The world returned to Selene in fragments—each sensation a shard of glass cutting through the merciful darkness that had claimed her.
Smoke stung her lungs with every ragged breath. Ash rained down like cursed snow, settling into her dark hair and clinging to the torn remnants of her twilight velvet gown. The fabric that had been soft as silk against her skin now felt rough and alien, stiff with dried blood that might have been her own or someone else's entirely.
For what felt like hours, she didn't move. Her body remained curled against the cold flagstones that had once been polished smooth enough to reflect dancing candlelight. Now they were cracked and blackened, littered with debris from the collapse of her world. Every breath scraped raw in her throat, tasting of ash and death and the bitter smoke of dreams burning to nothing.
When her eyes finally fluttered open, the grand hall of House Valen was gone as surely as if it had never existed. What remained was a monument to destruction—a cathedral of ruin where once there had been warmth and laughter. Blackened oak beams jutted from the rubble like the ribs of some great beast left to rot under an uncaring sky. The vaulted ceiling had partially collapsed, leaving jagged holes through which gray morning light filtered like accusations.
The tapestries that had once told her family's proud history—battles won, alliances forged, loves celebrated across five centuries—now smoldered in heaps of ash and ember. Threads of gold and silver had melted into twisted shapes that caught the weak light and threw it back like tears. The carved wooden screens that had hidden the musicians lay splintered beyond recognition. Even the great hearth, where fires had burned continuously for three hundred years, was choked with rubble and debris.
The air hung heavy with more than smoke. The copper tang of blood mixed with the acrid stench of burned silk and charred flesh, creating a miasma that seemed to coat the inside of her mouth with every breath. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the drip of water from a broken cistern and the creak of timber settling into new configurations of ruin.
Selene pushed herself up with arms that trembled like autumn leaves, pain lancing through her body in waves. Her ribs ached where she'd been slammed against the wall, and her palms were scraped raw from clawing across rough stone. But nothing—not the physical agony, not the smoke-burned lungs, not the cuts and bruises—compared to the vast emptiness that had opened in her chest like a wound that would never heal.
She remembered the moment with crystalline clarity now that consciousness had fully returned. The masked raiders with their foreign accents and blood-stained hands. The way they had moved like wolves, confident in their cruelty. The feel of rough leather against her skin as they pinned her down. And then—worst of all—her sister's scream echoing through the stone corridors, growing fainter with distance until it was swallowed entirely by smoke and shadow.
"Isolde," she whispered hoarsely, the name scraping against her raw throat like a prayer to deaf gods.
Her gaze swept the devastation with growing desperation, searching among the fallen timber and scattered stones. Please, she thought, let her have escaped. Let her be hiding somewhere safe, waiting for rescue. Let this be a nightmare that would end with Isolde's laughter ringing through familiar halls.
Then she saw her.
Isolde lay not twenty paces from where the high table had stood, her small body half-buried beneath a fall of ash and debris from the collapsed ceiling. Her gown—that beautiful creation of soft blue silk that had made her look like a princess from the old songs—was now little more than charred rags clinging to still limbs. Soot had settled in her auburn hair like a mockery of the flower crowns she had loved to weave in summer.
Her chest did not rise. Her eyes—those bright, innocent green eyes that had sparkled with mischief and curiosity—stared sightlessly at the smoke-stained sky visible through the broken roof.
Selene's heart didn't just break; it shattered into so many pieces she wondered if it would ever beat properly again. She crawled forward across the treacherous rubble, heedless of how the sharp stones tore at her palms and knees. When she reached her sister, she gathered that precious, lifeless form into her arms with infinite gentleness.
"No, no, no..." The words tumbled out, broken things that held no power to change what had been done. "Please, sweet sister, you can't leave me. Not you too. Please wake up."
Her tears came then—hot streams that carved channels through the soot on her cheeks. She rocked back and forth, clutching Isolde as if her warmth, her love, her desperate need might somehow call life back to that still form. The silk of her sister's gown was cold beneath her fingers, no longer soft but stiff with things she didn't want to name.
