She jumped 12

The mark on my thigh hadn’t faded.

If anything, it pulsed stronger now—like something ancient and half-forgotten had begun to stretch inside me. The whispers still clung to the corners of my mind, voices of long-dead Luna Brides rising and falling like smoke through bone.

I didn’t sleep. By morning, the summons arrived.

Vault Trial – midday. Attendance is mandatory.

They didn’t call it what it was. They never did. The Matrons dressed every nightmare in sacred silk and silver ink.

I dressed in silence, pulling my hair back, securing the knife Sariah gave me beneath my belt. Not that it would help. You couldn’t stab a memory. You couldn’t kill a vision.

Sariah met me outside the southern wing, jaw set and eyes already filled with tension. She pressed something into my palm—a sliver of obsidian on a leather cord.

“What is this?” I whispered.

“Warding stone,” she said. “It won’t protect you from what the vault shows… but it might remind you who you are when it starts to pull you apart.”

I clenched it tighter.

Her eyes flicked around us, then back to me. “You need to listen carefully. If your sigils flare—if the vault reveals your seal—they’ll know what you are. And if they know…”

“I’m dead,” I finished for her.

Sariah nodded once. “Publicly. They’ll call it treason. An attempt to deceive the Games.”

I forced myself to breathe. “Then I won’t let them see.”

She stepped forward, gripped my shoulders. “Don’t forget who you are, Lyssira. Not even for a second.”

The trial guards approached. No time left.

The girls were led in a single line through a stone corridor that dipped below the palace—the kind of old, breathless dark that carried weight. The walls were carved with runes that pulsed faintly as we passed. The air felt colder with every step, like the world had sunk beneath itself.

We reached the vault’s threshold. A massive iron gate. A Matron stood at its center, holding a scroll of names.

“One at a time,” she said. “You will enter alone. You will face what is buried. Do not speak once you return. Do not lie. We’ll know if you do.”

The first girl was taken through. Then the second. The third didn’t come back for over an hour. When she did, she was sobbing and clutching her stomach.

I was eight. When they called my name, I walked toward the vault like it owed me something.

The door creaked open. I stepped through. Darkness swallowed me whole. No flame. No echo. Just the sound of my own breath.

Then the world cracked open. I was on the cliff again.

But not mine. Hers.

Alira’s scream echoed through the sky. I saw her small hands clawing the stone floor, the door slamming shut. I smelled the heat on her skin, felt the way the male’s weight loomed behind her, black eyes and hunger and violence.

“No—” I gasped. “No, this isn’t—”

But the vision pulled me deeper.

I watched as her heat took hold, watched as she begged them not to lock the door, and felt the exact moment her voice broke. She didn’t scream after that.

She never screamed again.

The cliff blurred, and suddenly I was a child again, standing in a sun-drenched kitchen. A woman stirred soup at the hearth, her hair twisted into a braid, her voice humming low.

“You must never show them,” she whispered without turning. “They’ll take it from you. And if they take it from you, it will break you.”

“Mother?” I whispered.

The woman turned. My heart stilled.

It was her.

Her eyes were full of tears she hadn’t yet cried. “They’ll come for you when they know, Lyssira. But you can’t be afraid. You have to wake up.”

Light flared behind her—burning white—and the mark on my thigh pulsed like it had been struck.

Pain shot through me. My vision blurred. The air around me turned sharp. And then—I felt it.

Something inside me surged. Power, raw and full of memory. The sigils on my skin lit up beneath my dress, and the vision cracked, fracturing around me like glass.

The vault couldn’t hold me anymore. The illusion shattered. And I fell.

I stumbled out of the gate, my legs barely working. The world was too bright. My knees gave out.

But I didn’t hit the ground.

Hector caught me.

His arms wrapped around me before I could collapse, one hand at my back, the other cradling my head. “Lyssira—”

Our skin touched. And everything changed.

Suddenly I saw him. His childhood. His mother rocking in silence. The day her seal appeared. The moment she walked into the sea. The loneliness that came after. The weight of the Games placed on his shoulders like a curse he didn’t choose.

It hit me like fire. I gasped. He flinched back as if burned.

“You saw too much,” he whispered, stepping away like I was the dangerous one now.

The Matrons descended before I could say another word.

By the time I returned to my chamber, dusk had settled over the palace. I locked the door, heart still hammering.

That’s when I saw it.

A folded slip of paper on my pillow. My name scrawled across the front. I unfolded it with numb fingers.

“Her seal manipulates the bond. She hides her scent. She cheats the rite.”