So how did I come to be Seraphina's minion?
After those days, one night I dreamt. I dreamt of Fire...
Fire was the first thing I ever knew.
Not warmth — hunger. The kind that devoured everything it touched.
In the dream, I was small again.
A child hiding beneath a wooden table while the farmhouse burned around me.
Flames danced across the rafters, licking the ceiling beams until they split like bones.
Someone was screaming — my mother, maybe — though her voice sounded distant, like a memory swallowed by smoke.
A hand reached for me through the fire.
Pale. Human. Trembling.
I reached back, but before our fingers met, the world turned to ash.
The dream always ended that way — in silence, in ruin, in heat.
Only this time, when I opened my eyes, the fire hadn't gone.
It had followed me back.
My veins burned. My chest rose and fell in ragged bursts. I was lying on a marble floor, half-naked, soaked in my own blood. Light flickered above me — not sunlight, but the sickly white glow of moon-crystals hanging from vaulted ceilings.
A woman stood over me.
Seraphina.
Her hair fell like silver silk down to her waist, her eyes a pale violet that caught the light like knives.
She didn't smile, not exactly. It was more like curiosity wearing the mask of mercy.
"You dream loudly," she said. "It woke the stones."
I tried to speak, but my throat was sand. Only a hoarse breath came out — "Where… am I?"
"In my home," she said. "The Crimson Spire."
She crouched beside me, brushing her fingers against my neck. Her touch was cold, but it sent a surge of heat through me, igniting every nerve.
"Do you know who you are?" she asked softly.
I didn't. Not anymore.
All I could see were flashes — the river, Aria's face pale with moonlight, the taste of blood, the sound of my own scream when the darkness claimed me.
Then the fire. Always the fire.
"Good," she said, reading the confusion in my eyes. "Forget the noise. Forget her."
Her thumb brushed the edge of my jaw. "The bond she left in you is dying. Let it die. There are older hungers waiting."
The world tilted. I didn't know if it was her voice or my body collapsing again, but I felt myself falling.
And the fire — the one from my dream — followed me down.
...
When I woke again, the fever had worsened.
Days, maybe weeks, had passed — I couldn't tell. The rooms of the Spire shifted with the hours, staircases rearranging themselves like veins. Seraphina's coven moved through the halls in silence: pale creatures with jeweled eyes, each one watching me as though waiting for something inside me to awaken.
They called themselves The Embered — her chosen circle.
I learned their names slowly.
— Varyn, her alchemist.
— Iseult, the blade-singer, whose blood ran silver.
— Nerith, the quiet scholar who collected hearts in crystal jars.
And Seraphina herself—their sun and moon, their savior and storm.
She visited often, always alone.
Sometimes to heal me. Sometimes just to watch.
One night, she found me at the window, staring at the sprawl of ruins below the tower.
"You're restless," she said.
"I'm remembering," I murmured.
"Then you're healing."
Her smile was thin. "Tell me what you see."
I hesitated. "A house. Fire. A boy."
"And the fire — what does it want?"
I looked at her. "Me."
Her eyes brightened. "Yes. It always wanted you."
She stepped closer, tracing her fingertip along the scar on my wrist. I hadn't noticed it before — a small, circular mark burned deep into the skin, faintly glowing beneath the surface.
"What is that?" I whispered.
"The reason you're still alive," she said. "A mark of origin. A Sun-seed."
The name meant nothing to me, but the way she said it — reverent, almost fearful — made my stomach twist.
"Long before the Nightwalkers, before the Courts, there were those born of flame," she said. "Not turned. Not made. Born. Their blood could burn through prophecy itself."
She tilted her head, eyes studying me like I was a weapon still in the forge.
"You carry that blood, Liam. You are not a creature of night. You are fire that forgot itself."
Seraphina began to train me.
The first lesson was pain.
She burned me until I learned not to scream.
Cut me until I stopped bleeding.
