He Who Holds My Soul (The Fire and Silence Trilogy #1)

Prologue

She dreams of ash.

It curls in the air like falling snow, silent and slow, blanketing the shattered world in soot and distant memories. The ground beneath her is cracked and scorched, glowing faintly with dying embers that pulse like a fading heartbeat. It hums beneath her, ancient and angry.

Screams sound in the distance—or maybe they’re echoes of screams long since silenced. Here, sound doesn’t die. Here, everything remembers.

Something that once resembled a crown lies discarded at the base of a blackened throne. Half-melted. Twisted. Warped by fire or fury—it’s impossible to say.

Who did it belong to?

She reaches out with trembling hands that are blistered.

Smoke unfurls from her skin like she’s burning from the inside out.

But she doesn’t feel pain, not here, not in these dreams. Only the weight.

Gods, the weight. It’s the type that suffocates, like the silence before a guttural scream that could crack the sky itself.

She tries to turn, to move, to run. But she can’t. Something holds her still, like fate itself is holding her completely frozen, pressing down on her shoulders.

“You were warned.”

The voice is everywhere and nowhere. Male and female. Divine and monstrous.

The ash begins to swirl faster now, like a storm, a reckoning. It stings her eyes, her throat, filling her mouth with a taste of dust and betrayal.

A shadow rises in the distance. It has no face; it never does. Just a silhouette of absence, a walking void.

“She will return.”

She wakes with a gasp, sweat-slicked and shaking. Her hands tremble as she touches her chest.

She can still taste the ash on her tongue.