The dreams came again, slipping through the cracks of sleep like smoke through stone.
It always began the same way: a wheat field beneath a sun too bright to be real. The air shimmered with heat, bending the world into strange shapes. The wind didn't carry sound, only a low humming, like breath caught between two heartbeats. Each stalk glimmered as it hardened into glass, the whole field fragile and sharp, waiting to shatter at the smallest touch.
And then I'd see it—the farmhouse, burning at the edge of the horizon. The roof sagged, the windows blazed. The air tasted of ash and iron. And standing in front of it was a boy.
He was barefoot, holding a wooden carving of the sun. The edges were blackened, the wood cracked, as if it had already survived too many fires. His face was streaked with soot, but I didn't need to see it clearly. I knew him. The tilt of his head. The shape of his mouth. The eyes that met mine.
They were my eyes.
"Do you remember?" he asked. His voice was quiet, too calm for a place so hot it might melt the sky.
I tried to answer, but fire came out instead. It poured from my mouth like air from a bellows, roaring across the field. The glass wheat caught instantly, burning without color, the flames as pale as sunlight. The boy didn't run. He smiled as the fire climbed his body, his outline dissolving until he was nothing but brilliance. For one terrible second, I felt myself burning with him.
I woke choking on smoke that wasn't there. The stones beneath me hissed, thin red cracks running from where I lay. My skin was hot, steaming, as if the dream had followed me back.
And I knew she had felt it. Seraphina always did.
Her hall was waiting, bright with cold light. Pillars of black quartz stretched upward, humming faintly, and the air shimmered as though the heat itself bowed to her presence. She sat on her throne of obsidian, one leg crossed over the other, watching me approach.
"You burned the floor again," she said. Her tone was light, amused, but her eyes gave her away. She wasn't angry. She was pleased. "Tell me, Liam. Are you trying to bring the whole mountain down?"
"I dreamt," I said. My throat ached, my voice raw.
"Good." She rose from the throne, her movement fluid, dangerous. "Dreams are the fire remembering itself. Tell me what it showed you this time."
"A field. A house. My parents," I murmured. "They prayed to something. A god of flame."
Seraphina smiled, slow and sharp. "They didn't pray. They called it. And the fire that answered them wasn't divine—it was blood answering blood."
I frowned. "I was human."
Her head tilted slightly. "Were you? Fire doesn't choose stone to burn through. It chooses flesh. You were born from it, Liam. The oldest flame pretending to be a man."
Her hand reached for mine, her fingertips brushing my wrist. The spiral mark beneath the skin glowed faintly, pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat. "They feared you," she said softly. "That's why they burned the temple. They wanted to keep the fire from waking."
My jaw tightened. "Why would I forget any of that?"
"Because you were human once," she whispered. "And humanity burns first."
Her words sank into me like heat through armor. For a moment, the air itself seemed to lean toward her. I felt my pulse steady, then match hers. The mark on my wrist throbbed brighter. It felt like belief—unwanted but impossible to shake off.
That night, she gathered the coven to "test" me.
Neris came first, her veins faintly green, like emerald roots glowing beneath her skin. Valor followed, tall and silent, his expression unreadable. Mira stood at the edge of the circle, her eyes far away, lips moving to some invisible song. Kade crouched near my feet, drawing sigils in ash and blood, his fingers trembling with focus.
Seraphina lifted her hand. "Breathe," she said.
The air thickened at once. I felt it building in my chest—the heat, the pull, the rising pressure like the edge of a scream. When I let go, it burst from me in a wave of white fire. The courtyard blazed brighter than day, then fell silent.
When the light faded, the ground beneath us was no longer stone but glass, smooth and smoking, the same spiral symbol burned deep into its surface.
"Magnificent," Neris whispered.
Valor only nodded. "Unstable," he muttered. "But magnificent."
Mira smiled faintly. "He remembers."
Seraphina walked toward me. She didn't seem to feel the heat. She stopped close enough that I could see the reflection of my flames in her eyes. "The fire knows its master," she said, her voice soft but commanding.
"For you," I said, though even I wasn't sure whether I meant it or questioned it.
"For us," she replied.
But her eyes told me the truth. They weren't looking at me—they were looking through me, at what burned behind my ribs. Not hunger. Possession.
When the others left, I stayed awake, sitting on the cold floor. I tried to remember my mother's voice, the sound of my father's laughter, the way sunlight felt on skin that didn't burn. Nothing stayed. Each time I reached for a memory, it slipped into light.
Sleep came again.
The boy was waiting. He sat in the ruins of the same burning temple. A woman knelt beside him, her face blurred, her voice soft. I could almost hear her words, but they disappeared under the crack of splitting wood. Soldiers broke through the doors, torches raised. The fire spread instantly. The woman pushed the boy back, shouting something I couldn't hear. Then the flames swallowed everything.
The boy stood in the ashes, unharmed. The charm in his hand blazed brighter than the sun. His eyes—my eyes—met mine. The spiral shimmered across his wrist. The world bent under the light.
When I woke, Seraphina's voice was already there, quiet and intimate, curling through my thoughts.
"They feared you even then," she murmured.
Her words echoed long after the sound faded.
And as I stared at my hands, still faintly glowing in the dark, I realized I could no longer tell if the dream was showing me the past… or rewriting it.