Pain forgets nothing. It grows clever.
The scent of flame-forged silk. The weight of dominion in her blood. Once, Lady Ishal wore her house name like a crown.
Valshura.
Born of flames. Bred for command.
They whispered she was a prodigy in her youth—second daughter of a second son, yet somehow the center of every gaze. Veins of Dominion Flame surged brightly within her, a rare trait once said to command others' bloodlines at will. Unstable. Beautiful. Dangerous.
But all of that shattered on a morning no records kept.
She remembered her father's voice first—not his words, but the fury in them. The screams. The betrayal. A challenge at the Flame-Stone Chamber. A duel of heirs. Her father stood against the direct bloodline, eyes burning with ambition.
He lost.
The sentence was silence. Not death. Not exile.
Imprisonment. Hidden away, forgotten.
And Ishal?
Cast down. From a blazing palace to a gray-bricked vassal house.
Stripped of name. Called a curse.
A misfortune child.
"She brings disaster."
"She is her father's echo."
"Don't let your son sit beside her—her blood trembles."
Whispers. Always whispers. Students laughed at her in Saevareth halls. Masters sighed when she passed. Every praise was followed by a shadowed warning.
She once loved the stars. She now only looked at them to hide her tears.
---
Memory fragment. Fast. Clipped. Like a broken mirror.
A slipper thrown at her head.
"You're no Valshura."
Scrubbing hallways while noble girls mocked.
Enira watching her with cold, pitying disdain.
Failing her first vein test—because the examiner 'lost' her results.
Waking up to burn marks in her bed.
Her hand trembling while holding her father's last letter.
---
Then, the Watchers came.
Not in person. Not at first.
A whisper during a class on celestial trajectories.
A symbol carved into her dorm wall—vanished by morning.
A vision during meditation: mirrored masks circling her vein-root.
They watched her before she knew how to see.
And when they finally came—in moonlight, through her mirror—she didn't ask why.
She said:
"You remembered me."
---
Now, high above the Academy in the silent winds of night, Lady Ishal traced the crystal-letter's edge with a fingernail.
"A step closer," she murmured. "To power… and to the fall."
She looked to the east, where the great flame-banner of House Valshura still rose beyond the floating mountain peaks.
"I'll not tear them down," she said, voice quiet. "I'll crawl back inside. I'll make them call me savior. And then I'll watch them kneel."
Below her, students laughed. Some fought. One child in particular was asleep, his breath shallow, unaware.
She turned her gaze on him.
Nocth.
Not a boy. A fissure. A wound stitched by hands not meant for stitching.
She smiled, soft and strange. The kind of smile that fire makes right before it burns.
"Let's see what lies beneath your skin."