Chapter 99
*Jiselle*
The sanctuary didn’t sleep, not really. Even in the dead hours of night, its walls pulsed with a quiet life–runes humming low along the corridors, unseen guards shifting through the shadows, and beneath it all, the ever–present thrum of magic pooling like a current under stone.
I’d stopped expecting silence weeks ago. It wasn’t just the sound that kept me awe–it was the pressure. The weight of too much power inside too fragile skin. The pull of memory, or echo, or something older than both.
Tonight, though, the pull wasn’t inward.
It was directional.
I felt it in my teeth before I registered the thought. Something calling me–steady, magnetic, like gravity had changed and the source was buried deep in the mountain itself. I followed it barefoot, my steps soundless across cold stone, the hallways curling tighter and tighter until they narrowed into a passage I hadn’t seen before. It was low–ceilinged, cramped, the air thicker than usual and tinged with the scent of old wax and dust.
It opened into a room unlike anything I’d seen in Kael’s sanctuary.
No torches burned here. The light came from the floor–faint, rune–glow embedded in the stone in long curling shapes that coiled into the cracks like fire veins. Books lined the walls, some bound in hide, others in cracked leather, but all of them old. Not just old–ancient. A thin layer of ash coated everything, as if the room itself had been burned out of memory.
And yet, nothing here was destroyed.
This was a library. A secret one.
No guards. No locks. No whispers of warning.
Just history, quietly waiting.
I stepped forward, fingers brushing the spine of a tome that vibrated under my touch. My magic pulsed in response- curious, wary. I let it guide me, drifting past shelves until I reached a scroll that wasn’t glowing, wasn’t marked, wasn’t ornate in any way.
But I felt it.
Felt me in it.
I unrolled the parchment slowly, expecting faded script or broken glyphs, but the ink was so dark it looked freshly written. And the words–gods, the words-
“One will burn the mate to awaken the stars.”
I stared at the sentence, my pulse stuttering in my throat. The rest of the scroll blurred, my eyes unable to move past those ten words. They sat like lead on the page. Heavy. Irrefutable.
One will burn the mate to awaken the stars.
It couldn’t mean what I thought it meant.
It shouldn’t.
But the second I read it, my fire flared behind my ribs, slow and steady like recognition.
No other sentence followed it. The prophecy ended there. Just one line. One warning. Or promise. Or curse.
I stepped back like the words had burned me. My breath caught on something too big to swallow, and for a moment, I wasn’t in the library anymore.
I was back in that trial realm, facing three versions of myself–broken, bloodied, and crowned–and realizing too late that all of them were real. Possible. Waiting to be chosen.
And now this scroll had added another layer to that choice.
Not just who I would become.
But who I would destroy to get there.
The fire in me didn’t rage at those words. It accepted them. That terrified me more than the prophecy itself.
I backed away from the scroll, but its weight fc Successfully unlocked! of the room. The shelves closest to the center
bore the oldest texts. These weren’t bound in any
lines, curves, symbols burned directly into the page.
ne of them weren’t written in letters at all–just
One book–thin, brittle–fell open in my hands to a single phrase carved into the page as though etched with a claw:
Ethereal–bound: those born not to carry the flame, but to become it.
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Chapter 99
My fingers clenched the edge of the parchment.
I’d heard that word once before. From Kael. Whispered under his breath like a memory he wasn’t ready to share.
Ethereal
The gifted wolves who weren’t just wielders of magic, but vessels of something deeper. Older. My Trial had already confirmed it–that I wasn’t just another fire–wielder like the rogues trained in Kael’s sanctuary. My flames didn’t follow rules. They made them.
But this-
This suggested I wasn’t alone.
Or at least, I hadn’t been.
The next pages were fragmented. Stories. Accounts. Some told of wolves who went mad. Others who tried to rule, only to be betrayed by those closest to them. One had a sketch beside it–just a blur of lines, but unmistakable in its form. A girl with glowing white hair, her eyes solid silver, standing atop a burning plain.
The caption beneath it: She who bends the heavens.
I shoved the book closed and sat back on my heels, pressing the heel of my hand to my sternum.
My chest ached.
Not with pain.
With pressure.
As if my ribs were trying to hold something in that no longer fit.
Had Kael known? From the start? Had he been steering me toward this all along? The Trial. The training. The secrecy. The way he looked at me–not like a girl, not like a wolf–but like a fire he didn’t know how to contain.
Had he known the prophecy?
Had he known that I was the one meant to burn Nate?
I forced myself to breathe. To think.
Prophecies were symbols. Warnings. They didn’t have to come true. Not unless you believed in them so hard you bent yourself to fit their shape.
But what if I already was?
What if the fire had already changed me too much?
What if I couldn’t feel the mate bond anymore because I wasn’t just suppressing it–but because I was the one unraveling it? That night, I avoided Kael.
I avoided everyone.
I climbed to the uppermost tower of the sanctuary and sat beneath the open sky, the stars cold and distant above me. The moon was low, waning. My magic pulsed softly under my skin, never sleeping, always alert. It didn’t comfort me anymore. It made me feel like a house with too many locked rooms. I didn’t know what was hiding in them. I didn’t know who I’d be if I opened them all.
Nate’s voice came to me in a dream again, but this time it was farther away. Fainter. Like a radio caught in static.
Jiselle…
That’s all he said. My name.
But when I woke, I was crying.
And I couldn’t remember why.
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