I hadn’t thought to question it. Not when I was a girl, tracing the tales of the Seven Sisters in countless books with ink-stained fingers, or later, when the songs were no longer lullabies but lessons, endlessly repeated. I was taught the words as history, as legacy – the shape of what had come before and what I, too, was meant to carry. Everything I learned pointed toward the moment it would manifest in me, the slow-burning ember flaring at last into full flame. But the ember never caught. Whatever lived in our blood, it passed me by, silent as breath swallowed in sleep, leaving behind only the rituals and the waiting.
I remembered the first time they tried. I was ten – draped in the heavy ceremonial robes of Irongate, the ones only worn for the oldest of rites, the fabric pooling around my ankles like it meant to anchor me there. We stood in the sanctum, its walls etched with ancient script, a ring of candles lit in a perfect circle while the Acolytes scurried beyond it frantically like insects. Mowgara’s hand rested on my shoulder, firm and cold through the cloth, pressed just above the mark that had decorated across my back since I was but a babe. Her voice filled the chamber, low and strange, speaking words I didn’t understand – words meant to summon my flame.
But nothing came. No flicker of heat, no shift in the air – only the sharp, searing pain where her hand met my skin, as if my own body had turned against me. I must have screamed. I remember the way the light spun, the way the stone floor seemed to tilt beneath me, and then nothing. When I woke, I was in my bed, the scent of burnt fabric still lingering, my mother sitting beside me with her expression carefully smoothed into something like regret. “It didn’t wake,” she’d said, and for once, her voice held no triumph, no cruelty – only the finality of a door quietly closing.
Eventually it became clear that the blood in my veins would stay quiet no matter how fiercely I willed it, and I was given steel in place of flame, sent to the barracks where expectations went to be buried. I learned to bite down on the ache and call it pride.
But Maeve’s question had cracked the surface of something, and now the pieces shifted in ways I couldn’t ignore. I searched my memory for their faces – the Sisters who should have stood beside her – and found only absence. I must have known of them; Mowgara had never claimed to be the first. They had been there, surely. And then they weren’t. No mention in stories, no place in the songs. Their names slipped away as if even the tales had forgotten how to carry them forward.
If there had always been seven, each bearing part of the weight sothat none would collapse beneath it… why had Mowgara carried it alone? Why had it passed to no one else? And if it had not come to me the way it should have – what had broken in the line?
Maeve shifted, her hands unfolding in her lap as if she, too, had carried the weight of waiting too long. “It began with whispers,” she said. “Far from Dragna’toch, in the deeper provinces, where even the wind carried the old names – names the people of these lands had long since forgotten. The Seers heard them first.”
I felt Mathias inhale, the catch of breath in his chest sharp and involuntary. His body leaned into mine with the movement – not forcefully, just enough that I could sense the rise and fall of him at my side, the weight of it shared between us. His arm remained draped around my shoulders, though I wasn’t sure which of us it was meant to steady.
“They spoke of people gathering in secret, drawn to ruins and shrines long sealed, believing the old gods were not as far departed from the world as we’d been told.” Maeve glanced toward the fire, though her gaze didn’t linger. “Some among them said the gods were returning to reclaim what had been stolen from their wardens. That the flame was never meant to be wielded by mortal hands. Some, most, called it nonsense.”
Mathias’ fingers twitched where they rested near my shoulder, the motion small but tense. I could feel his pulse against my skin – steady, but quickened – like he already knew where this story would end. Maybe he always had. Maybe the Sight had shown him more than he’d ever dared say aloud.
“But Mowgara didn’t ignore it,” Maeve continued, the strain in her voice unmistakable, as if even the memory could burn. “She listened. She watched. And when the whispers reached Dragna’toch – when it became clear that even some within the Sisterhood had begun to believe – she turned on them. Called it treason. Called it rot thatneeded cutting out before it spread. The Sisters who dared speak the doubts aloud, who helped the Seers in secret or questioned what right they had to keep what was stolen… she named them enemies.”
Maeve took a deep, shaking breath. “One by one, they vanished. Some tried to flee. Most didn’t get the chance. It was protection, she said – preserving the line, the flame, the sanctity of the blood. But what she was doing –” Maeve’s jaw tightened, her fingers knotting together again. “What she was doing was making sure there would be no one left to challenge her claim to the fire.”
A jolt ran through me – quick and sharp. “She killed them?” The words came out raw, scraped bare by disbelief, though even as I said them, something in me recoiled at how clearly I already knew the answer. “All of them?”
Maeve’s eyes met mine, and this time there was no softness in them. “Aye,” she said. “All of them.”
