One must die, one must live.
The universe demands balance.
The Moon does not forget.
And the stars do not forgive.
PROLOGUE II
THRAX
Fourteen Centuries Later
In a house that had not known life for centuries, a man stirred in sleep.
He awoke to a pain that didn’t feel like his own.
He had not dreamed in fourteen centuries.
Not once.
Sleep was a courtesy his body borrowed, never earned.
His heart—a cursed, sluggish thing—pounded against his ribs as if it had just remembered how to function.
At first, it was just pressure—a strange fullness in his chest, like someone had stuffed him with a thing too alive. He lay there, flat on his back, eyes still closed, trying to breathe through it. But the pressure didn’t ease. Instead, it grew and swelled, blooming behind his ribcage like a second heart forcing itself into existence.
His breath caught.
He sat up, one hand clutching his chest as if that might hold it together. It didn’t help. Something beneath his skin was thrumming, it was pulsing with a strange rhythm, something that didn’t belong in abody like his. He threw the covers back and swung his legs off the bed, but the moment he stood, his weight crushed him.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed.
The floor met him hard, knocking the wind from his lungs. He stayed there for a moment, on hands and knees, panting like a man drowning in air. Slowly, he could feel not just the fullness, but a weird kind of ache spreading through his limbs like liquid fire. Not pain, not illness, but somethingunnatural.
His body was reacting to something impossible.
Across the room, the mirror caught his reflection. He froze.
His eyes were glowing.
A deep, bright red lit the centre of his gaze, forming a rim around each iris. His veins—black and coiling—rose beneath his skin like roots cracking through stone, wanting to tear out of his body.
The scar on his chest splintered, radiating white light that could’ve blinded him if he wasn’t seeing red.
Suddenly, realisation crashed through his skull.
The last time he had felt anything this intense was the day Selvanyra took his soul.
She...she had been born...?
He gripped the edge of a nearby chair, hauling himself up to stand on shaking legs. His chest still burned, not with pain now, but with unbearable knowing. He just felt the momentshetook her first breath. The weight in his chest wasn’t some curse resurfacing, but it was a thread connecting him to her.
She was here, yet he didn’t want to believe it.
He stared at himself in the mirror, panting, heart still slamming into bone, demanding an exit. The light in his chest began to dull as he turned away from his reflection, trying to calm himself.
The prophecy had begun to stir.
