Elara (Liriel) POV
"You died somewhere between page 327 and the braking of the bus."
The words echoed like an afterthought I wasn't meant to hear—not from a mouth. The meadow stretched around me like a dream I didn't remember falling into.
I blinked.
Once. Twice.
I wasn't on the bus anymore.
The last thing I remembered was the low hum of the city outside the window, the weight of my library tote across my lap, and the silence that followed a long day spent buried in borrowed worlds. There'd been a book in my hands, open to Chapter Nineteen, its spine worn, the scent of paper and ink curling in the air. Curse of the blightborn. That was the title, it was bold and strange and magnetic.
I'd been halfway through a sentence about a man who couldn't die when everything went black. Not sleep. Not exactly. Something deeper.
And now… I stood here. In a meadow bathed in wind and wildflowers. It smelt like lavender and ilies. The breeze was soft and cool, and the silence was deafening for miles. No city noise. No engine. Just this unsettling stillness.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
"You already know."
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. I turned, and then I saw it.
A figure descended from the sky, clothed in ethereal white that shimmered like mist and moonlight. Wings—huge, otherworldly things—unfurled behind them, glimmering with starlight. Their body was light and shadow both, shifting with each breath of wind.
But their eyes…
Their eyes fixed on me. Bright as the cosmos, steady and unblinking.
I stumbled back, my breath catching. "You're not real. This is a dream."
"No," the being said, stepping lightly onto the meadow. Not a single blade of grass bent under their feet. "You are between. Between what was and what could be."
"I was on a bus," I said, struggling to breathe. "I heard brakes. Screaming. Glass. And then—"
"You died," it said softly. "But not completely. Your soul still flickers. Fragile. Uncertain. You are here because your tether to life remains… though it frays."
My arms clutched around the book I hadn't even realized I still held. Curse of the blightborn. The title shimmered now, as if the letters had been inked in molten gold.
"What is this?" I asked. "Why am I holding this?"
"That," the being said, "is the last door you opened. The last story your soul touched. And now, it waits. There is a choice before you: return to your broken body with only the slimmest hope of survival… or…"
Its wings shifted, galaxies blooming behind its head like a halo.
"…begin again. Within."
My mouth was dry. "Begin again… in the book?"
"The one you never finished," they said. "You read its beginning with mortal eyes. You may live the rest with immortal flesh."
I shook my head slowly. "But I don't know how it ends. I don't know the prophecy. Or what happens to Ardyn. Or the gods. Or the Church—"
"That is the price of choice," it said, wings folding. "Uncertainty is the ink of fate."
I looked down at the book in my hands. Its pages fluttered—faster, faster—until light bled out from its spine. I felt myself unravel. Heat. Starlight. Thought scattered like dust.
I didn't remember falling.
I only remembered becoming.
***
When I woke up, I was Liriel.
I gasped, sitting up hard, lungs fighting cold, thick air. My hands were pale. Smaller. Ink-stained. Not mine.
I was in a stone chamber lit by flickering candlelight. Dust floated through the air. Scrolls lay scattered across the floor. Outside the window, a city shimmered under a twilight sky, all golden domes and towering spires.
Cindergate.
I knew it instantly. I'd traced its layout in the lines of Chapter Six. But now I could smell it. The incense. The ash. The old iron and older magic. I could feel it.
"I'm dreaming," I whispered. But even that didn't sound like me.
It was her voice.
Liriel's.
The rebellion's lost scholar. The daughter of an archivist and a traitor. The girl who believed Ardyn Veyne wasn't a curse, but a key.
And now… I was her.
Footsteps echoed down the hall.
"Liriel! The warding flames are dimming again! We need more sigils etched before nightfall or the Wretches will breach the library walls!"
I knew that voice.
Thalen.
The Exiled Commander. Once a loyal blade of the Divine Order. Now, a soldier of the shattered.
I forced myself upright. My legs trembled. I grabbed the satchel beside me and felt inside: runestones, half-burned glyph scrolls, and—
A map.
The Dreadlands. Velmaria. The Prophecy.
It was real.
All of it.
I was here. Inside the story I had only half-read. Inside a world I had never finished.
And somewhere, out there—fractured, cursed, hunted—Ardyn Veyne walked the warlands.
Unknowing that his fate was no longer just ink and paper.
It was me.