Sun and Stars

Rose

We didn't speak for hours.

Not as we ran, not as the cold wind whipped at our faces as we passed through the trees, not even as the sounds of pursuit faded behind us like shadows.

Ivar led me deeper into the forest beyond the old paths, into the places where sunlight felt like a stranger and the trees grew thick enough to obstruct the view of the clear sky above.

We finally stopped beside a half-ruined watchtower swallowed by moss. He touched the stone, whispered something in a language older than any I'd heard before. The door opened, though there was no handle.

Inside it was quiet, dry, and forgotten. Magic still hummed in the foundations of the place.

He built a fire in silence. I sat by it, my knees pulled to my chest, arms wrapped around them. The ache in my limbs felt small compared to the weight pressing behind my ribs.

I wasn't afraid anymore.

I wasn't even shocked.

I was just… changing.

He finally broke the silence. "You saved us."

"I didn't know what I was doing, it just… happened."

He looked at me like someone seeing a something he thought he'd lost long ago. Beautiful and dangerous.

"No," he said softly. "It didn't 'just happen.' That kind of power doesn't wake up unless it's answering something."

I turned my face toward the fire. "What am I, Ivar?"

He was quiet.

"Something that hasn't walked this world in a long, long time."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

Later, washed the dirt from my hands in the basin he indicated, I lay down on the cold stone and stared at the wooden beams above, I ate the little bread and cheese we still had left.

Sleep came for me like mist.

Soft and slow then it engulfed me into its strange dreams.

The Dream

I stood again in the white field. This time the sky above me cracked like a mirror made of shards of glass. Silver light poured down in streams, not drops.

The older version of me was waiting.

Barefoot. Robed in red and white. Her hair braided.

She smiled. "You stepped through the door."

"What am I becoming?" I asked.

She circled me slowly, studying. "What you were always meant to be. Not a wife. Not a sorcerer's beloved. Not even a bearer of borrowed blood."

"Then what?"

"A First Flame. The last seed of a forgotten fire. The kind of being who can choose whether to burn down empires or rebuild them from ash."

 I didn't know in that moment whether to laugh or cry at the obscurity and the horror of it all.

"I'm just a girl from a cottage by the mint fields."

"You were," she said. "But girls like that raised gods once and gods feared them for it."

I woke before dawn.

Ivar was asleep sitting up, one hand still on the hilt of his sword.

He looked younger like this. More like the man who had brought me a lily. Less like the one who had killed for me in the dark.

I stepped outside the tower and let the wind touch my face.

My hands were steady.

I wasn't afraid of what I had seen inside myself. Not anymore.

But I was beginning to realize that maybe everyone else should be.

Because I wasn't just a girl in love with a man full of secrets.

I was something older than both of us.

And I was done running.

The forest didn't sleep like people do.

It is always breathing life in and out.

It sighs with the weight of memories, and every leaf murmurs stories. I feel I'm starting to understand. Not in words. Not yet. But in pulses and rhythms that match the strange new beat of my heart.

I woke before the sun rose.

I stepped outside.

The world was shivering in that breathless hush between night and morning. I stood barefoot on damp moss and lifted my face to the stars. My hands ached not in pain, but in hunger. Not for food, but for answers.

For truth.

Who am I now? What have I become?

I pondered.

Not just Rose of the garden gate and sun-warmed kitchen.

I killed something last night without touching it. I felt power crackle through my veins like lightning learning how to speak.

And worst still, I liked it.

Ivar

When I woke, the first thing I did was listen.

For her breath. Her heartbeat. Her absence.

Only when I heard the soft trickle of water outside and sensed no danger did I rise.

Rose stood barefoot on the edge of the bank of a little stream, her back to me, hair loose and moonlit. She looked like a painting come to life of a goddess or a beautiful young woman.

She was already changing.

Faster than I'd hoped or feared.

I knew what she had become when the light burst from her palms. The ancient chord she'd awoken in that circle. It had slept in her blood, waiting for the right wound to tear it open.

I should have told her everything.

But how do you tell someone that what they are could end kingdoms?

That there are songs in the oldest libraries about fire-born queens with eyes like hers, and how they burned their lovers when betrayed?

I was meant to protect her.

But now I'm not sure whether I'm meant to love her or fall to my knees and obey her.

Rose

He came to stand beside me, silent as always.

"I saw her again," I said, eyes still on the fading stars.

He didn't ask who.

"She said I was a First Flame," I continued. "What does that mean, Ivar? Tell me the truth."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"There was a time when people like you ruled not with crowns, but with will. Before the kings, before the temples. The fire you hold isn't mine, Rose. I only passed on a seed of immortality. What grew in you… is much older."

I turned to look at him.

"Are you afraid of me now?" She asked him with fearful eyes.

He met my gaze. "Only of what others will try to make of you."

The Watcher

High in the canopy, hidden among branches no bird would dare land on, I watched them.

The man I once knew as Ivarion, last son of the House of Blackford.

And the girl no, the flame beside him.

So she had awakened.

I had felt it last night, all the way from the mountain citadel. The ripple in the pattern. The way the stone-song shifted, and light bled from roots that hadn't pulsed in centuries.

She doesn't know it yet. Not fully.

But she will.

And when she does, she'll either rise to rewrite the world or break it wide open.

I slid down the bark like a shadow folded in silk. My blade whispered softly in its sheath, eager.

I wasn't here to kill her.

Not yet.

I was here to watch her eyes turn to fire and watch her choose.

Ivar

She turned from me without a word, walked a few steps into the trees, and knelt beside a trickle of water that ran through stones older than my family name.

I watched the sunrise, its rays illuminating her face.

Whatever gods watched now, they watched her.

I only hoped they remembered mercy.

Because the others, the immortals who hunted us would not stop, especially not now when they sensed what I had awakened in the world.

Rose

The sun finally rose, its gold rays touching the forest ground like it was returning to claim its place in its life cycle.

I lifted my face to allow its warm rays to kiss the chill away from my skin.

And this time, the light didn't burn me.

It answered.