The instant I crossed the veil, the air broke like glass around me. One heartbeat I was still in the forest, Damon's voice cutting through the dark; the next, it was gone—ripped away as though the world itself had blinked shut. No earth beneath my feet. No sky above. Only a field of mirrors stretched into an endless horizon, their surfaces cracked and shivering with faint glyphs that crawled like veins of fire beneath the glass.
I turned, desperate to see them—the pack, Damon—but what looked back was only a faint shimmer, distorted echoes trapped on the other side of the glass. Their mouths moved. I couldn't hear them. Not really. Only the faintest ripple of sound like a storm buried a thousand miles away.
I lifted my hand to the mirror-surface and found no reflection waiting, only shadows that slipped across the glass like oil, bending and twisting into forms that weren't mine.
Then the Choir rose.
Not as scattered whispers, not as fractured fragments clawing at my skull—this time they spoke together. A single tide of voices, low and crushing, high and piercing, all layered as one. The sound carried weight, pressing against my bones as if it could shatter me into dust.
Heir. Intruder. Moonblood. Ash-borne child.
The words weren't just sound—they were being, carved into the very marrow of me. My knees buckled, my breath caught, but the mirror-floor held me, unyielding.
I was inside the Threshold.
And there was no way back.
---
The world locked into shape around me like a trap snapping shut. The shifting void of mirrors and shadowlight hardened into something crueler—an arena woven from memory and nightmare. My childhood room, burned at the edges. Damon's silhouette, fractured into a thousand hostile reflections. Faces of the pack, twisted into strangers who bared their teeth at me, eyes emptied of loyalty. Every corner of my past and present dragged into the circle, weaponized against me.
Above, glyphs unfurled like constellations etched in fire. They burned so brightly they branded the air itself, lines of power tethering me in place, binding my essence like a star held in an iron cage. The Hollow Order had written my very existence into their design. I was not only walking through their trial—I was the prize they sought to anchor, the shard of prophecy they meant to bend until it cracked.
The ground beneath my feet pulsed, stained with ash that wasn't ash, a stage that breathed like something alive. My skin prickled with recognition—I was meant to fight here, meant to bleed here, meant to prove myself or be consumed whole. The Choir's voices echoed in unison above, not dissonant this time but perfectly layered, a harmony that burrowed under my ribs like the rhythm of a heartbeat. Their song was not welcome, nor hostile—it was claiming.
And then it struck me with a force that nearly toppled me: this place wasn't a battleground. It was a crucible. The Hollow had no interest in whether I survived intact—it wanted me reshaped, aligned, rewritten. Every step forward meant surrendering something of myself. Every hesitation meant giving the Order more ground.
My pulse thundered in my ears, not from fear but from the sharp edge of choice pressing closer. I wasn't here to simply resist. If I stepped deeper, I would either claim this place—or it would claim me.
---
The Choir's song did not rise—it shattered. One voice became a thousand, then more, and in each note I recognized something too intimate to bear. Faces tore from the shadowglass around me, pulling forward from mirror-shards until I stood surrounded by versions of myself. Some were pale with fear, some armored in wrath, others hollow-eyed with hunger. Their mouths opened in unison, speaking not in chorus but in overlapping dissonance, a storm of my own voices.
Savior, destroyer, vessel—each word a blade cutting from a different angle. One self clutched the wolf mark blazing on her throat, another bore scorched hands dripping with flame, another held chains as though she had forged them herself. They circled me like predators, like judges.
I staggered, but the Threshold did not let me fall. Power cracked out of me in pulses—roots split the mirrored floor, shadows bled into flame, glyphs overhead sputtered and bent in patterns I did not command. My breath came ragged, but with every exhale something darker slipped free.
The selves leaned closer. A Dahlia with ash in her hair whispered, You burn them all. Another, crowned in fractured bone, hissed, You reign in silence. A child's version of me—eyes wide, innocent—asked, Do you remember who you were, before they sold you?
I couldn't tell where their voices ended and mine began. I pressed my palms against my ears, but it only made the sound coil deeper inside. The truth hit me with the force of a breaking seal: the Choir wasn't some external legion clawing at my soul. It was me. Every possibility, every path, every fate my bloodline had chained into the Hollow was alive here, singing.
The arena pulsed, demanding choice. Shadows and flame writhed higher, rooting into the glyph constellations above. My control slipped. If I didn't claim it, it would claim me.
---
The Threshold shudders, and for a moment I think it is my power breaking it apart—but then I feel the sting of something colder, invasive. Sigils bloom across the horizon like chains of fire, their geometry rigid and suffocating. They don't belong to the Choir. They are the Hollow Order's brand, carved into the air as if to graft their will onto mine.
Far away, on the edge of awareness, I sense Damon. His voice is muted, distant, but his fury thrums through the bond we share. The pack feels it too—the disruption, the way my body in the waking world has become a lantern of stolen light, glowing with symbols I cannot peel away. They are trying to anchor me, not free me.
The arena around me buckles. My fractured selves—the savior, the destroyer, the vessel—stagger under the weight of foreign glyphs slicing into their forms. The Choir's voices splinter, not because they doubt me, but because the Order is forcing their song into silence. This is no longer trial alone. It is siege.