The silence that surrounded them was more terrible than any scream. It pressed in from all sides, broken only by the occasional crack of settling timber and the distant drip of water finding new paths through broken stone. Somewhere, a raven called—the first living sound she had heard since waking, and it felt like mockery.
Selene buried her face in her sister's hair, inhaling desperately. There, beneath the smoke and ash, she caught the faintest ghost of lavender—the scented water their mother had always used to rinse their hair after bathing. It was such a small thing, that familiar scent, but it broke her in ways that all the destruction around them could not.
For the first time in her life, she prayed with the desperate fervor of the truly lost. She begged whatever gods might be listening to undo this horror, to let her wake from this nightmare, to trade her life for her sister's. But the gods, if they existed at all, remained as silent as the dead.
Footsteps crunched across the rubble, each step deliberate and careful.
Selene stiffened, lifting her tear-streaked face from her sister's hair. Fear shot through her like winter lightning—had the raiders returned to finish what they'd started? Were there more soldiers coming to ensure no witness survived? She had no strength left to fight, no will to run. If death wanted her, let it come.
But the figure that emerged through the drifting smoke was blessedly familiar.
"Selene."
Her adopted brother Alaric strode toward her through the wreckage, moving with the careful grace of someone who knew how to navigate a battlefield. His dark traveling cloak was torn in several places, and soot streaked across the sharp planes of his face. But his blue eyes—so much older than his twenty-four years—softened with something that might have been relief as they fell upon her.
He looked every inch the warrior he had trained to be, tall and lean with the kind of controlled strength that came from years of swordwork. But there was gentleness in how he approached, in the way he held his hands where she could see them, as if she were some wounded creature that might bolt at the wrong movement.
She clutched Isolde's body tighter against her chest, some primitive instinct making her want to protect what remained of her family. "Don't come closer," she rasped, her voice barely recognizable to her own ears.
Alaric didn't listen—he never had been good at following orders, even as a child. He knelt beside her among the rubble, his movements careful but sure. Without a word, he wrapped his arms around both sisters, pulling them into an embrace that was strong and steady and warm with life.
The dam inside her broke completely. Selene collapsed into that familiar safety, her grief spilling out in great, wrenching sobs that seemed to come from the very core of her being. He smelled of leather and steel and the pine forests where he had been hunting when the attack came—normal things from a world that no longer existed.
"She's gone," Selene choked out between gasping breaths. "I couldn't save her. I tried, but I wasn't strong enough, wasn't fast enough. Those men—they just took her, and I couldn't—"
Alaric's jaw clenched, the muscles jumping beneath his skin. His arms tightened around them both as he stroked her hair with one gentle hand, the same way he had when nightmares had woken her as a child.
"Hush now, little star," he murmured, using the pet name he'd given her years ago. "This is not your fault. You're just one girl against trained killers. You did everything you could—more than anyone had the right to ask."
"I promised her," Selene wept, the words torn from some deep place in her soul. "When we were children, after Mother told us the stories about the old wars, I promised I would always protect her. I swore it on my honor, and now she's—" The words dissolved into fresh sobs.
"Selene." Alaric's voice carried a note of steel beneath the gentleness. "Look at me."
She lifted her gaze, eyes blurred with tears that refused to stop falling. His face was carved with pain that matched her own, but underneath it burned something harder, colder.
"This was not your failing," he said, each word deliberate and weighted. "You were not the one who ordered this massacre. You were not the one who sent armed men against innocents at their own table." His voice trembled with barely controlled fury. "This was Damian's doing. His soldiers, following his commands. He is the one who slaughtered them all—your parents, your sister, everyone who bore the name Valen."
The words hit her like physical blows, each one driving deeper than the last. King Damian. The name carved itself into her mind with letters of fire, searing through the fog of grief to lodge in some harder, darker place in her soul.
She had seen the royal banners, heard the soldiers shout his name as they put torch to tapestry. The man she had been taught to revere as rightful king, the ruler her father had sworn to serve with absolute loyalty, had repaid that devotion with steel and flame.
Her tears still fell, but behind them something new stirred—something that burned hotter than grief, more enduring than pain. As she held her sister's cold body and felt her brother's warm embrace, Selene felt the first ember of what would become a consuming fire kindle in the ruins of her heart.