They move toward her instinctively, and the Ether responds, curling silver threads between them like loyalty already sworn. Like bonds recognized and claimed.
I stay perfectly still. Predators don’t crowd their prey—not when the prey might bolt, and certainly not when other hunters are circling.
Instead, I watch. And I think.
The legends speak of a chamber lined with mirrors, where the chosen stood before themselves unbroken. Where an oath was made not with words alone, but by becoming whole—two halves of a soul joining across the space between what is and what could be.
The stories always hinged on the name. The mirror self had to be named, acknowledged, claimed. Only then could the Oath begin.
For centuries, we treated it as fairy tale. Hope dressed as mythology, told by those who’d forgotten what it meant to be complete. Even among Feeders, who understand hunger and incompleteness better than most, the Ashen Oath was bedtime fantasy.
But I’ve just watched it happen.
Bree didn’t dream. She didn’t hallucinate or break under pressure. She touched the core of something that was supposed to be extinct.
“She was so sure,” Bree whispers, and her voice carries that particular quality of someone who’s seen truth and found it terrifying. “Like she’d been waiting for me. Like she already knew how everything would end.”
Thane shifts closer, silver eyes calculating. He’s thinking tactically—how this affects his position, his mission, the Council’s interests. Useful, but limited. He sees politics where he should see prophecy.
“What did she look like?” Gray asks gently, and I can hear the effort it takes him to keep his voice steady.
“Like me. But…” Bree struggles for words, gesturing helplessly. “Whole. Like she’d never questioned whether she deserved to exist. She stood in this beautiful place, all light and mirrors, and I was—” She stops, pressing her palms against her eyes. “I was standing in ash.”
The imagery sends something cold sliding down my spine. Two chambers. Two versions of the same truth, experienced through two different lenses of self-worth.
That’s when I know for certain. This isn’t just Ether manifestation or magical bleeding between realms. This is the Ashen Oath awakening, piece by piece, choice by choice. And if the Oath is real, if it’s happening, then Bree isn’t just Scarborne nobility returned from exile. She isn’t just an inconvenient magical surge for the Council to contain.
She’s the hinge point. The one whose choice will reshape everything.
And I want to be there when she makes it.
“Did she say anything else?” Wes asks, voice carefully controlled. But I can taste the hunger coming off him too, different from mine but just as sharp. The awakening Incubus in him recognizes what the rest haven’t yet grasped—that Bree’s power is evolving, deepening, becoming something none of us anticipated.
“She said I’d be her eventually.” Bree’s laugh holds no humor. “That the only choice was how long I’d fight it.”
There. The prophecy, spoken in her own words.
I glance at Thane and find him watching me with that peculiar intensity of his. We’re rivals by nature—vampire and incubus, bothpredators, both drawn to the same impossible girl. But we’re also the only ones in this room who understand what she’s just described.
The others see fragments. Confusion. Something to be solved or protected against.
We see the moment everything changed.
Bree shivers, pulling what looks like Rhett’s hoodie tighter around herself. The gesture is small, vulnerable, utterly human. It doesn’t match the cosmic weight of what she’s just experienced, and somehow that makes it more unsettling.
She thinks she’s fractured. Thinks she’s failing them all by not being ready for power that chose her before she was born.
But I’ve just seen the proof—she’s the hinge. The Oath lives in her, waits in her, grows stronger every time she doubts herself into that chamber of ash and ruin.
“It felt so real,” she whispers.
“Because it was,” I say quietly, speaking for the first time since her revelation.
Every head turns toward me. Bree’s green eyes are wide, still shocked, but there’s something else there now. Recognition, maybe. Or fear.
“You know what this is,” Thane says. Not a question.
I push off from the wall with deliberate grace, taking a single step closer to their circle. Close enough to be part of the conversation, but not so close that I crowd her.
