Briar Hollow hadn't changed as much as it pretended to.
The cobbled streets were newer, the storefronts dressed in glass and metal, but the bones of the town—the lamplight, the crooked corners, the echoes in the stone—remained the same. It had changed, yes—but not enough. The bones of the place were the same. She felt them beneath the fresh paint and new concrete: the cobbled streets beneath modern roads, the echoes behind children's laughter, the charred stone hidden beneath commemorative plaques.
Centuries had passed, but memory didn't rot like flesh. It lingered.
Lyraen stood on a balcony carved from black stone, overlooking the city's sprawl. Lights flickered like fireflies in a graveyard, hiding secrets behind every illuminated window. She could feel it—something in the marrow of the city had begun to stir. The sigil's effects were growing stronger, resonating with every breath of her kind.
She pulled her coat tighter. Glamour still cloaked her—just enough. Her aura veiled. The wind shifted. To mortals, she was pale, tired, forgettable. But the city? It remembered her.
The sky dimmed. Somewhere, a dog howled in the distance, then fell silent.
She wandered into the heart of town, past bakeries and lantern-lit cafés, through narrow alleys that once ran red. In the center stood the old chapel, now repurposed as a museum—its spire cracked, its foundation scorched. Her boots clicked against the memorial stones that paved the square. Its once blackened stones now bore polished plaques and glass panes, but Lyraen could still see the scorch marks beneath the new façade.
She walked past the front entrance and around the side, to the garden that once grew wild with lavender and rosemary. She remembered every scream.
Inside the chapel, now filled with glass cases and quiet tourists, she drifted unseen. Her eyes caught on an exhibit near the altar: "THE TRAGEDY OF BRIAR HOLLOW – A MYSTERY OF FIRE AND FOLKLORE." Photographs, artifacts, and an oil painting showed a winged figure in flame. Seraph or devil? the plaque asked.
She smiled bitterly.
A child ran past her, chasing a paper bird. It looped and dipped on enchanted wings, bright as flame. Lyraen watched it vanish down an alley. For a moment, she almost smiled.
Then the memory came—smoke in her throat, a hymn on her lips, blood on her hands. She remembered the smell of the boy's blood. The way she had begged Heaven to take her back. The silence that followed.
No redemption came. Only hunger.
She turned away—knelt and touched the earth. It pulsed faintly beneath her fingertips. This was hallowed ground once, before it was scarred. Before she scarred it.
"I remember you," she whispered to the soil.
Etched into the stained glass above the altar was a new addition: a mark. A spiral wing wrapped in thorns. The sigil. Her breath caught. It had followed her here.
Behind her, a man watched from the museum steps. Hooded. Still. Holy symbols threaded through the embroidery of his coat. A hunter. But not Ezran.
Far beneath Nytheralis, in the lowest chamber of the Sanctum Stirpis, Ezran Morthane stood in the cold silence of interrogation, like a blade drawn halfway from its scabbard. Night had settled thick over Nytheralis, and the sky was painted in streaks of violet and ash.
Beneath the gilded halls of the Custodes Noctis' new sanctum, Ezran Morthane interrogated a vampire. The creature writhed against silver chains and irons, its skin burned where holy water touched. Its eyes, once seductive, were now wild with hunger and fear. Trembling, his face pale with blood loss. Bruises marred his once-beautiful skin. Sacred oil steamed where it touched his flesh.
"You saw her," Ezran said. "Tell me where."
The vampire spat blood. "You can't stop her."
Ezran held up the sigil—a metal burning cruciform disc pulsing with faint crimson light against its chest. The scream echoed like a hymn turned inside out. The vampire recoiled as the mark burned into his skin.
"She's searching," the vampire finally choked. "For truth. For… herself."
Ezran's eyes narrowed. "What truth?"
The vampire whimpered. "Something about the old world. Something lost. She thinks it can… unmake what she is."
"She moves through Velin's Reach," it hissed. "She searches the Boneweaver."
Ezran's jaw tightened. The Boneweaver—a name out of myth, a being said to have stitched the veil between realms, binding what was broken when the vampires first Fell. If Lyraen sought the Boneweaver, it meant she was closer to the truth than he'd feared.
Ezran stood, eyes unreadable.
"She's in Briar Hollow," said the woman in scarlet.
He turned to the scarlet-cloaked woman at the door. "Send word to our watchers, to search for her. She's coming apart. And when she does, we strike."
Ezran stared at the fragment of her halo, which now pulsed more erratically. It resonated with proximity. It knew she was near.
"She's beginning to remember," she added. "It will either save her or destroy her."
Ezran nodded once. Then turned away.
Back in Briar Hollow, Lyraen stood before the chapel window, her reflection twisted in the ancient glass. Below, the city pulsed with its usual nocturnal rhythm: shadow markets, veiled auctions, and whispers passed between immortals disguised in human skin. It was a fragile dance—desires hidden beneath civility, predators playing saints.
Lyraen pulled her cloak tighter. The wind carried memories.
She had returned to her sanctuary, an abandoned observatory on the edge of the Nightvale district.
From here, she could see the remnants of what once was—the ruins of the First Spire, where the Council of Eclipse had governed vampire-kind before its fall. Their bones still lay beneath the foundation, turned to crystal from centuries of decay and magic.
She wandered the old marketplace, now repaved and lined with cafes and boutiques. But in her eyes, she saw it as it had been—strings of lights across the stalls, laughter, music drifting in the wind. And fire. The night of the burning. They'd set fire to the square to purge her. She'd watched from the chapel's ruins as the townspeople, those she had once healed, once sang for, became a mob of torches and pitchforks.
She had let them. She thought she deserved it. But she hadn't died.
The old town was not just a place. It was a grave. And her past, still buried within it, clawed at the walls of her mind.
The boy's name whispered in her mind. The boy she had loved. The boy she had taken. The one who gave himself willingly.
She walked now through memory and ruin, hunted by both past and prophecy. Something ancient had reawakened. A darkness not just within her, but behind her—moving through cities and sigils and signs.
A priest passed her on the street, eyes blind to her true form, but his prayers stung her skin like salt. She turned away.
In an alley just past the chapel's ruins, she saw the mark again. Burned into the brick, faint but pulsing—like a wound refusing to close. The spiral wing. Wrapped in thorns.
The Seer had warned her: go where you were broken. She had come, but answers remained veiled. The sigil. Why was it here?
She reached toward it. Her fingers trembled.
Behind her, a blade hissed free of its sheath. A voice stirred behind her. "You shouldn't be here."
She turned. An old woman with cloudy eyes, a local perhaps, stared at her like she knew.
Lyraen didn't reply. She left the museum and walked toward the forest edge where the town bled into shadows. There, long ago, a rift had opened. Not in the earth—in her soul.
Night fell like a hush over the town. The stars emerged, distant and cold. She sat by the river where the boy once played. Memory whispered through the reeds. She closed her eyes.
She would find the truth. Even if it burned.
And in the dark, something watched.
To be continued...