, she sometimes wondered what that meant.
But questions had never served her.
Survival did.
On the eve of her eighteenth birth, the forest changed.
The birds fell silent.
The wind stilled.
And the moon rose red.
Kaelara stood atop the Stonewatch — an ancient, crumbling arch that overlooked the Hollow Vale — and felt her chest tighten. Shade growled low at her side. He had never growled at the moon before.
Then she felt it — not in her skin, but in her bones.
A heat. A pull.
A name rising on the back of her tongue, though she had never heard it before.
"Avenya."
The name left her lips like a breath, and the world shuddered.
A red beam of light pierced the heavens in the far-off sky — distant, yes, but sharp enough to tear through cloud and logic.
Kaelara gasped. Her body burned from the inside. Not with pain, but with awakening.
Her palms glowed faintly gold, then crimson, then violet, before dimming again.
Shade pressed his nose to her shoulder. He was trembling.
So was the forest.
The next morning, Maelna was waiting.
Not at the hut. At the grove.
It was a place Kaelara had been forbidden to enter — a ring of blackened trees with no birds, no breeze, and no life. Once, she had approached it as a child. The air had turned to ice. Her vision blurred. Her ears bled.
She had never gone back.
But now, the grove called her.
And Maelna stood within it, waiting — hands clasped, expression unreadable.
"You saw it," the old witch said without turning.
"The sky bled."
"What was it?" Kaelara asked.
Maelna's face cracked like dried earth. For the first time in Kaelara's life, she saw fear in the woman's eyes.
"The seal is breaking," Maelna whispered. "The Kingdom stirs."
"What kingdom?"
Maelna only shook her head.
"You were never meant to wake."
"What am I?"
"A ruin reborn."
She turned then and looked directly into Kaelara's eyes.
"You are not of this world, Kaelara. Not entirely. You were given to it."
"By who?"
"By yourself."
Maelna led her deeper into the grove, down through roots older than language, into a chamber of obsidian vines and white ash stone. In the center stood a pool — black, still, rippling without wind.
"Look."
Kaelara knelt and stared into it.
She did not see herself.
She saw a crown of antlers.
Eyes that burned green and gold.
A battlefield of thunder.
A circle of women, five, cloaked in power beyond reason.
She saw a black-cloaked figure standing at the edge of the world, arms outstretched, shouting her name.
Avenya.
Then the image shattered.
She fell back, gasping.
"What is happening to me?"
Maelna sighed.
"You are not one. You are five."
"I don't understand."
"You will."
The old woman pressed a bone-pendant into Kaelara's palm.
"Go south. Follow the silver river. Find the stone gate. The world you belong to is stirring. It will seek you. Do not let it break you before you find the others."
Kaelara looked down at the pendant.
It was shaped like a flame… but inside it was a shard of green glass, pulsing faintly.
"You said I wasn't supposed to wake," Kaelara said, trembling. "Then why now?"
Maelna turned toward the mirror-pool, her voice no louder than a leaf falling.
"Because the Black Queen has risen."
She did not say goodbye.
Maelna vanished into fog before the sun rose. The hut lay quiet, its shelves emptied of herbs and scrolls. Shade waited at the edge of the path, tail twitching, golden eyes watching her.
Kaelara wore a cloak of barkwoven leather and carried a satchel of roots, flint, and a single rusted dagger. Her feet were bare. Her soul hummed with something she could not name.
The world outside the forest awaited.
Somewhere, others like her — other Queens — were stirring.
And deep inside, something ancient whispered not fear, but fury.
Not terror — but destiny.