The Witch and the Warden

Silence lingered long after the Guardian's shattering—thick, sacred, and unnaturally still. It clung to the air like smoke after a sacred fire, not a silence of peace or stillness, but one of reverence, the kind that hovers after the closing of an ancient rite. The chamber, once charged with thunder and defiance, now pulsed with the ache of transition. Not death. Not defeat. Something else—an unspoken metamorphosis. The weight of it pressed down on Selena's chest as she stood alone at the edge of what had been both a trial and a threshold. The floor beneath her feet was scorched and cracked, scorched with streaks of lightning that still whispered of divine fury. Her boots hovered just inches from a charred spiral etched deep into the stone—its design barely glowing now, like an old scar still tender to the touch.