It was dark in here.
Cold.
Not the kind of cold that bit or burned, but the kind that settled in quietly — like a secret told too often, worn smooth by repetition, then quietly forgotten.
It filled the cracks between Selena’s bones, lined her throat, pressed into her spine until she forgot what warmth even felt like. It didn’t scream. It didn’t sing. It just... waited. And so did she.
The room had no na, no mory, and no rcy. It had been her entire world for as long as she had been alive, at least in this life — a world shaped from four stone walls, a ceiling veined with slow, dripping moisture, and a floor too cold to sleep on.
There was no window, no door she had ever seen open, and no light except the pale glow that sotis shimred faintly from the ceiling cracks like an afterthought.
There was a cot, barely softer than the stone itself, and the sound of water: irregular, arrhythmic, and maddening. She had nad it once, the drip. Pretended it was soone walking toward her. It never arrived.
The water was also cold. Not the biting cold of wind or ice, but sothing still and heavy.
She tried to hold the water in her hand and pour it over her head. It settled into her bones and hair like dust in an abandoned house.
The stone walls did not freeze her to death, but they never gave her warmth either. Like everything else in her life, they endured her in silence. It was a silence so complete it rang, so total it took shape. She spoke sotis, just to hear sothing.
She was a child here, but she had not always been one. In the life before this one, Selena had worn armor before she had worn silk. She had belonged to the House of Thorne, a noble family steeped in old magic and rigid hierarchy.
There, children were not raised — they were molded. Legacies were not born; they were chiseled through blood, fear, and obedience. She had learned to read from military reports, to pray from war hymns, and to speak only when spoken to. Her tutors taught her to smile in court but not in private. Emotion was vulnerability, and vulnerability was dangerous.
She had been taught to bow before elders but never to rest her head in anyone’s lap. Taught to wield power but not to ask for help. Taught to bleed quietly, to succeed silently. Their love had been distant, ceremonial. It never reached her.
By ten, she had morized enemy dialects and assassination histories. By eleven, she was trained to withstand pain. At thirteen, she was handed her first blade and told to stop crying.
And so she obeyed. She always obeyed. Obedience was safety. It was purpose. It was the one thing that made sense in a world where nothing else did.
And then, without warning, her world had begun to unravel.
Her uncle was the first to die—collapsed in his study without a mark. Her cousin followed, found disemboweled in the barracks. Her mother—cold and ruthless as she was—bled out among her garden roses, the red of the petals indistinguishable from her own. Rumors spread like an infection: betrayal, politics, treachery. But there had been no plot. Only a man, he killed her family... and herself.
She had seen him just once. After her final campaign, wounded and captured, her soldiers dead or scattered. The snow had still been falling when they dragged her into the command tent.
And there he stood, quiet and forgettable in appearance, yet unmistakable in presence. He wasn’t handso, nor imposing. But his silence carried weight. It was familiar. She had felt it before — at every funeral, in every emptied chair, in the cold left behind after each death. He was the shadow cast over the family’s final breath.
"You took everything," she had said to him. Her voice had been thin, barely a thread.
He looked at her, his expression unchanged. "You didn’t want it."
And she went silent, he was right, she never wanted anything she lived for.
She had hated her family. Hated their rules, their sharp smiles, the emptiness masquerading as legacy. But she had been them, too. And without them, she was nothing but ash.
She had closed her eyes, expecting death.
Instead, there was only darkness. Her death was quick and painless, as if a show of rcy from soone who understood her.
When she awoke, she was small again. A child. The stone room was all she knew. Her voice was gone, her na aningless. She had no idea who had placed her here, or why. Ti passed without shape.
There was no food, yet she never starved. No water, yet her lips never cracked. Sothing in the air sustained her, though it did nothing for the weight inside her chest. She counted days through assumption. She asured ti by mory.
She did not age in the usual way. Her limbs grew quickly, her mind even more quickly. The silence beca a constant companion, the rhythm of dripping water a clock that refused to move.
She would pace the room with her bare feet, she would stay under the dripping water and walk on the wet stone, just to feel sothing.
The walls never changed. The stone never yielded. But it was all she had. And over ti, she got used to this life. However, even with such a long isolation, her mind was intact.
She never scread. Never wept. Her mind, oddly, remained intact. She thought often, quietly, and constantly. mories from her first life flickered across her consciousness, fading at the edges but refusing to vanish.
The assassin lingered most of all — not out of hatred, not anymore. She had co to admire him, in a strange, shaful way. He had destroyed her, yes. But he had also freed her. He had broken sothing that was already cracking beneath its surface.
She wondered if he had known what would happen to her — if her rebirth had been part of so larger design, or rely an accident of magic and death.
Sotis she imagined he had spared her on purpose, placing her in this prison to break her differently than her family ever had. Other tis, she imagined that he had looked at her and seen a child already broken, and simply walked away. Both versions made sense. Both haunted her.
Still, there was one mory more distant than all the rest. It ca not from her life, or even from her death, but from sowhere between.
A woman. She could rember no na, no face—only the color blue and a smile that ward her in a way nothing else had. It was the only softness her mind allowed. Everything else was sharp. Everything else cut. But not this.
That mory was different. It wasn’t tied to duty or legacy. It felt safe. Real. Not like sothing she had been trained to see or feel, but sothing innate and untouched.
She did not rember what the woman said, or why she was there, but the mory lingered like warmth in her chest, sothing clean and unreachable. Sotis she imagined that woman had kissed her forehead.
She might have held her close. Or whispered her na — not with demand or disappointnt, but with tenderness. As if Selena ant sothing, not because of who she was or what she could do, but because she simply existed.
She thought about that smile often. She thought about what it would feel like to have arms wrap around her, not to teach her posture or train her stance, but just to hold her. Just to an it.
It was a child’s wish, a fragile, foolish thing — but she held onto it with everything she had. So days, it was all that stood between her and the madness crouching just behind her eyes.
And when the weight of her thoughts beca too heavy, she would move to the wall and press her hand against it, small fingers spread wide. Pretending. Pretending the stone could feel her, might soday press back. Pretending that she was not alone. Sotis, she whispered stories to the wall. Silly ones. About sunlight. About rivers. About voices that called her by na.
She didn’t long for escape. Or light. Or even for food. She longed for a voice. A warm one. One who would say her na without judgnt, without expectation. One who would not want sothing from her. One that might see her not as a legacy or a weapon or a survivor, but simply as a girl.
"Selena," she whispered to the dark, pretending.
"You did well today."
The stone said nothing.
But she whispered it again.
And again.
Because one day, soone might.
And maybe, just maybe, she would believe it.
And if she ever left this place, if she ever walked beneath a sky again or felt warmth that ca from sothing other than mory, she would find the one who spoke with kindness. She would find that smile in blue. She didn’t know how, or when, or even if it was real.
But she had nothing else.
Only ti.
Only mory.
Only hope.
And for now, in this place of stone and silence, hope was everything.
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