(Third-Person Limited — Selene Veyrith)
The Flame did not roar; it did not gutter. It shivered.
A quiet, violent hesitation deep within the Shrine's iron basin.
The old men in the upper clerical wing denied later that they had felt anything—conscience has a way of folding memory like paper—but the acolytes who slept with the lamps on remembered waking as if something cold had walked through their ribcages.
The energy simply drew itself inward, a thin, deliberate recoil that smelled faintly of soot and an unfinished verdict.
Selene Veyrith felt the omen not as a threat, but as a deep forgetting—a rejection already inscribed in the bones. She was on a road meant only for death or desperate escape.
The mud thick as quickened ink. The wind flensing the skin from the pines.
She bled as if the world itself were trying to tear the lineage from her core.
She held her daughter to her chest, the tiny body a burden and an accusation.
The newborn's cheeks were the color of washed ivory, her breaths precise and shallow.
The swaddle's sigils—knots of thread that claimed House Asterion's name like written law—had dissolved under the storm. They were black, formless stains now, suggestions where proof should have been.
A child unmarked is a child without witness. A child without witness is a child without claim.
The cold line from the forbidden books—A name unspoken may be a life unanchored—was no longer metaphor. Tonight, Selene prayed with a violence that transcended mere bargaining.
"Stay," she whispered into the infant's downy hair. The syllable was not command so much as plea.
The midwife, a woman whose hands had forgiven more things than prayers ever could, tightened a scarf around Selene's ribs and spat the word priest like a curse.
"We must reach the shrine," the midwife kept saying. "They must witness her."
Selene's laugh was wet and brittle. "They will witness what they can. Or they will report only the signs that suit them."
Lightning tore the world apart. For a breath Selene's face became light—too beautiful, too mortal—and she thought that to be beautiful at death would be some small softening of the verdict Thesalia kept ready for daughters who did not fit neatly into prophecy.
The carriage found the edge of the road and slid. Wood screamed. The world tipped.
They fell.
Selene remembered the weight of wood against her shoulder, the midwife's curse like a flint struck, the horses' mouths foaming in the dark. Her hands closed around the infant as if holding onto a coin dropped down a well.
The fall broke bone and fortune and perhaps a little faith; when the search party hauled them up, Selene's dress was a map of mud and blood. But she lived long enough for the shrine to take her in.
They carried her into the cradle hall on the hands of men carved into haste. The lamplight washed her face, making her seem less a ruin than a last, desperate proof.
Acolytes crowded with towels and oil and the clumsy, urgent tenderness of those who knew they stood between life and ledger. Three other mothers had been brought earlier, their infants lying in a circle of wooden cradles around the central basin.
Selene's eyes opened, and the terror in them was simply the terror of someone who had to give everything away. She reached with a hand that shook and found the small face warmed to her touch. The child looked back with the solidity of a thing that knew its own hunger.
"Ly—" the name came like an attempt at a shape.
The midwife, lips white, tried to steady a breath and recite the necessary formulas. The priests moved with correct distance.
Selene held the infant against her chest and found a slender stubbornness rising up from somewhere the storm could not reach.
"Record her," she whispered when the priest leaned close. "Record her name. She is—"
"Lysera," the midwife finished for her, bent and fluent in oath. "Lysera Asterion."
Selene's throat worked. A faint, astonished smile left her. "Yes," she breathed. "Lysera."
Her palm flattened over the child's cheek, a benediction rough with mud. She closed her eyes. "Live, Lysera."
She stayed long enough to murmur the half-remembered lullabies she had learned in Valthus and press the baby's ear to the slow certainty of her heart—but the blood would not stop. When she finally went, it was as if the hush of the mountain had folded down over her.
Callion arrived in that hush. He was younger then, the sharp priest with eyes like knife-ink. He moved with the orderly patience of one who calculates risk.
"Where is the lineage tablet?" he asked. "Lost," an acolyte said.
Callion's fingers brushed the swaddling. The sigils had dissolved to dark smudges. A child without a tablet is a child whose name will be argued over by men who value paper more than blood.
Under the baby's tiny, unblinking gaze, Callion felt a prick of recognition he could not name. The shrine's flame behind him leaned fractionally away—as if it too were assembling this night into meaning.
Then the second wind came, barging inside as if the mountain had exhaled.
It swept down the chamber like a hand, upending a cradle with a soft crash, sending linen and prayer-scrolls skimming across the stones. The flame in the basin bowed and recoiled, all its gold wavering.
When the hall settled, there were four babies on the floor instead of four in order. Cradle order was lost. Any tidy witness had been blown into the wet air.
Selene's shrouded form lay on a mat; the infant—Lysera—had come to rest nearest it, where a shard of shroud clung to her cheek. To the human heart, the sight was a kind of proof.
Riders from House Asterion came then. A steward pointed to the infant nearest Selene and said with the blunt authority of the bereaved, "This is Lady Selene's child. We take her."
Callion watched them wrap the baby. He felt the gravity of a world built on ink and witness. He could have announced the disorder: The storm undid our order. We cannot be sure.
But the envoy's face was a raw map of loss. Men grant certainty to those who come begging it. Callion said nothing.
Later, Callion pressed his palm to the altar and let an old, ambiguous line put itself into words in his throat. The line: "When the Flame falls silent at a daughter's birth, names shall drift like ash upon the wind, and a child claimed by the wrong arms shall alter the fate of Thesalia—toward salvation... or toward ruin."
It was a rumour of a prophecy. Callion preferred the ambiguity. Ambiguity allowed action while preserving righteousness. It made him careful and cruel in the same breath.
He told a novice to register the remaining infants as Children of the Eclipse Night. Lysera slept between the seams of a world rearranged without her knowledge.
Callion remained, remembering Selene's last word, the baby's tiny steadiness, and the way certainty settles a man's shoulders. He did not yet understand whether he had saved a life or signed the beginning of a fracture.
For now, the flame lay silent like a secret. And beneath the hush, a name still waited to be fully born.