The dream began as it always did—soft light, a vast nothingness beneath her feet, the kind of silence that made her aware of her own heartbeat. But tonight, there was something else.
A scent.
Warm and ancient, threaded with the metallic tang of fire and the calm of rain-soaked stone.
It brushed against her senses like a memory she had never lived yet somehow always carried.
She turned.
Far ahead, a ripple of gold shimmered—no, not gold. A pulse. A heartbeat. Calling her.
It wasn't a command. It was an invitation.
Her feet moved before thought could catch up, yet each step felt as though she were walking against a current. The closer she came, the more the air trembled with a voice—deep, resonant, and unbearably familiar.
'Come'.
Illyria's hand lifted, reaching toward the light. But just as the warmth grazed her fingertips, a sharp pull yanked her back—out of the dream, out of the silence—into the cold clarity of dawn.
---
Her mornings had a rhythm now.
The training grounds still smelled faintly of steel and smoke, the sharp scent mingling with the sweet tang of the mana blossoms lining the courtyard walls. Lydia stood in the center, eyes closed, as motes of light swirled around her fingertips.
Two powers thrummed inside her—creation and destruction—two currents that hated and loved each other in equal measure. She had learned, over the past hundred years, to let them braid into one steady stream… most days.
Today, the moment her magic surged to its peak, she heard it again—soft, like a cry across an ocean.
Not pain. Not joy. Something older.
Something that sounded like herself.
"Too slow," Seraphine's voice cut through the stillness, rich and commanding.
Illyria exhaled. "I'm not slow. I'm… careful."
The Dragon Queen stepped forward, her black-and-gold cloak sweeping over the pale grass. "Careful is for mortals. You're not mortal." Her amber eyes glinted. "Again."
Illyria obeyed, drawing on the well of mana deep inside her. Yet, even as she focused, something else intruded—a faint sound, like someone crying far away, their voice muffled as if underwater. Her fingers faltered.
Seraphine noticed. "You flinched."
"I heard something," Illyria murmured, scanning the training grounds. "No… not here. Inside. It was… pulling me."
Seraphine's brows narrowed. "Pulling you?"
"It felt… like a tether. Familiar. Not just to me—" She pressed a hand to her chest. "To my blood."
For a moment, Seraphine studied her in silence, then asked quietly, "How long has this been happening?"
"Since last winter. At first, I thought it was my imagination. But now…" She looked away. "It's growing stronger."
The Dragon Queen didn't answer immediately. She walked to Illyria's side, her presence warm and heavy with authority. "Voices that call across mana are not… accidents. You may be tied to something you do not yet understand. Or someone."
Illyria didn't reply. How could she explain the strange flashes she'd been having? Not just the cries—memories.
It was during meditation that the memories would come.
Not hers—never hers.
When she passed people in the halls, their lives unfurled before her like an open book. A soldier polishing his sword—and she saw his boyhood, the moment he swore to protect his sister. A maid carrying linens—and she felt the grief of her lost lover. Joys and sorrows, all spilling into her, staining her heart with lives that weren't hers.
It was suffocating. And yet… she couldn't turn away.
They came without order or mercy, slipping into her mind like leaves on a restless stream. Illyria didn't fight them. She had long since learned she couldn't.
But she did something else. She kept them.
Not as burdens, but as stories. She held them with the same carefulness a scribe would give to a sacred book—because someone had to remember. Someone had to make sure they weren't lost.
And in keeping them, she sometimes forgot which feelings were hers.
The wind swept in from the open balcony, carrying the scent of salt and rain. Beyond the palace, the mountains stood like jagged spines against the horizon. Somewhere out there, she knew, the source of that pull waited.
---
Kaelira had noticed.
"You're too quiet these days," her shadow guard murmured one afternoon, stepping from behind the pillar where she had been watching.
Illyria's lips curved faintly. "I'm thinking."
"You're always thinking." Kaelira 's tone was sharp, but her eyes softened. "Don't let their lives drown yours, Princess. You are not just their mirror."
Illyria did not reply. In truth, she wasn't sure anymore.
---
It was Seraphine's arrival that broke the heaviness of the week.
The dragon queen moved with a grace that belonged to something more than human. Her golden eyes were clear, but today they held a sharp edge.
"I've remembered," Seraphine said without preamble. "My responsibility. Why I stayed in this realm at all."
The Dragon Queen's gaze was fixed on the mountains. "It's because I've come to find the Forbidden Beast Monarch."
The words sank like stones into the silence.
Illyria swallowed. "And if you find him?"
Seraphine's expression was unreadable. "Then the chains of fate on this world will start to break."
A shiver ran down Illyria's spine. She opened her mouth to speak—
—but the ground beneath them trembled. Somewhere deep in the mountains, a muffled, bone-deep roar answered the pull in her veins.
