Chapter 1 Prologue

The night they came for her, the stars bled.

Elara should have known the prophecy was never just folklore whispered around dying fires or warnings etched into crumbling stone by witches long turned to dust. She should have listened when the elders said their bloodline carried a debt written in shadow and sealed with sacrifice. But she had been young then, foolish enough to believe love could rewrite destiny, brave enough to think she could protect her daughter from a fate the universe had already decided.

She had been wrong.

The smell of smoke reached her first, acrid and choking, curling through the stone corridors of their sanctuary like fingers reaching for her throat. Then came the screams. Her sisters, the last of the Shadow Witches, died as vampires tore through their defenses and demons poured through rifts they could not close fast enough. They had known this would happen. The vision had shown her three nights before: fire and blood, fangs and claws, the only alliance between ancient enemies their world had ever seen. United for one purpose. Their extinction.

Elara ran through the corridors she had walked her entire life, her daughter pressed against her chest, the tiny heart beating wildly against her own. Seraphine was barely three months old, too young to understand that her mother was about to ensure she grew up never knowing her name, never seeing her face, never discovering the power that lived inside her blood. Seraphine. Her Sera. The last hope of their dying line.

The ritual chamber appeared ahead, and Elara slammed the iron door shut behind them, throwing every ward she had left across it. Her magic was nearly gone from the fighting and from holding the sanctuary upright as long as she could, but she had just enough left. Just enough for this final spell, this last desperate act of a mother refusing to let her daughter burn with the rest of them.

She laid Sera in the center of the binding circle she had drawn weeks earlier in preparation for this moment. The infant stared up at her with eyes far too old for her tiny face, shadow magic already swirling in their depths. She did not cry. She never cried. Even now, she seemed to understand.

“Forgive me,” Elara whispered as she knelt beside her daughter and pressed a trembling palm to her forehead. “Forgive me for making you carry this burden. Forgive me for binding your power so deep you will forget what you are. Forgive me for leaving you alone.”

The door shuddered behind her. They were close. Too close.

She began the incantation, chanting words older than any human civilization, older than the Veil itself. Her blood dripped onto Sera’s skin, merging with the blood she drew from the tiny palm she cut. Their bloodlines intertwined in the ritual bond. The shadows in the chamber responded immediately, gathering and writhing around them like living things. This was Shadow Witch magic at its purest. Magic that could reshape reality if one was willing to pay the price.

Elara was willing to pay everything.

“Your power sleeps now, little one,” she chanted as the shadows sank into Sera’s skin and vanished like water into sand. “Hidden so deep no spell can find it and no vision can see it. You will live as human, ordinary, until the time of choosing arrives. When you turn twenty four, when the world needs you most, when the war has dragged them all to the edge of extinction, you will wake. You will remember. And you will choose what kind of world rises from the ashes we leave behind.”

The door exploded inward. Vampires rushed in first with fangs and inhuman speed, followed by demons wreathed in shadow flame. At their head stood two figures she recognized through her tears. Malakai, the Demon King, wore a mask of cold satisfaction. Theron, the Vampire High Lord, carried eyes empty of mercy.

“Elara,” Malakai said. She heard a faint ghost of something that might once have been regret. Long ago they had been something to each other, before she chose her people over him and before his love curdled into this hatred that would end her line. “Do not make this harder than it needs to be. Give us the child.”

“Never.” She rose to her feet, placing herself between them and Sera. The ritual was nearly complete. She needed only a few more seconds.

Theron moved faster than her exhausted eyes could track. Pain exploded through her chest as his hand punched through flesh and bone, closing around her heart. She gasped and blood filled her mouth, but her chanting did not stop. She poured the last drops of her magic into the spell even as it drained her life away.

“The binding is done,” she whispered through agony. “You are too late. She is hidden now. Hidden so completely you will never find her. But she will find you.” She smiled through the blood, wild and fierce. “When the world you are building burns, when your war destroys everything you ever claimed to love, she will return. My daughter’s daughter’s daughter. And she will choose your fate.”

Malakai’s face twisted with rage. He lunged toward Sera, but the moment he touched the edge of the binding circle, shadow magic erupted outward. The blast threw him back, knocking them all off their feet. When the light faded, Sera was gone. Transported somewhere far from this place, somewhere even Elara herself never knew, her power locked away and her destiny set in motion.

“What have you done?” Malakai roared.

“I have given her a chance,” Elara whispered as darkness closed in at the edges of her vision. Theron’s hand still gripped her dying heart. “A chance you never gave me. A chance none of you give anyone. A choice.”

The last thing she saw before everything went black was Theron’s face. For a single fleeting moment, she thought she saw something like shame in his eyes. Then there was nothing. No fear. No pain. No sound. Only the knowledge that her daughter would live and would one day stand where she could not. Her daughter would carry the burden, face the prophecy, and decide the fate of every creature who walked this broken world.

The prophecy had begun.

And twenty four years from now, it would end in blood, shadow, and a girl who did not yet know she had been born to save or destroy them all.