The next morning, Haera wakes with blood on her bedsheets — not fresh, not hers. Dried in strange shapes. Spirals. Runes. One word.
Kael.
She bolts upright, heart pounding. Her palm, which she sliced the night before, is healed. Not even a scar. But the memory of the ritual is as sharp as broken glass.
Cairos texts only three words:
"Are you okay?"
She doesn't respond. She isn't sure.
---
In class, the lights flicker again. The professor's voice sounds muffled, like underwater. Haera stares at the chalkboard and sees nothing written there — until she blinks.
Then it's full.
Lilienne. Cairos. Kael. The Binding. The Breaking. The Rewriting.
She gasps.
No one else reacts.
Just her.
As though time is showing her its cracks.
---
At lunch, she sits alone until a girl with sharp cheekbones and dark skin slides into the seat beside her. She wears no school crest. Her eyes shimmer like onyx.
"You've done it now," she says simply.
"Excuse me?"
"The ritual. You think that was the end? That was the spark."
"Who are you?"
"I'm the librarian," the girl smirks. "Of the lives you don't remember."
She places a folded note on the table and leaves without another word.
Haera opens it.
Inside, it says:
"He wasn't your first heartbreak. You were his."
---
That night, the dreams don't come. Only fire.
A ballroom burning.
A crown melting.
A boy — Kael — dragging her away from the inferno, tears streaking his face.
"You promised me," he says. "And you gave it to him."
---
Haera jolts awake.
Outside her dorm window, smoke rises. Not from a fire. From words burned into the lawn below.
"You belong to me first."
---
She rushes to the East Wing, her hands trembling. Her feet carry her before her brain can protest.
There, on the scorched ground near the old sundial, lies another letter. This one sealed with obsidian wax.
It crumbles in her hand like ash.
Inside:
> "You burned the binding. But you forgot the beginning."
"Ask him who really ended your first life."
---
Cairos finds her sitting there an hour later, barefoot, shaking.
She doesn't look at him.
"You lied," she says. "You said Kael was just a failed bond. But I remember now. He saved me… the first time."
Cairos's face is unreadable. Cold.
"Some truths are better left buried."
"But I died with his name on my lips."
A pause.
Then he whispers:
"And you lived every other life with mine."
He kneels beside her.
"Do you want the truth, Haera? The real truth?"
She nods slowly.
Cairos's hand tightens into a fist.
"I didn't break the first cycle. You did."
---
The ground trembles.
A voice — not his, not hers — echoes through the wind:
"And you'll break it again, little flame. Just wait."