In the ancient hollow temple of Bael'mor, carved into the bones of a forsaken mountain, the Orrian Order assembled beneath a ceiling that wept black wax and whispered names older than memory itself. Time didn't move here—it slithered.
The air was thick with incense: sweet, rotting, narcotic. A scent like honey fermenting in ash. Flickering candles floated in suspended glass orbs, their flames dancing like spirits, casting shadows that pulsed and trembled as if alive.
They knelt in concentric rings—politicians, billionaires, exiled scientists, dethroned royals—draped in robes of void-black silk embroidered with sigils stitched in blood-thread. Their faces were slack, their eyes milky with reverence. Each of them had surrendered something—lovers, firstborns—to the order. And in return, Daeva had promised them power and immortality.
She stood at the obsidian altar like a deity born of ash and ambition. She was clocked in a living shadow that hissed and curled around her skin like a lover. Her voice, when it rang out, sounded nothing like a human's. It was ancient, something that should not be.
"Tonight, we strip back the lie of human dominion," she intoned. "Tonight, we reveal the truth buried beneath myth."
Behind her, a Half-blood boy knelt, trembling. His skin was luminous with silver runes that shimmered and burned. He couldn't have been older than sixteen. His mouth moved in silent prayers—none of them to gods that would answer.
Daeva walked around him slowly, her bare feet silent against the cold obsidian floor. The silence made her words louder.
"Long before your gods were named, before humanity carved cities from dirt, the Voherin came down to earth."
A beat of silence. The flames danced higher.
"They were not angels nor demons. They were celestial beings. And like all things with power, they grew curious and hungry.
She paced the altar slowly, her bare feet whispering across the stone.
"They descended not to conquer the world, but to experience. To taste the human world. To feel. And so they did what mortals do. They loved, they mated and they left behind offspring born of both bloodlines."
She spread her arms as if presenting invisible figures.
"Those children were called the Halves—bridges between two worlds. They inherited gifts their mortal kin feared.
"Some were Empaths. They were able to taste the emotions of others like wine, then twist them into madness or bliss."
"Some were Mirrors—shapeshifters who could become anything they saw, even memory itself."
"Others were Soundweavers who had the power to bend perception with a whisper, unravel loyalty with a lullaby."
"A few were Time-Readers, born with the echo of past and future bleeding behind their eyes."
The room stirred. One cultist began to cry softly. Daeva stopped in front of the trembling boy.
"The humans called it an abomination. They couldn't understand it, so they did what humans always do when afraid—they destroyed it. Hunted their own gifted children, burned the bloodlines, and rewrote history."
She knelt beside the boy, gently tucking a curl of hair behind his ear.
"But the Halves are not for hunting. They are rare, powerful and ours to harvest."
The crowd moaned in rapture.
Daeva placed her palm on the boy's temple. A convulsion rocked him and then a shockwave of silver light poured from his skin. A high-pitched wail echoed as power leaving him in writhing streams. His gift, the Mirror trait, shivered through the room like broken reflections.
She inhaled it. The boy crumpled, empty. Then she turned to her soldier—Maen, a human volunteer.
"Accept the gift of illusion!."
She touched his chest and the energy flooded into him. Maen's form shifted—his limbs warping, face twisting into the exact replica of the boy.
The cult gasped, reverent. Some wept.
One woman dropped to her knees and whispered, "Oh mother! I beg for the gift of Immortality!"
Daeva raised her arms. Her voice filled with rapture and wrath.
"You humans no longer need to be born special," she roared. "You can become them. You can steal what was once divine. We are the inheritors. The reclaimers. The new gods."
"All Hail the Void-Born Mother!" they chanted in unison, like puppets.
Their eyes glowed with something not quite human. Something lost.
The candles flickered out, one by one, and the room grew cold.
****
In a chamber hidden below an elite wellness spa—a space scented with eucalyptus and silence—the world's oldest extermination order convened.
The Vyreum Circle.
The marble walls bore no sigils. The lighting was soft, deceptively modern. But this was no sanctuary. This was a sanctum.
At the room's center sat a black stone table shaped like an ouroboros—an ancient serpent consuming its own tail. A symbol of purification through destruction. Of endless cycles.
The members seated around it wore no robes, no masks. They donned bespoke suits, silk ties, and Cartier watches. Their faces were the ones seen shaking hands at summits, officiating Mass, signing laws into being.
Doctors. Bishops. Ambassadors. Professors. Financiers.
But their voices were not of science or policy. They spoke in Latin-accented code, whispering of spiritual genetics and bloodlines born of blasphemy.
"The Halves are a cancer," said the Elder, his voice sanded thin by age and righteousness. "The Voherin were celestial contaminants, infecting our bloodlines under the guise of desire. Their children… are the afterbirth of trespass."
"They carry within them echoes of power that was never ours to bear," murmured a bishop, fingers pressed together like prayer. "Echoes that tempt fate and gave rise to Hybrid sin."
Another voice—measured, clipped—cut through. "They disrupt the blueprint. The divine architecture of humankind. They destabilize the order."
The room hummed with quiet conviction.
Then a screen slid from the table's center. A holographic dossier bloomed into view: a woman, Halve-born, now living under false papers in Lisbon.
Her existence was her only crime.
"The blood must be cleansed before the Clear Spark rises," the Elder declared. "If the prophecy is true, she will awaken them all. And if that awakening comes, the human genome will be irreversibly compromised."
A vote was called to decide her fate. All hands raised. Unanimous.
Orders were issued without emotion and an agent moved before midnight.
She was found waiting for a train—alone, listening to music. She never saw the blade. Her body collapsed into shadow. Her body would not be found and there would not be any missing person report.
