The forest bent around her as she walked.
Every tree leaned toward her as if the branches themselves remembered her name. Leaves blackened when her fingertips brushed them, curling into ash before they touched the ground. Yet the roots spread deeper, greedier, as though they thrived on her corruption.
Orryn inhaled the night air. The blood-red moon spilled through the canopy, breaking across her face in fractured beams. She could taste the prophecy in the air—metallic, bitter, inevitable.
Her sisters' faces burned in her mind. Seliora's trembling light, Nysera's furious shadows. They still believed themselves whole without her. They still believed in the lie of balance.
But balance always breaks.
She reached the edge of a clearing where a black pool reflected the sky. This was where she had been reborn a decade ago, after the curse swallowed her. The Mirror had found her here, shattered and alone, and showed her what the world truly was: not a cycle of life and death, but a slow rotting, a collapse. Ruin was not failure—it was truth.
She crouched by the pool, staring at her reflection. One green eye glowed like moss lit by sunlight. The other was fractured silver, cut through with cracks that never healed. Her lips trembled, though no one could see.
"You should not have left me," she whispered.
The pool rippled. Her reflection shifted. It was not her face that looked back, but Nysera's. Cold silver eyes, hair matted with shadow, lips curled into disdain.
You were weak, the reflection sneered. We could not carry you.
The water split again. Seliora's reflection rose beside it, soft and glowing, auburn hair bright against the dark pool. Her voice trembled with guilt. We begged you to stay. You chose the darkness.
Orryn's hands shook. "No. You never begged. You never came. You let the curse take me."
Both faces in the pool spoke at once, their voices overlapping, haunting. You were the sacrifice. You still are.
Orryn's scream split the clearing. Her magic lashed out, shattering the pool into shards of floating water, each fragment reflecting her face a thousand times. The shards hovered in the air like broken glass, then dissolved into mist.
Her breathing slowed. Her hands steadied.
"Sacrifice," she whispered again, calmer this time. "Yes. That is why I live. That is why I endure."
The trees trembled as if agreeing. The curse in the soil sang her name.
She rose and began to walk again, past roots knotted like skeletal hands, past mushrooms glowing faintly with pale rot. Every step she took left black prints on the earth that pulsed before fading.
Voices followed her. Not her sisters' this time, but the dead.
You carry us… You are our vessel… You are the breaking of chains…
Orryn closed her eyes, drinking in their worship. For a moment, she felt less alone. For a moment, she was not the abandoned triplet but the chosen one.
Her thoughts drifted to their mother's face, half-decayed, pulled from the grave by her own hand. She had not meant to wound them with it, not at first. She had meant it as proof. Proof that the dead did not belong to Nysera. Proof that Seliora's healing was meaningless against the grave.
But the look in their eyes—horror, grief, betrayal—had filled her with something sharp and hot. A satisfaction she could not deny.
They feared her. And that fear was power.
She sat beneath a dying oak, its bark flaking like burnt flesh. Pulling a dagger from her cloak, she carved into the earth. Not words, not symbols, but the mark the Mirror had given her: three spirals entwined, the outer two strangled by the blackened third.
"One must fall," she murmured.
The mark glowed faintly, pulsing with life stolen from the soil.
Her mind drifted again to her sisters. Seliora's tears. Nysera's rage. They were bound by love, still. That was their weakness. Love made them hesitate, even in the face of prophecy.
Orryn's lips curved into a smile that was almost tender.
She loved them, too. In her way.
But love was not enough to keep the island alive. Only ruin could cleanse it. Only ruin could break the curse that had chained Thalyssra for centuries.
Her sisters did not understand. They clung to their fragile half-truths: life, death, cycles. They refused to see that the curse was not something to be broken but something to be fulfilled.
If the island demanded one fall, then she would be the one to make it so.
Not because she hated them.
But because she loved them too much to let them pretend.
The wind shifted. The pool behind her hissed as though boiling, even though no fire touched it. The air grew heavy with the taste of iron and ash.
Something vast stirred beneath the island. Something ancient, older even than the prophecy.
Orryn tilted her head, listening.
"Yes," she whispered into the dark. "I will finish it. I will be your hand. And when the choice comes, I will make it for them."
Her fractured eye burned. The world split in her vision, one half blooming with gold light, the other rotting into shadow. She saw both futures, both endings.
In each, only one sister stood beside her.
And in each, the other lay in the earth.
She touched the cracked skin of her arm, tracing the veins of black that marked her as the Mirror's child. For the first time since she had returned, she felt calm. Purpose filled her, steady as the tide.
The prophecy was no longer a curse. It was a promise.