Hi everyone! I've made some important updates to Chapter 12. Please reread it before continuing—this chapter picks up directly from those events, and I don't want you to miss the details. Thank you for your patience and support, and enjoy the chapter!
The night came, and neither Vivian nor Rina slept.
At Macon's bedside, Vivian sat rigid, her arms folded tightly, her back curved forward in silent defiance of exhaustion. Her eyes did not leave her brother's face. Every twitch of his hand, every shift of his lips, made her grip the wooden chair tighter. She had grown used to sleepless nights, but this one carried a weight that pressed on her like a stone.
He was whispering again.
Not loudly—no, it was barely more than the scrape of breath—but the name threaded through the silence like a blade dragging across glass. Over and over. A name that made no sense to her, yet filled her with dread every time she caught it.
Vivian clenched her jaw. She wanted to wake him, to shake him, but fear rooted her to the chair. Fear of what she might see if his eyes opened and weren't his anymore.
---
Rina sat in her own room, her knees drawn to her chest as she clutched her sketchbook. She had thrown it to the floor earlier, terrified when the drawing shifted before her eyes, but discarding it had not silenced the echo in her head.
She could still feel it, like a hum beneath her skin. Macon's face, first so familiar, now warped into something… other.
And the whisper. The same name he muttered in his fevered sleep. She didn't even know what it meant, but hearing it inside her own skull made her heart pound so hard she thought it might burst.
She tried to tell herself it was her imagination. That it was her tired eyes. That the drawing had not really changed. But even with the sketchbook closed and shoved beneath her bed, she swore she felt it pulse faintly, like something alive trapped between paper.
Sleep, when it finally came, was not gentle.
---
She dreamed of the battlefield.
The air was red, thick with ash, the moon swollen and bleeding across the sky. Her boots sank into mud and blood. The clash of steel rang like thunder, soldiers rushing past her with shields raised. Their faces were blurred, smeared by smoke, but their voices carried clearly, their chant echoing like drums in her chest.
The name.
The same one she had heard Macon whisper in his sleep.
The same one that made Vivian's face pale each time it spilled from his lips.
It rose like a wave around her, chanted by hundreds of voices, shaking her bones until she thought she might split in two.
And then she saw him.
Macon—or the shape of him—stood at the heart of the chaos. Not the boy she had come to know, the one who turned his head when she entered a room, the one she had secretly drawn in her sketchbook with lines of softness around his eyes. No, this figure was something else entirely.
He was armored, cloaked, the cursed scar carved across his chest glowing like a brand. His stance radiated command. His eyes were sharp, cruel, filled with a cold fire that carried none of the hesitance or warmth she recognized.
He raised a blade high above his head, and the crowd roared with a sound that rattled the heavens.
Rina tried to scream his name. To tell him to stop. To remind him of who he was.
But no sound left her lips.
Her throat locked, and the silence tore through her like glass.
Then, in the midst of the roaring, his head turned. His gaze locked on her through the smoke, piercing, merciless. For a moment, everything froze. The battlefield held its breath. Even the cries of war dissolved into nothing.
The blood-red moon loomed heavy overhead.
And then he spoke.
Not with Macon's voice. Not the unsure, wavering tone she knew from their brief conversations. No—this was something ancient, thunderous, echoing through the marrow of her bones.
"You knew me once."
Her body jolted as if struck. Memories—or fragments of them—flashed like broken glass. She saw herself as a child again, but not in any memory she could place. A girl in armor. A battlefield. Hands clasping hers, dragging her through fire. A voice calling her name that was not her name.
Her breath hitched. "No… no, that wasn't real…"
But the figure before her only stepped closer. Smoke curled around his armored form like chains, and his voice shook the ground.
"You will remember."
The blood moon cracked across the sky, spilling light that burned her skin. The battlefield dissolved into ash, folding in on itself until nothing remained but his eyes—cold, unyielding, waiting for her to break.
She stumbled back, the world shattering into pieces around her—
---
Rina woke with a scream.
Sweat clung to her skin, her hair plastered against her forehead. Her chest heaved as she scrambled upright, clutching her sheets as though they could shield her.
Her gaze darted immediately to the floor beside her bed.
The sketchbook.
It lay open, though she swore she had closed it. The pages glowed faintly in the dark, the graphite strokes shifting as if alive. Her breath caught as she leaned closer.
The drawing had changed again.
The boy she had drawn—Macon—no longer looked like himself. His face was hardened, his eyes shadows instead of warmth. His armor was smeared with blood, streaks so dark they seemed wet against the page. And in the corner, scrawled in jagged, uneven lines, were words that had not been there before.
"Dawn rises in blood."
Her throat closed. Her trembling hands shot forward, slamming the book shut so hard the echo startled her. She pushed it under her bed as though burying it might silence it.
But the words seared themselves into her mind, repeating, repeating, repeating.
She curled into herself, arms wrapped tight around her knees, rocking slightly as she whispered to no one, "It's not real. It's not real. It's not real."
Yet even as she said it, her body knew the truth.
This was not just a dream. Not just a drawing. Not just a boy lying weak in a bed across the hall.
Something bound her to him—something older than her life, older than this world. She was part of it, though she didn't yet understand how.
And that terrified her more than anything.
Because Macon was no longer just the boy she had secretly drawn, no longer the classmate she had grown close to.
He was something else.
Something rising.
Something that wanted her to remember.
And she was terrified of what she might find when she finally did.