The Fall of Devana

Rosaline's POV

The silence was too loud.

It pressed against my ears like a scream trapped in glass.

I blinked up at the stone ceiling, lit by a single dying lantern. The air was still and stale. Dust danced in the light. My limbs ached, and my heartbeat felt… wrong. Too slow. Too calm.

How long had I been asleep?

I sat up slowly, the cot creaking beneath me. My hands trembled as they brushed over the old pendant at my neck cool metal embedded with a faintly glowing gem. My father's voice echoed from the deepest part of my mind.

"This is all of me, Rose. Half my soul. If anything happens… it will protect you."

Something had happened.

I rose to my feet, the stone floor cool beneath my bare toes. The walls were lined with old shelves, scrolls, and crates long since emptied or decayed. The war chamber beneath the palace a secret room meant to withstand siege, rebellion, maybe even prophecy.

But not this.

I wandered through the shadowed chamber, muscles protesting, throat parched, soul bruised. The silence was no longer just around me it lived inside me. No sounds above. No laughter. No footsteps. No kingdom.

Only absence.

"You'll come back in the morning?" I had asked him.

"Yes," he had said.

He had lied.

The memories returned slowly, like blood trickling from an old wound.

A figure in white had come to the palace. He called himself a saint. The day he arrived, the skies turned silent, the birds froze mid-flight, and even the wind held its breath.

He hadn't smiled. He hadn't begged.

"You must give up what you hold most dear," he said.

"Your daughter. She must wed the heavens—or Devana will fall."

My mother had gasped. My father had drawn his sword. But even then, I remember…

He looked at me.

He knew I would be the price.

And then came the crimson moon.

Years passed.

I remained.

The bunker became my tomb, my sanctuary, my crucible.

At first, I cried for them. Called out for them. Scratched the walls until my nails bled. But no one came.

Then the crying stopped.

I read everything every scroll, every prophecy, every spell etched into brittle parchment. I practiced them, whispering incantations into the dark. My fingers glowed. Sometimes they burned. I collapsed from hunger more times than I can count, living off stored grains and then whatever mushrooms grew near the moisture vents.

I trained my mind to forget the taste of sunlight. My body hardened with discipline. Push-ups between spells. Meditation in the cold. I built strength not just in muscle, but in magic, in memory.

Every year on the day I thought might be my birthday, I lit the pendant with whatever magic I could muster.

I asked it, "Did you save me or imprison me?"

It never answered.

I climbed the steps toward the sealed hatch, the steel door above still untouched. My fingers shook as I reached for the bronze switch hidden behind a dusty stone. I hesitated.

If I opened it… Would there even be a world left?

I pressed the switch.

With a groan of metal and age, the door began to creak open, light slicing into the darkness like a blade. It burned my eyes. I stumbled up, shielding my face, until I stood at the edge of the bunker's entrance.

And stared.

The palace was gone. No towers, no flags, no people. Only scorched earth and broken stone.

Devana had been silenced.

I stepped out into the light alone.

"It was supposed to be a game," I whispered to the wind. "A test. You lied to me, Father. You left me behind."

But not without a weapon.

The pendant pulsed faintly at my throat. My magic royal and ancient slept beneath my skin, waiting.

I would find out what happened.

I would find the heavens.

And I would make them pay.

The wind struck like a stranger's slap—sharp, unwelcome.

Charred trees clawed at the sky like skeletal fingers. The cobbled roads I once ran through as a child were buried beneath ash. The grand library, once bursting with scrolls and prophecy, was nothing but crumbled stone and memory.

And the palace… my home… had been reduced to stone ribs in a graveyard of ghosts.

There were no bodies. Only silence.

I wandered for hours, barefoot, the pendant against my skin a constant heartbeat. At times I thought I heard voices—my mother calling my name, my father laughing in the throne room—but it was only the wind. Or perhaps it was me.

"We will awaken when the moon burns," the Saint had said.

I had seen it.

The night the sky turned red.

The scream of the sea.

The quaking earth.

The moment everything ended.

And I had slept through it.

By sunset, my body screamed for rest, but my mind refused. I needed answers—if not from the heavens, then from time itself.

I reached the edge of what was once the capital and found something unexpected: a trail of rusted debris. Cans, broken furniture, and old signs marked in unfamiliar script. It led me to a road—black and smooth, unlike anything I'd known.

And there, humming along the horizon, came the first car I ever saw.

It screeched to a halt.

A man stepped out, clutching a phone to his ear, speaking in quick, irritated bursts.

"Yeah, I don't know, man, there's some barefoot girl on the side of the highway—looks like she walked out of a medieval fair."

I watched him like he was a creature from another realm.

"You okay?" he asked, frowning. "Are you lost?"

I didn't answer. How could I?

I wasn't lost.

The world was.

That night, I found shelter in the ruins of an abandoned watchtower, lit only by moonlight. I studied the stars. They were the same… And yet everything beneath them had changed.

I used the pendant to summon old spells.

Flickers of warmth. Sparks in my fingers.

But I was rusty.

Weak.

"You should sleep," I whispered to myself. "Tomorrow, you survive again."

And I did.

In the years that followed, I became a ghost in the living world.

I stole books. Read in secret. Watched and listened.

I learned to dress, to speak, and to blend.

The world was ruled not by crowns or spells but by money, screens, and silent wars.

But beneath it all there were whispers.

Imps. Werewolves. Vampires. Grims. Even angels.

The heavens had not forgotten.

And neither had I.

I changed my name to Rose Ainsworth.

Moved far from cities.

Lived close to trees.

Worked meaningless jobs—then ones that mattered.

I climbed corporate ladders quietly, not out of ambition, but necessity.

It's easier to search when you're invisible.

Now I work as an assistant director in a multinational company. I live among humans who think they rule the world.

They have no idea what's coming.

And I've waited long enough.