Her heart lurched.
The voice in her dreams whispered again. Come to me.
---
Illyria tilted her head, the flicker of a smile dancing on her lips. "You speak as if you already know where to find him."
Seraphine's gaze didn't waver. "I don't know… not yet. But I can feel it. The Forbidden Beast Monarch isn't just a myth written to scare children. He's real, Illyria. And if I find him, if I bring him back…" She let her voice trail off, as if the weight of the thought pressed too heavily on her chest. "Everything might change."
Illyria's eyes narrowed slightly, not in suspicion but in thought. "Change for the better… or for the worse?"
Seraphine didn't answer right away. The wind stirred between them, rustling the high grass under the silvered moonlight. "That depends on who reaches him first."
A sudden sharp ache pulsed behind Illyria's eyes, unbidden. She gasped softly as visions flickered past her mind—pieces of lives that were not her own. A child clutching a faded ribbon. A soldier's hand shaking as he wrote his last letter. The sound of someone singing to the stars, voice trembling with hope. Each memory bled into the next until her own heartbeat was lost in the storm of them.
"Illyria?" Seraphine's voice cut through, but faintly, as though muffled by distance.
And then—she heard it. A voice deep and resonant, curling around her mind like smoke: 'Come, my dear little spirit'.
The pull was stronger this time, almost dragging her forward, toward something she could neither see nor name. She didn't know if she was running toward salvation… or toward the beginning of the end.
Illyria's gaze narrowed. "Then tell me, Seraphine—why did you come to the Spirit Realm to find him?"
The Dragon Queen's eyes softened, though her voice carried the weight of ages. "They call him the Forbidden Beast Monarch… but that title hides the truth. He is not a destroyer, Illyria—he is the guardian of the Three Realms. Once, his name was spoken with reverence, yet history has erased him. He lies sealed in the deepest path, beyond the forbidden gates of your own Spirit Realm. To find him is to walk where no light dares follow."
Illyria's pulse quickened, a strange pull tightening in her chest. "If he is a guardian, why is he called Forbidden?"
"Because power terrifies those who cannot control it," Seraphine replied. "And his power was never meant to bow to any crown."
Her words settled over Illyria like the slow drop of ink into water, spreading in dark, delicate ripples. Somewhere deep in her blood, something stirred—something that felt like recognition.
The words lingered between them like the hush before a storm—right before the distant, beckoning voice returned, drawing Illyria toward the place where destiny waited, chained in shadow.
***
The night draped the Spirit Palace in silver and shadow, the halls breathing with a quiet far older than the princess who walked them. The day's lessons still lingered in Illyria's mind—endless pages of strategy, records of past wars, the delicate weaving of words that could win or doom a kingdom. But tonight, she was not thinking of politics.
Her steps carried her to the open balcony where the moon spilled its light across the marble floor. She found her mother there—Queen Serenia —watching the sky with the calm patience of someone who had seen centuries pass like seasons.
"You've finished late tonight," Serenia murmured without turning.
Illyria bowed her head respectfully. "The council asked for my opinion on the new border treaties. I think they just wanted to see if I could give the same answer you would."
Her mother's lips curved faintly. "And did you?"
"Mostly," Illyria admitted. "But… there's something else I wanted to ask you."
The queen's gaze shifted to her daughter, sensing the weight in her tone. "Go on."
Illyria hesitated, fingers tightening on the railing. "If there came a day when I could no longer protect the Spirit Realm… if I stood on the edge of losing everything—what would be my last means of survival?"
The question hung in the air between them, heavy yet fragile.
Serenia studied her, the moonlight catching in her silver eyes. "Survival is not always about victory, Illyria. Sometimes it is about endurance—about holding on until the storm passes. The moment you surrender hope is the moment the battle is truly lost."
She reached out, brushing a strand of hair from her daughter's cheek, the touch as much a mother's comfort as a queen's blessing. "A ruler must know when to stand, when to yield, and when to disappear—only to return stronger. Even in the ashes, a kingdom can rise again… if its heart still beats."
Illyria's chest ached with a strange tightness. "And if… the heart itself is taken?"
"Then you protect the memory of it," Serenia said softly. "For memory can be sharper than any blade. It can guide you back to yourself when all else is gone."
They stood in silence for a moment, the cool wind carrying the scent of the night gardens.
---
That night, Illyria dreamed.
In the dream, the air was thick with mist, the ground cold beneath her bare feet. A voice—low, ancient, and unyielding—called her name from beyond the fog. She ran. Sometimes away, sometimes toward it—she could not tell. The pull in her heart and mana was undeniable, as if the voice had always been a part of her.
Far away, on a mountain none dared approach, the forbidden seal that had held for countless ages gave a whispering crack.
And the sound carried like a heartbeat across the realms.