Chapter 1 (Pages 1-3) – The Celestial Thread | Ashfall

Elarion, Year 312 After the Sundering

— Northridge Province, near the ruined spire of Elumir

The smoke of the ruined spire still lingered in the air—weeks old, but stubborn, like it had nowhere else to go.

Kieran crouched low in the brush, his fingers tracing the carved hilt of the blade that wasn’t his. It had belonged to his mother. A woman with fire in her voice and starlight in her veins. A woman who vanished five winters ago, along with every other mage west of the Brightmere.

He squinted toward the tower, now nothing more than bones and shadow.

Behind him, a quiet rustle.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” whispered Myla, stepping out from the thicket like a ghost. Her cloak was dusted with snow. Her hair—a wild curtain of obsidian curls—whipped in the wind. “Again.”

“I’m not inside yet.”

“Not yet. But you’re thinking about it.” She kicked a pebble. “Just like last time. And the time before that.”

Kieran offered a grin. “Maybe the third time’s the charm.”

She didn’t smile back.

In the distance, the ruined tower moaned—a haunting sound that made the hairs on his arms rise. Something was waking. Or watching.

Maybe both.

“Let’s go,” Myla muttered. “Before whatever’s in there remembers how to scream.”

He hesitated—just long enough to see it. A flicker. Not in the tower, but in the sky.

A pulse. Like a vein. Like a thread.

And then it was gone.

---

The wind shifted.

Kieran blinked up at the sky, but the thread of light—if it had ever truly been there—was gone. Just cloud now. Bruised gray, pressing low, pregnant with snow and something heavier.

Myla was already walking. “Don’t stare at it,” she muttered.

“At what?”

“The sky. It’ll stare back.”

He followed, steps crunching behind hers, eyes still dragging toward the spire. The ruins loomed taller with every step, black stone jagged like broken teeth. Ivy still clung to the walls, dead and frost-bitten.

“You really believe the old stories?” he asked, as they climbed the rise.

She didn’t look back. “Which ones?”

“That the mages could hear the stars. That the Celestials used to walk through fire and not be burned.”

Myla hesitated. “I believe something burned them.”

They reached the edge of the ruin. The tower’s base had crumbled inward, exposing the heart of the keep. A rusted staircase curled downward into shadow.

Kieran knelt. He touched a stone, rubbing his fingers across a faint groove.

Letters. Not written—carved. Old runes. Familiar.

His heart skipped.

“I’ve seen these before,” he whispered. “On my mother’s staff.”

“You said she never let you near it.”

“She didn’t,” he said, standing slowly. “But once—when I was little—I saw it leaning against the window. The stars were shining through it. And I saw the symbols light up.”

He stepped closer to the ruins, almost reverently.

Myla’s hand closed around his arm. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“Then why did you follow me?”

She didn’t answer right away.

Finally, softly: “Because I saw it too.”

Kieran turned.

Her eyes were wide, fixed on the crumbling wall—no, on the shadows within.

A shape moved. No sound. No breath. But the air changed.

The ash in the wind suddenly swirled upward, dancing around them like a thousand gray fireflies.

And in the dead quiet, something began to hum.

Not a song. Not language.

Resonance.

Low. Ancient. Like the memory of a song from another life.

Kieran clutched his mother’s blade, heart thundering.

Then—faint and distant—he heard it.

A voice.

One word.

“Awaken.”

---

Ravaryn Hold — Eastern Highlands

Five days before the spire stirred.

The crown didn’t fit.

That was the first thing Elira noticed as she stared at her reflection in the obsidian mirror. The second was the absence in her eyes—like someone had forgotten to relight the fire inside her skull.

“Breathe, my Lady,” whispered Corrien, her handmaiden. “You look every bit the queen you are becoming.”

Elira didn’t reply.

The coronation robe hung from her shoulders like a shroud. Gold leaf trim, embroidered sigils, the stitched light of a thousand past rulers. She hadn’t asked for any of it. Not the dress. Not the title. And certainly not the fate that came with it.

“I’m not her,” Elira muttered.

Corrien stilled. “Not who?”

“My mother.”

A silence stretched thin between them.

“No,” Corrien said at last. “You’re not. She ruled with fire. You… are something older.”

Older. What a strange word for someone barely seventeen.

Beyond the palace, horns blew from the mountain gates—echoing up the frost cliffs and into the chapel towers. The people waited. The throne was empty. The old king was gone, bones now ash in the Crypt of Songs.

Elira stepped away from the mirror. From the girl in the glass who didn’t know how to kneel, didn’t know how to lead, and certainly didn’t know how to protect a crumbling realm.

But outside, they’d chant her name anyway.

Elira.

Daughter of flame. Granddaughter of star-born blood.

She descended the spiral steps toward the sanctuary hall, each footfall echoing like thunder in a tomb. And as she walked, she whispered a single prayer. Not to gods she didn’t know, or powers she didn’t trust.

But to the one she’d dreamed of once.

A figure in the snow. Cloaked in starlight.

He did not speak. But he saw her.

And in the dream, he wept.