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Chapter 7: The Ashes of Velaryn
Smoke clawed at Cael's throat—thick, acrid, suffocating—mixing with the cold silence that settled like a shroud over the ruins. Beneath shattered temple stones, he lay curled in a fragile shell, trembling as the world around him crumbled into dust and shadow.
He did not cry.
Not yet.
Through a narrow crack in the cracked marble, a faint glow flickered—her necklace. Iilyra's necklace, still warm, humming softly with the last thread of her enchantment.
"Now you can't lose me, Cael," she had laughed, pressing it into his palm.
But he had lost everything.
A sudden chill whispered across the ashes, like a shadow brushing past—a reminder of the cold woman's presence somewhere nearby, unseen but watching.
Her voice still echoed in the smoky air, sharp and commanding.
> "We need all the shadows we can get. Leave no light alive."
Her soldiers moved like ghosts—silent, deadly—oblivious to the boy hidden beneath their destruction.
Time slipped away—hours, days—until it blurred beyond meaning.
He tried to hold onto the echoes of his past: his mother's soft humming in the kitchen; his father's firm hand on his shoulder, telling him, "Strength isn't how loud you roar. It's how still you stand when everything breaks."
But everything had shattered.
His clan was gone. His home reduced to ash. Iilyra… gone.
His fingers clenched the necklace tighter—the warmth from it a bitter contrast to the freezing void inside.
> "Why them?" he whispered to the silence. "Why not me?"
He sat alone in the ashes of a world that once burned bright.
They had given everything for him.
And he had done nothing.
He wasn't a warrior—not yet.
But he would be.
No loud vow escaped his lips. His promise was quieter—an ember burning in the shadows of his heart:
> "You took my light.
So I'll become the dark that hunts you."
Rising slowly from the ashes, a new shadow stirred—not born of death, but something fiercer: survival.
The last of Velaryn was no longer just a boy.
He was a darkness they had failed to snuff out.
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