The chapel was colder than memory. Dust motes floated in fractured light through cracked stained-glass windows, coloring the silence with red, blue, and violet hues. But none of the warmth reached Elara as she crossed the empty sanctuary floor.
The altar loomed ahead, familiar and foreign all at once. Here, once, she had begged for mercy. Here, she'd knelt as a princess. Now, she stood as something the gods themselves might not recognize.
Behind her, Corven moved like a shadow, his boots silent on the stone, his presence a blade drawn but not yet swung.
"I was here the night before the trial," Elara murmured, her fingers brushing the edge of the cracked altar. "I begged the High Priestess to protect me. She never spoke. I thought it meant she'd abandoned me."
"Maybe she didn't," Corven said softly. "Maybe she left an answer that no one was meant to find… except you."
He crouched beside a crumbling base of the altar, brushing away centuries of dust. His gloved hand revealed faint runes carved into the stone not the clean, sanctioned script of Ravaryn's clerics, but older, wilder symbols that seemed to shimmer faintly beneath the torchlight.
"When the Crown forgets, the Fire remembers."
Elara's brow furrowed. "That's not chapel scripture."
"It's Flame Order code," Corven said. "They used it to mark hidden prophecies and seer-born truths."
Her pulse quickened. "I thought the Flame Order was wiped out a century ago."
"So did the court," Corven muttered. "But fire doesn't die. It hides in ash."
Behind the altar, a faded tapestry depicting the Phoenix's Ascension hung limp with age. Elara approached it slowly, recalling how it once shimmered on her coronation day a radiant symbol of power, rebirth, and eternal loyalty.
Now, its threads were frayed. As false as the vows whispered beneath it.
She reached behind the tapestry. Her fingers brushed stone. Then, a slit barely wide enough for a hand. She reached into the crevice and withdrew something wrapped in dry cloth, stiff with time.
It was a scroll. Heavy. Ancient. Stained.
With blood.
Corven's eyes narrowed. "Is that…?"
Elara didn't answer. She unwrapped the scroll and opened it carefully. Inside was a parchment covered in jagged script not calligraphy, but urgent writing. Desperate. And old.
"One born twice. One burned once. One remembered by the Mirror."
The words blurred in her vision.
"I've seen that phrasing before," she said hoarsely. "In the dream. The one right after I woke in Thalia's body."
She read further:
"The heir of flame shall return not as queen,
But as witness,
While the shadow born of forgotten blood
Wears her crown."
The scroll trembled in her hands.
"It's not about revenge," she whispered. "It never was. It's about replacement."
Corven took the parchment gently and flipped it over. A second inscription written in dried blood covered the back.
"One may rise.
One must die.
But the second must forget,
Or both shall burn."
The silence that followed was unbearable.
"They're not just warning me," Elara said. "They're giving me a choice."
"If you remember too much," Corven murmured, "you fracture the timeline. You were reborn with the fire's permission… but that permission has limits."
Elara turned away, pacing the length of the chapel like a caged predator.
"Then what do I do? Stop remembering? Stop uncovering the truth?"
"You can't un-know what you already do," Corven said. "Which means…"
"Which means someone has to die," a new voice cut in.
They spun around.
A man stepped from the shadows of a side chamber older, stooped slightly, but with eyes that burned like lanterns. One eye was ruined, a melted orb of scar tissue. The other gleamed gold, etched with faint magical runes. His robes were those of a forgotten order red and charred black and around his neck hung a pendant shaped like a phoenix wing fractured in two.
Corven drew his blade instantly.
"Who are you?" he barked.
The man raised his hands. "I am no threat to her. I came to witness the turning."
"The what?" Elara asked.
"The moment the prophecy folds in on itself," the man said. "I am a Flamekeeper. The last of the ones who recorded the true visions of fire. I knew the High Priestess. I buried that scroll at her command."
Corven didn't lower his sword.
"You let her die," Elara said coldly. "You let me die."
"I was too late to stop what was set in motion," the man said. "And she told me not to interfere. The gods had already passed judgment. But she did leave one final truth behind a second prophecy."
He handed Elara another parchment, older and barely legible.
This time, it was only two lines:
"Two flames shall walk in one shadowed world.
One is memory. One is made."
Elara's blood ran cold.
Corven read the lines aloud, then said quietly, "You were never meant to survive… not alongside her."
"She was created," the Flamekeeper said. "Not born. The false Elara. A vessel to hold the kingdom's lie."
"And I was… what?" Elara snapped. "The mistake they buried?"
"You were the memory that could undo it all," he said.
Corven stepped forward. "Then how do we end this?"
The Flamekeeper produced something from his robes. A dagger. Curved, obsidian, pulsing faintly with crimson runes.
"The Mirror Gate lies beneath the catacombs," he said. "A place where timelines fracture and identities unravel. If both versions of Elara step through it… only one emerges. Whole. True."
Elara took the blade. It was heavier than any weapon she'd ever held — not in weight, but in what it demanded.
"I have to kill her," she whispered. "Or she kills me."
"Or…" the Flamekeeper said softly, "you forget. Willingly. You sever the bond, burn the memory, and become someone else entirely."
"No crown. No revenge. No justice."
He nodded.
"No fire."
Her throat clenched. Corven stepped beside her, silent, his gaze unreadable.
"You're not alone," he said. "Whatever choice you make… I stand with you."
Elara stared down at the dagger.
So many versions of her life had been stolen her love, her crown, her name.
But this moment? This one belonged only to her.
And when she walked out of this chapel… one version of Elara Valeblume would cease to exist.