Ember: 10 Years Old
Khaos: 6,089 Years Old
Beware of he who lurks in the dark woods.
**Valiant—Dream Cave**
"Once your sister is born, the Old Ones will come and take you away, Ember. There's no place for you here. Not as my daughter, and certainly not as a Witch."
The forest beyond the coven was not a place for children. It was a place for things the witches had long stopped naming. Still, Ember ran into it—barefoot, bleeding, and burning with the ache of being unloved.
She had nothing left to fear.
Soon, her coven would cast her out. Not with fury—but with quiet disdain. She had been told all her life that she was too small, too strange, too powerless to belong among them. A mistake of fate. A flame too weak to catch.
So she ran away from her mother's Palace of Flames like the vast disappointment she left behind could possibly cease to exist with her exit. But her purpose was hardly to escape—but to create a temporary bubble of safety for herself.
The night Ember had been born as the only daughter of Valata AshFall, High Priestess of the Azure Witches; the only one coven that dared practice the sorcery of flames, her birth had been celebrated with great cheer for all but five seconds.
That was until the Velth Reader cradled her little, newborn body at the time and made a painful declaration, "She's an Echo Witch. She possesses no Velth at all."
Velth is the soul-fuel of witches. All witches are born with it. So Ember not possessing it was a rarity that made her stick out.
The ten years that followed after that declaration saw Ember morphing deeper into the disappointment that was expected of her. Reduced to the status of a servant in her mother's own coven, she had been confident that she would at least live out the remainder of her life peacefully.
But even that hope vanished when her mother took in nine months ago. And in anticipation of the birth of her sister, Ember was forced to count down the remainder of her days as a member of the Azure Witches.
Once her sister was born, she would be cast out to the old ones—recluse ancient witches whose cruelty knew no bounds in their attempt to forge witches out of 'Echoes'.
So Ember wandered deeper in the forest, hoping perhaps to temporarily forget it all. The trees thickened, dark as bone beneath moonlight, and the earth thrummed with an ancient pulse as if to signify that something lived here.
Something that watched with otherworldly eyes. Certainly not something that Ember was scared of.
Then the sky split.
A sound like ruptured heavens cracked the noisy-quiet of the forest.
Then something fell.
No—someone.
A body crashed through the canopy like lightning given flesh, slamming into the ground with enough force to silence the entire forest. The earth shook, the trees danced, and every other living thing that dared to breathe in the dark woods took flight and escaped.
Birds, crickets, squirrels…they all suddenly ceased to exist.
Ember froze.
And from the broken trees the being had crashed into emitted dust like smoke; particles like ash almost representing dying fireflies.
And there—at the heart of the ruin—lay a being that seemed to have survived a fall no ordinary person would have survived… a vampire.
At least, he seemed like a vampire except there was an air of extraordinariness around him. This man was no ordinary vampire. He seemed to be the kind that has existed with time itself, and those kinds were regarded as gods.
He was motionless, half-buried in the earth, blood slicking his chest and pooling beneath his hand. A dagger, ancient and soaked in something that thrummed with power, was tightly gripped in his hands.
The dagger was strangely double hilted, Intricate runes drawn on it. But what stopped Ember cold wasn't the weapon or the wound.
It was him.
He looked like something shaped by the gods and then discarded for being too beautiful, too terrifying. His face was carved with impossible perfection—like moonlight given structure. His dark hair shimmered like silver, matted now with blood. Skin pale, smooth, veined faintly with blue, like lightning trapped beneath his flesh.
So even though he looked young—like a man in his late twenties at most, it was impossible to not call him old. He seemed to be heavily wounded, yet certainly alive from what Ember could feel.
But there was power in the stillness of his body. Power that coiled like a storm just beneath the surface.
Ember's breath hitched. In her ten years of existence, this was the first time she was seeing something so painfully beautiful… something so godlike like the ancient gods whose evidence of existence were sewn in the history books Ember read all her life.
Beyond the sight of him was a flickering shield that surrounded him, barely visible—a web of magic older than anything she'd ever seen. It shimmered alive with warning at anyone that would dare to come close, pulsing with delectable danger.
Whatever he was, nothing should've been able to touch him. Not even death.
Yet something had.
Ember attempted to get close to him, but as she had quite expected, the shield whipped at her, throwing her with enough force that her back slammed against a tree before she slipped down, aching all over.
The shield wrapped around him was preventing him from external danger. But it didn't take notice of the man that was heavily wounded inside it. Bleeding from unspoken grief and bone etched pain.
Maybe because the shield knew the man inside it would never die. Immortal, his pain was nothing but temporary. Knowing that as well, why did Ember still want to reach him?
Remembering her knowledge of the natural animosity between vampires and witches, she approached carefully. "I am harmless," she said slowly, "while I appear to be a witch, I am without any powers. Not a single lick of Velth in me, I am but an echo."
The shield flickered as if it listened to her speak of her powerlessness, but it hesitated on whether or not to go down as Ember hoped it would.
"I only want to help." She said, and then took one step that brought her directly before the barrier.
The shield cracked.
Just once. A fissure in the air. Then, silence.
She crept closer to the being…the god, slightly trembling. The logical part of her asked her to abandon her foolish mission, but she did no such thing, wanting to prove something to herself and the world that listened.
That she was not entirely powerless. Yes, she was an echo witch, but she could give a little bit of life to this god.
Lowering her five feet frame, she knelt beside him, who was the very picture of a fallen god. Or perhaps he was not a fallen god but a broken one. It was just something about the way he gripped that bloodied dagger of his in pale, bloodied vein fingers.
Like the weapon was a lifeline and a pain at the same time.
But do gods feel pain? Especially gods in the form of the cold blooded creature like the man that laid before her?
Ember pressed a sharp stone to her palm and dragged it across. Her skin split, and blood welled—hot, trembling, real.
She let it drip into his mouth.
At first, nothing happened.
Then—
The blue veins beneath his skin stirred.
The veins seemed to lit up faintly, and the wounds across his chest began to pulse, slow and shimmering. Color returned to his lips.
Ember recoiled back, heart hammering like she had perhaps committed a grievous sin.
He didn't move. Not fully— his eyes were still shut against the world. But he was healing. The blood was working. Her blood was working.
She was finally putting to good use her status as an Echo Witch. Should her blood have contained the powers of a true witch, it wouldn't have any ability to heal a vampire. That went to great lengths to reveal that she was just like any other ordinary human.
Plain and without any special abilities.
Before she could revel in her victory, yellow fireworks lit the almost darkening sky, illuminating both her and the god that was still laid on the ground.
The message in the fireworks was clear; her mother and High Priestess of the Azure Witches had just entered into labour, and all coven members must gather and witness the retelling of history made possible through the birth of Ember's sister.
Everyone was already sure that the newborn would be nothing short of an Arch Witch—a prestige far better than Ember's status as an Echo.
Glancing at the still god one more time, Ember wondered if she would be able to see him again. She dared not delude herself though—when it came to power there was a whole world of difference between her and him.
Should he wake he would easily snap her neck like twigs so if anything, she should hope that the fact his eyes were closed should ensure he never would remember her, the little girl who dared to approach him and feed him.
She had a good feeling this was the weakest the man had ever been, and in her experience, powerful people hated it the most when another saw through their web of vulnerability.
That thought in mind, Ember bolted away from the god and the dark forest, towards the Palace of Azure Witches to witness the joyful event that would change her life as she knew it.
Little did she know that that night would represent something far bigger than she could have ever anticipated—a change in the world of many people beyond just her. And that change had already begun with the fallen god whom she dared to feed.