Back in the chamber, the Elder gave a final nod. "One spark closer to darkness extinguished."
From the edge of the room, a figure stood unmoving. He wore no signet, no rank pin—yet every member deferred to him with their eyes.
Atlas.
He did not speak. He never did. But he was known to be a relic of ancient warfare. He stepped forward and placed a black coin on the table. On it was a symbol: a broken crown, pierced by a dagger of light.
It was a solemn declaration.
The Halves must fall. The Clear Spark must not rise.
****
The dream came in layers—first, shadow. Then light. Then voices. Not eerie, not frightening. Ancestral. Heavy with warmth and warning. They spoke in a tongue she didn't recognize but understood in her bones.
Nyah stood barefoot in a silvery mist that curled like smoke around her ankles. All around her, veils of light towered like cathedral spires. The air shimmered as though she were underwater, and yet it hummed—alive with memory.
A figure emerged through one of the veils. A woman who looked strange yet felt intimately familiar. Her skin shimmered like obsidian under starlight, her eyes swirling with galaxies. She radiated the kind of majesty Nyah had only seen in paintings of saints and spirits—terrifying and beautiful.
"The hour is almost upon us, Nyah Morel," the woman said, her voice soft as wind through temple stones. "And you are not ready."
Nyah stirred beneath her silk sheets, her limbs thrashing in the grip of something unseen. A bloom of heat ignited low in her spine, expanding outward like molten glass. Her breath hitched. Her body arched as if pulled by invisible strings.
She awoke with a strangled gasp.
Sweat clung to her skin. The room was dark, but her senses blazed. Every sound was louder. Every scent sharper. Her heart galloped, not with fear—but with knowing.
Then it came. A sting. A glow.
She gasped as sudden heat lanced through her sternum—right between her breasts—radiating outward like a living brand. Her skin felt aflame, but the fire wasn't only on the surface. It pierced through her, as though something ancient had been carved not just into her flesh, but into her soul.
She clutched her chest, stumbling toward the mirror, her breath ragged.
There it was.
A glowing glyph—etched in fine, golden script—flickering just beneath the skin between her breasts. It pulsed with an eerie rhythm, like a second heartbeat. The light bled deeper, as if it threaded through bone and muscle, all the way to her back.
She twisted slightly, and for a moment—she swore she could see the same mark mirrored faintly between her shoulder blades, like a brand seared from the inside out.
And then—just as suddenly as it came—it vanished. Leaving only warmth. And a silence that felt... watched.
"What the hell…?" she whispered.
Then—
The whispers came again but this time, they weren't inside her head. They curled through the air. From the corners of the penthouse. From the cracks in reality.
Her eyes flicked up to the mirror—and her reflection blinked. What she saw next was not her reflection.
It was her sister Liora's but the reflection stayed only for a second.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. She leaned closer. Her reflection shimmered, fractured like glass rippling underwater.
Then another face appeared. Her mother's.
Not as Nyah had remembered her. Not the tired woman wilted by grief and disease. But radiant. Celestial. Wearing robes woven from starlight, eyes like twin moons. She looked... otherworldly.
And behind her—
Liora again.
"Wake up, Nyah," the reflection mouthed.
Then the mirror cleared.
Nyah dropped to her knees, clutching the counter. Her skin buzzed. Her pulse drummed like war beneath her flesh.
She was becoming someone else. And something—someone—was watching.
****
Nyah stared at the spot where the glyph had been, her breath shallow. Her heart slammed against her ribs like it wanted out—like it had seen something she hadn't.
What the hell is happening to me?
The faint scent of something ancient clung to her skin—burnt amber and ozone, like the air just before a storm. Her fingertips trembled as they grazed the now-normal skin between her breasts, still warm to the touch.
This isn't normal. But then again, she had never been normal.
As she sank to the cool marble floor of her penthouse bathroom, knees tucked against her chest, her mind reeled backward—a reluctant dive into memory.
High school.
It had never been a kind place. For her, it was a battlefield—less about popularity and more about survival. A warzone of whispered rumors and watchful eyes.
She was that girl. The one with quiet eyes too old for her age. The one who could finish your sentence before it left your lips.
Once, during a history presentation, her voice had slipped into a language she didn't know. Low and lilting. Her classmates stared in horror. She'd blinked—and couldn't even recall what she'd said. The teacher made sure to never ask her to speak again.
Another time, she'd warned Chelsea Burrows not to take the highway home—her voice firm, eyes hollow. Later that night, there'd been a fatal crash and Chelsea's family had accused Nyah of being involved.
Then there was the morning she told a substitute chemistry teacher not to take the elevator. "Use the stairs today," she'd murmured, eyes distant. An hour later, the elevator plummeted and two teachers were hospitalized. They all stopped looking at her like a student after that.
Another time, during prom preparations, a cheerleader taunted her. Nyah had simply brushed past her—and the girl burst into hysterical sobs for hours, unable to stop. It made Nyah feel both terrified and powerful.
Doctors said the cheerleader was going through emotional trauma as a result of stress. It was nothing unusual. But everyone at school knew it started the moment Nyah touched her.
Since then, Nyah had learned to keep her thoughts and visions to herself and instead smiled beautifully. She had even learned to flirt with the boys to blend in. But the whispers had always been there. Always humming beneath her skin.
They had always been there.
And now—something ancient had branded itself on her body. As if claiming her. As if calling her home.
She pressed her forehead to the tile, breath coming in ragged gulps.
Who am I really?
And from the mirror above, her reflection watched her—not with sympathy. But with silent expectation.