“And in doing so, she learned what no Sister ever dared test: that when you end the flame in another, it does not vanish. It folds into you.” Her voice dropped, the weight of it settling between us like the last toll of a bell. “One death, and she grew stronger. Two, and stronger still. She said it was the fire returning to its source. But by the time she reached the fourth, we knew better.” Maeve shook her head slowly, not in disbelief, but in something heavier – grief, maybe, or the memory of watching something sacred turn monstrous. “She wasn’t guarding the flame anymore. She was hoarding it.”
“We?” I asked, the word out before I’d managed to hold it back.
Maeve turned toward me, just enough that the fire cast its glow across the deep lines etched into her brow. “The Sisters,” she said, “and those of us who served them. The Mothers. We lived among them at Dragna’toch – midwives, healers, caretakers. We carried no magic of our own, but we bore witness to those who did. We kept the traditions, held the histories. We knew every child born under a bloodmoon. Every song. Every rite.”
She didn’t look at me – her focus was pulled somewhere inward, to something the stone walls couldn’t contain.
“One by one, she hunted her Sisters,” Maeve said, her words slow and heavy, like stones lowered into deep water. “And by the time she came for the last, Dragna’toch was burning. She tore through the sanctum, shattered the archives, turned every chamber of learning and lineage to ash – saying no one deserved to remember what had betrayed her.” She drew a breath that caught partway through. “And when there was nothing left but smoke and ruin, she smothered the flame of the last True Sister. Eleonora.”
The name struck like a blade. My back straightened on instinct, a prickle racing up my spine – and then the heat came. A sudden flare where the mark lay carved into my skin, sharp and searing, as if the name alone had lit something dormant beneath it. I didn’t cry out, but I knew Maeve saw it in the way my mouth drew tight, the way my hand gripped the hilt without meaning to.
Maeve didn’t reach for me. She didn’t need to. Her voice came measured, each word sounding like it had been carved and carried for this moment. “Eleonora knew Mowgara would come for her. There was no refuge left, no wall high enough, no vow sacred enough to keep her safe once the others had fallen. She was the last. And she was carrying a child.”
Maeve’s eyes held mine, unblinking. “The child’s father had been a soldier once – long before the fire turned on itself. But by then, he had laid down his sword. Chosen a different path. One of faith. They said he would become one of the first of the new Speakers – a voice for the gods we no longer named.” She paused, as if weighing how much the past still pressed against the present.
“He was sent away for his own safety. No man has ever set foot inside Dragna’toch – not then, not ever – and that may have beenthe only thing keeping him beyond the Queen’s reach. A few of the Mothers were sent with him, to see him safely beyond her sight. But the child… the child was still within it.”
Her gaze flicked downward, toward the dagger my fingers were still squeezing so hard they had gone white, the pearl of its hilt catching the firelight. “There were three,” she said then, softly. “Forged from the same steel – one for Eleonora, one for the father, and one for the daughter they could never raise together. A hope, I think, that what had been torn apart might find its way back.”
She shifted, resting her hands in her lap, fingers curled loosely as if they remembered something hers could no longer touch. “When the girl was born, the Queen was already at the gates. There was no time – not to hide her, not to flee. One of the Mothers did the only thing left to her. She took the child and burned a mark into her skin, high on the back and across the shoulder – a seared handprint, red and raw, meant to look like the touch of the gods.”
Her voice caught then, not with doubt but with memory. “It was an old belief – that those marked by divine hands were not to be touched, that to harm them was to bring ruin upon yourself. It was a deceit, a desperate one. But a lie wrapped in fear can be stronger than a blade.”
“The Queen found the child,” Maeve continued, her words heavy with something recited many times and never easily. “Saw the mark. Knew what it meant – or what it might mean, if the old stories still carried weight. And for all her cruelty, the Queen was never one to test the will of gods. Not directly, at least.” Her shoulders eased, as if setting down something she’d carried too long. “So, she spared her. Took the child into her arms and told the world she had borne her in secret – that the fire had chosen to be born again through her.”
“She never wanted children,” Maeve said, each word like a punch on my chest. “Not because she couldn’t, but because she wouldn’t. She knew what it meant – to bring life into the world was to risk losingwhat she’d clawed to keep. The flame doesn’t stay where it’s born. It moves, like a tide, from mother to daughter, always forward. Even the oldest Sisters felt it one day, their fire dimming as it answered the pull of new blood. But this child… The fire hadn’t stirred in her yet. And Mowgara saw a way to not only possess the child but also to bind the power that slept inside her to her own – a bond that even Drizzna, for all her cunning, had never thought to forge.”
The fire crackled, low and sharp, like it too was waiting.
My throat tightened. I opened my mouth, but it took a moment for the words to rise. “Who… who was that child?”
