Kael’s silver eyes burned, not with anger, but love, raw, trembling, repentant. Alarik’s gaze held steady, storm-bright and aching, as if he could feel every heartbeat trembling inside her ribs.
“I—” she began, voice cracking.
A shudder ripped through her.
Her body jerked back as if yanked by invisible threads. Her breath fled her lungs, her knees gave way and she hit the floor hard, the marble cold against her spine. Her limbs locked. Her voice abandoned her. Her eyes burned like starlight had been poured into her skull.
A voice that wasn’t hers tore from her throat, a voice of future and past, echoing through the throne room like thunder cracking through glass.
“She was never your chosen, Dreammaker. She is your undoing.”
Screams erupted. Metal scraped against stone. Shadows leapt from the walls. But Maris felt none of it. She wasn’t in her body anymore.
She was falling.
Dragged down into the heart of a vision not her own.
It wasn’t the god song she’d heard before. It was something deeper. Older. And it wasn’t kind.
She saw chains.
Golden, celestial, tangled through the cosmos like snares around a great being of light and shadow. A woman, radiant and furious, her eyes gleaming the same white fire that now lived inside Maris.
Eiren.
Not sleeping.
Bound.
Her power seethed beneath the chains, ravenous and searing with hate.
“She lied,” a voice whispered in the void. It wasn’t one voice. It was four. Layered. Weaving in and out of each other like threads in a tapestry. “The Dreammaker is no savior. She is wrath. Scorned. Twisted by what she could not keep.”
Maris’s vision shifted stars cracked like glass, memories unraveled. She saw a fae male with violet eyes and pointed ears, bowing before the goddess. Then turning his back. Choosing another — a vampire.
And from their union the first nightbound was born.
The creation, Eiren hated.
A betrayal she never forgave.
It was vengeance, not vision, that drove her.
“She cursed the realms,” said the voices. “Poisoned the veil. Turned fate to rot. So we wove the threads to create you. A weapon in a girl’s shape. A failsafe in fragile skin.”
“No,” Maris breathed, but even her denial was swallowed by the storm. “No, she gave me power." She recalled the figure who marked her. Not done by Eiren but another—
“We marked you,” said the gods. “The sigil is no gift. It is a key. It will open the final door to your power and purpose. When she does— you must sever her hold on your world, by taking her life.”
The dream burned.
Maris writhed within it.
The threads of her memory caught fire every whisper, every vision, every blessing turned to ash. It had never been protection. Never been divine favor. It had been a cage made to carry a blade. Her.
She was not chosen.
She was made.