Each trial left me hollow, but the fire inside my veins refused to die. It coiled tighter, sharper — not consuming me anymore, but waiting to be commanded.
"Do you feel it now?" she would whisper.
"Yes."
"And what does it say?"
I swallowed hard. "It says more."
Her smile was soft and terrible. "Good."
The second lesson was memory.
She wanted me to remember everything — every moment of weakness, every name, every face I had tried to forget.
Especially hers.
Aria.
Seraphina would say her name like a curse. "The girl who bound you in shadow," she hissed. "She feared your fire. She drowned it in her darkness."
"She saved me," I would say.
"She caged you."
Those words sank deep, poisoning thought with doubt.
Maybe Seraphina was right.
Maybe the bond had never been love — only control.
Each night she wove new truths into my mind, stripping away what little I'd held onto.
And I began to believe her.
...
The turning came during a storm.
Thunder split the horizon; lightning crawled down the tower walls.
Seraphina stood before me in the great hall, her eyes glowing like molten silver.
"Unbind it," she commanded.
"The fire?"
"No — your fear."
She raised her hand. A wave of energy struck me, searing through muscle and bone. I screamed, collapsing to my knees as the Sun-seed burned white beneath my skin.
The floor cracked. The air shimmered with heat.
Seraphina's voice cut through the roar. "What do you remember?"
The farmhouse. The fire. My mother's hand.
Then — the river.
Aria's lips on mine as the world burned around us.
Her whisper — "Come back."
The memories clashed — light against shadow, flame against dark.
I could feel the bond again, faint, dying.
"No!" Seraphina's cry was sharp. She pressed her palm to my chest, her power slamming into the mark on my wrist. "She is gone. You are mine."
The fire answered her, not me.
It erupted outward, wild and merciless. The marble floor melted beneath us. The air turned molten.
She didn't flinch. She stepped closer, eyes fierce.
"Yes," she breathed. "That's it. You see? The world burns for you."
When the storm outside broke, the fire within me finally obeyed.
It folded back into my skin like a beast returning to its cage.
And in that silence, something inside me changed. The bond — the last piece of Aria still clinging to my soul — shattered completely.
What remained was hunger.
Pure and infinite.
Seraphina knelt beside me, pressing her lips to my temple.
"Welcome home, my Sunborn."
...
In the days that followed, she forged me into something else.
The coven watched as I walked among them, their eyes lowered. Even Varyn, who once mocked me as her pet, bowed his head when my footsteps scorched the stones.
Seraphina gave me command of her hunters — the Talons — to cleanse the remnants of Marcus's spies in the borderlands.
I obeyed.
I burned villages, temples, forests. I felt nothing.
Each fire mirrored the dream that had birthed me.
Each scream sounded like the child I'd once been.
And yet, beneath it all, a whisper remained — faint, insistent.
She's still out there.
I ignored it. Seraphina said the bond was dead. That Aria was ash.
But sometimes, when the flames rose too high, I thought I saw her face in them — not accusing, but waiting.
...
On the seventh night of the new moon, Seraphina summoned me to the top of the Spire.
The city below was drowning in darkness.
She stood at the edge of the balcony, the wind tearing through her hair.
"Do you know why I saved you?" she asked.
"Because I'm useful."
She laughed quietly. "No. Because you are the other half of prophecy. The world began in fire and shadow — and it will end the same way."
She turned to me, eyes gleaming. "You are fire, Liam. She is shadow. Together you will unmake the gods."
"And if I refuse?"
"You won't."
Her hand rose, brushing my cheek. "Because you still love her. And love, my dear Sunborn, always burns."
Behind her, the horizon lit up — not with dawn, but with flame.
The villages we had destroyed cast a red glow against the clouds.
I looked at them and felt nothing.
But somewhere deep inside, the boy in the burning farmhouse screamed again.
I closed my eyes and whispered, "Then let it burn."
The mark on my wrist flared bright gold.
The air trembled.
And for the first time since the river, I felt powerful enough to destroy the world that had made me.