The air reeks of duality: Choir glyphs pulsing wild and living, Order glyphs burning sharp and absolute. They clash above me like warring constellations, tearing the Threshold into a battlefield neither side was meant to dominate. Every step I take, I feel the tilt—toward them, toward their cage.
I want to scream, to tear free, but the more I resist, the tighter their weave grows. Somewhere, dim but certain, I know: they are not only watching. They are rewriting. And if they succeed, I won't leave this place as myself—I'll leave as theirs.
---
The Threshold quaked as if it too was being asked to decide. Symbols tore through the seams—Hollow glyphs searing across the Choir's living veins of light, turning them brittle, jagged. My other selves howled, dozens of versions of me collapsing into ash or twisting into monstrous echoes, each warning me of what surrender or fracture might mean.
I felt the pull of three doors, though none were real. One dragged me toward the safety of resistance, promising to split the weight from me but at the cost of shattering into pieces too scattered to gather again. Another burned with the Hollow's sigil, whispering relief, offering me release from choice if I let myself be nothing more than their vessel. The last was raw, molten, dangerous—it pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat, asking not that I be absorbed but that I claim. Seize the Choir, bend it, make it kneel to me instead of the other way around.
My body trembled under the strain. Roots lashed the void, fire hissed from my skin, shadows rippled like wings. None of it was fully mine, yet none of it could exist without me. The trial wasn't some foreign crucible—I was the crucible.
Through the roar of selves and symbols, a thread cut sharp and clear. Mira's voice. Faint, breaking, but real. Dahlia, don't let them tell you who you are.
Her words lodged inside me, an anchor dropped into an ocean storm. For the first time, I realized I didn't have to choose what they laid before me. The Hollow Order framed it as submission. The Choir framed it as dissolution. But what if the Daughter of Ash wasn't meant to follow a script at all?
The power shuddered, waiting.
And so did I.
---
The decision left my tongue before thought could cage it. No surrender. No fracture. Mine.
The fractured selves—the savior, the destroyer, the vessel—screamed as if ripped apart. Then, like shards drawn to a single flame, they converged, fusing into me with the weight of every path I might have been. The Choir's voices no longer thundered in opposition. They bent, reluctantly, agonizingly, to my will.
The Threshold roared alive. Sound became light, light became fire, fire became shadow. My body was no longer just a body—it was a conduit. Glyphs carved themselves across my skin in burning patterns, shifting as though alive, each stroke echoing with the language of ash and blood. My veins felt molten, my bones hollowed and filled with the Choir's resonance.
Outside, the forest buckled. Trees bent under a wind that came from nowhere, roots cracked stone, wolves threw their heads back in pained howls. Damon's voice was lost in the maelstrom, his oath-fire straining to shield them from the surge radiating from me.
The Hollow Order staggered. Their ritual lines snapped like brittle cords, symbols dissolving into static as the Choir's resonance overran them. Yet their eyes—terrified, fever-bright—clung to me. Not a failure, not a broken vessel. A Daughter, claimed.
The Choir's unison blazed one final crescendo that shattered the air like glass. Then silence fell, so heavy it felt alive.
I stood at the center of it all, trembling but unbowed. The glyphs on my skin pulsed brighter with each heartbeat, and when I opened my eyes, the world flinched. For in their reflection was not sky or forest or man, but the abyss of the Threshold itself—endless, watching, awake.
I had chosen. And the world would feel the cost.
---
The Threshold convulses, its bones of ash and its veins of ember writhing like a beast unchained. Every rune carved into its surface screams—yet not in pain. The Hollow both accepts and rejects, collapsing and expanding in the same breath.
I am flung forward, but the Threshold refuses to let me go whole. Half of me crashes into the forest floor, soil clinging to my skin, breath tearing through my chest. The other half still hangs in the Hollow's suspended dark, tethered to something greater than flesh.
The pack surges toward me, but their paws halt at once. A heat, no—an authority—lashes outward from my body, scorching the air itself. I am not untouchable; I am untouching. Their eyes shimmer with equal parts reverence and terror.
The Hollow's voice seizes my mouth. It does not whisper; it thunders, syllables older than the sun, burning through my throat until the words come out as fire instead of sound:
The Red Daughter has risen. The Shadow Crown awaits. The First Flame stirs.
I feel it—the Red Flame, alive and endless, pouring through me like a river of molten dawn. Not just power, but inheritance. Not just inheritance, but destiny. My choice to seize, not submit or resist, has carved me into something new.
I am no longer Dahlia the sold, the hunted, the claimed.
I am Dahlia, the Red Daughter.
The Hollow does not own me. The Order does not own me. Even the pack cannot claim me.
Yet far below, in the abyss where time itself coils around chains of dragonbone, a slumbering colossus stirs. Its scaled chest rises, its cavern lungs exhale heat enough to turn oceans into vapor. The First Dragon shifts in his dreaming, nostrils flaring as if scenting my flame.
He waits. Watching from the dark. Waiting for me to ignite fully—so he may awaken, so his chains may melt, so the world may burn or be reborn.
The Threshold shudders one final time. The Hollow's shadow and the world's light fuse in me, and for the first time since creation, apocalypse has lips. My lips.
I do not scream. I do not whisper.
I only burn.
---
Has Dahlia claimed her freedom—or has she stepped into the role carved for her since the dawn of dragons? Will the Red Daughter burn the Hollow away, or crown it in flame?
---