When Fire Learns to Lie

You could feel it in the walls.

That's how it started. That strange shift in the air that made the candles flicker even when the windows were shut. The cold didn't settle—it slithered. And Ravenhold, for all its stone and stoicism, seemed to know something was coming.

Seraphina hadn't woken yet.

Not really. Her eyes would open for moments, cloudy with some faraway memory, and then drift shut again like she was trying to swim against a current too strong to fight. Mira and I took turns sitting by her bed, trading off quiet hours filled with whispered worries and stiff cups of tea.

But when the fire in her room started to burn blue—I knew something had changed.

I was sitting in the armchair by her window, watching the sky pour down a lazy drizzle of silver rain, when I noticed the flames. They'd shifted hue. Pale blue. Soft at first, like a song just beginning. Then stronger. Fiercer. Like something inside her had stirred and remembered it had teeth.

I stood, unsure whether to wake her or run.

Then her breath caught.

She didn't gasp—she hissed, like a serpent catching heat through its scales. Her spine arched off the bed, every muscle in her body seizing at once. The mark on her chest lit up beneath her gown like it had been doused in oil and set aflame.

I reached for her hand, but the second I touched her—

I was somewhere else entirely.

---

It wasn't a room. Not really. Not a place you could describe with simple words. It was made of smoke and silver threads, suspended like a spider's web spun through time itself. The ground beneath me shimmered, cracked with veins of blue fire, and overhead, stars blinked in and out like they were remembering how to exist.

Seraphina stood in the center.

Not in a dress. Not in rags. But in a gown made of shadows stitched with glass. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, glowing that same dangerous silver from the Heart Tree. The mark on her chest pulsed in rhythm with the web around her, connected to it. Feeding it. Fed by it.

She saw me. But her face didn't change.

"You shouldn't be here," she said, her voice low and echoing like it didn't belong to just one mouth. "This place isn't meant for you."

"Then wake up," I said. "Come back. You're scaring us."

She tilted her head like I'd spoken in a forgotten tongue.

"I remember now. What fire costs. What it lies for. What it burns."

I took a step forward, but the threads at her feet shivered, tightening.

"You're dreaming, Sera. Whatever this is—it's not real."

"No," she said, "this is the only part that ever was."

Her hands lifted, slow and deliberate, like she was holding something weightless. A mirror shimmered into existence between them—tall, thin, fractured down the center like it had been dropped and put back together wrong. Inside it, I saw flickers. Her mother, her father, blood spilled across a snowy altar, a woman in black smiling with teeth like daggers—

—and Rowan.

Standing beside a man I'd never seen before.

A man with her eyes.

Seraphina dropped the mirror.

"I was born because someone lied. I lived because someone died. And I was cursed because someone chose me."

The mirror shattered into dust before it hit the ground.

I was thrown backward—hard. My head snapped back against nothingness, and suddenly the smoke and threads and stars were gone—

And I was back in her room.

On the floor.

Panting.

Bleeding from my nose.

And Seraphina was sitting upright in bed.

Awake.

---

Her voice was raw when she spoke, like she'd swallowed smoke and it hadn't quite left.

"Where's Rowan?"

Mira, who'd come rushing in at the sound of the mirror shattering across the room, froze in the doorway. "He left. Before dawn. Said he had to speak with someone in the northern pass."

Seraphina's eyes narrowed.

"He's going to them. The ones who made the deal. He thinks if he gets there before I do, he can change the terms."

I frowned. "What deal?"

Seraphina looked at me like I was still catching up—and honestly, I was.

"My birthright wasn't just a throne. It was a contract. Bound in blood. My father offered his firstborn in exchange for power. My mother tried to break it. So she ran. She found the witch. Asked her to curse me so that the deal would be void."

Mira let out a low breath. "But the witch didn't void it. She changed it."

Seraphina nodded. "She marked me as hers instead."

A silence fell over the room, thick as fog.

And then, almost absently, Seraphina reached out, took a small candle from the table, and held her palm over it.

The flame didn't flicker. It rose. High. Controlled. Burnt blue.

Then white.

Then silver.

"Fire used to tell the truth," she murmured. "Now it's learned to lie. Just like me."

---

We didn't leave the room for hours. She needed to rest, but there was no rest left in her. Not really. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw that fractured mirror. And every time she opened them, she saw only the future—sharpening its fangs.

I sat with her as night returned. As the manor settled back into uneasy quiet.

Then, just before midnight, a knock came at the door.

Three short taps.

And then silence.

Mira opened it first. A piece of parchment lay on the ground. No messenger. No sound.

Just a seal. Waxed in red. Marked with a sigil I didn't recognize—an eye crossed with a sword.

Seraphina took it in shaking hands. Broke the seal. Read the words. And her face went pale.

"It's time," she said.

"Time for what?" I asked.

"For the choosing," she said. "For the flames to pick a side."

---