The cold stone beneath her back was cracked and ancient, but Ashira Vireya didn't feel the chill. Not anymore. Her fingers twitched against moss-lined marble as a new awareness surged through her a rhythm foreign yet familiar.
She wasn't just breathing. She was alive.
But she shouldn't be. Not after what happened at the citadel. Not after her body had been torn apart by her own bloodline's betrayal.
Her eyes fluttered open, and what she saw wasn't a ceiling it was the void between worlds. Veins of starlight pulsed in a dome above her, and ghostly symbols floated in the air like embers caught in a slow spiral.
"You were not supposed to come back."
The voice was disembodied, ageless, like wind moaning through bones.
Ashira sat up with a gasp, chest heaving, and clutched at her throat only to feel a jagged mark etched there. She staggered to her feet, each movement setting off tremors of power she didn't recognize.
She looked down.
Gone was the fragile body that had been burned alive in the pyre of royal betrayal. Her arms now bore soft, glowing runes writhing slowly beneath pale, luminescent skin like something alive. Her once-scattered black hair was now streaked with silver, and her nails were tipped like obsidian blades.
"I'm not human," she murmured.
Correct.
The spectral voice echoed again, this time inside her skull.
"You are what happens when death is denied. You are wrath wrapped in rebirth. You are Ashira and something more."
Her knees buckled.
Visions stabbed into her consciousness her past life flashing in fragmented loops:
Her father's corpse burning on the blackwood throne.
Her stepbrother's smug smile as he fastened the noose of betrayal.
Her mother's silent scream as guards dragged her away.
And that final, cursed whisper before the flames took her:
"You were never meant to be Queen."
Ashira clenched her fists.
"Then I'll become something worse."
She stumbled forward, pushing open the broken temple doors, and was instantly hit by the winds of the Outer Expanse.
The sky stretched out in torn ribbons of violet and dusk, and a blood-red sun hung low over a wasteland of glass plains and jagged obsidian peaks. Cities once ruled by her ancestors now lay in ruins, picked apart by warlords and spirit beasts. Her empire was dust.
But she wasn't.
She descended the temple steps barefoot, every echo behind her burning away the ashes of who she once was.
A howl pierced the air.
Ashira turned.
From the hills emerged a beast massive, reptilian, eyes glowing like molten rubies. A Gravetail Leviathan, half-spirit, half-nightmare. Long thought extinct.
Her instincts screamed at her to run. But something deeper older held her still. She raised her arm, and before she could even think, her body moved with elegance and precision, tracing symbols in the air with her fingertips.
A glyph flared beneath her pulsing red like a heartbeat.
The beast hesitated.
Ashira blinked. "What the hell did I just do?"
"Blood memory," the voice within her growled. "The magic of your ancestors sleeps in your marrow. And now that you've died, it's been awakened."
The Leviathan growled low, lunging.
She didn't flinch.
Instinct power moved her limbs.
A second glyph ignited beneath her feet, lifting her into the air. Her bones crackled with energy. Her new spine no longer human aligned with something ancient.
She was no longer prey.
She was rebirth's fury.
With a twist of her wrist, a blade of pure energy burst from her palm, hissing like a flame. She slashed upward, cutting a seam of fire into the sky. The Leviathan recoiled, hissing.
"I don't know what I am yet," she whispered, glowing eyes narrowing, "but I know one thing I'm not yours to eat."
The beast reared back, but something in her blood pulsed harder, louder, and with it came a scream not of fear, but fury. The scream of the girl who had died, silenced, betrayed.
Ashira let it loose.
And the sky split.