Chapter 10
LYRA
The world disappeared. Not all at once. The shelves went first, then the stone beneath my feet, then the ache in my burned shoulder.
For one impossible second there was nothing except the warmth beneath my palm and the sensation of falling without actually moving.
I tried to pull my hand away, but my fingers wouldn’t listen.
Silver-blue light ran beneath the leather cover, branching around my palm in thin lines before slipping between my fingers and climbing my wrist.
Then everything came back.
I stumbled hard enough to strike the shelf behind me. Several books shifted overhead, dust spilling from their edges. My hand tore away from the Codex and I pressed it against my chest, breathing too fast.
The book sat exactly where it had been.
Then a pulse stirred beneath the surface. The glow trembled, not brighter but deeper, like it had woken from a long sleep. And then, without sound, the first words pressed into my mind.
You are late, Starborn.
I staggered back a step, my shoulder brushing a high shelf behind me.
“What—” The word rasped out, barely more than a breath. “Who are you?”
Silence.
The glow dimmed, then flickered again.
Not who. What.
That didn’t help.
The voice wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even a voice, really just a presence laced through the thoughts themselves, old and deliberate. Female, maybe. But not in any way I could define. Not in any way that felt human.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, too harshly. My voice cracked.
The book didn’t respond. The only sound was the soft, steady drip of rainwater from my sleeves, hitting the stone floor.
I took a breath, trying to steady the chaos still spinning inside me.
I didn’t want to be here.
Not just here, in this room. I didn’t want to be in the Sanctum. I didn’t want to be across the Veil. I didn’t want any of this. Not the staring. Not the runes. Not the weight of expectations pressing down from all sides.
I just wanted to go home.
But Edenlo wasn’t home anymore, was it?
It was ash. Blood and ruin. A town where children had played around a cracked fountain, where Maia’s laughter had carried across the market stalls, where Irelia had twirled her sun charm on her wrist and told me not to hide who I was.
Gone.
All of it.
Tears pricked at the corner of my eyes, hot and angry. I blinked them away, pressing my palm flat to the pedestal beside the book, grounding myself in the stone.
“If you’ve been waiting for someone else,” I whispered, “you’ve made a mistake. I don’t even want to be a wielder. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of this.”
Still, no answer.
I’d imagined the words. The whole thing—this building, this pedestal, this pulsing ancient book—was another fever dream. Grief and humiliation playing tricks on a mind too tired to keep itself stitched together.
But just as I started to turn away, it spoke again.
You were not chosen for what you wanted. You were chosen for what you are.
I froze.
My throat dried. My hands curled tighter into the stone edge of the pedestal.
“What am I, then?” My voice sounded too small in the stillness. “Because I don’t feel like anything. I feel broken.”
A long pause.
Then begin there.
I didn’t know what that meant.
I didn’t know what any of this meant.
But I knew the truth of what I’d said.
Broken.
That’s how it felt to sit in that dorm room surrounded by people who didn’t know me, to be told I belonged somewhere I didn’t believe in, to remember Maia’s hand slipping from mine in the smoke. To watch fire hit my skin today and feel nothing rise to meet it.
Just pain. Just shame. Just silence.
And yet… my light had flickered again.
I reached for the hem of my shirt, pressing my palm to my ribcage. My skin was cool now, the light gone, but the memory of it hadn’t faded.
“I haven’t been able to call it since Edenlo,” I said, voice low. “Since that day. It’s like it died with them.”
Another pause.
Then the presence spoke again.
Magic does not die. It waits.
I let that settle, but I didn’t know if I believed it.
After everything, I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore.
I looked back down at the book.
“I don’t even know what you are,” I whispered.
Names are only a comfort to the uncertain. I have been called a thousand things in a thousand tongues.
The glow under the surface dimmed again, pulsing slowly. Almost like breath.
But if it will steady you… this world calls me the Lumina Codex.
The name belonged in a myth. Not to a book sitting in front of me. Not to anything real. And yet… it had spoken. To me.
“Why me?” I asked again, the words quieter this time. “Why now?”
The glow beneath the surface of the book pulsed once.
Because your magic stirred. Because you are the echo.
“The echo of what?”
A pause stretched long enough that I thought the Codex had gone silent again.
Your blood is of two. But your face… is hers.
My spine went rigid.
“What do you mean?” I asked, heart suddenly too loud in my chest.
Your father gave you power. But your mother gave you form.
I shook my head. “I don’t—I don’t know who they were. I don’t even know if they’re still alive. Maia—she found me. I was just there one night at the edge of the clearing, wrapped in a plain cloth. That’s all I’ve ever known.”
The Codex pulsed again.
She walked these halls. Your mother.
I felt like the floor shifted beneath me.
“You’re lying.”
Truth does not flinch beneath fear.
I backed up a step, my breath unsteady. “If you know who she was—if she came here—why wouldn’t anyone have said anything?”
Because some truths are stitched into silence. Buried in choices made to protect you. But the mirror does not lie, Lyra. You carry her in your cheekbones. Your mouth. The stubborn light behind your eyes.
My chest felt tight, too full. I didn’t know if it was anger or grief. Then came the possibility I was afraid to name. Hope.
I wanted to scream that it couldn’t be true. That I wasn’t anyone. That I didn’t belong here, didn’t want to be here.
But the truth was… I had always wondered.
Who she was. Why she left.
Why someone would give up a child—me—and never come back.
“She left me,” I whispered, the words sticking in my throat. “She left me to die.”
Or she left you to live. There is a difference. And you may yet come to understand it.
I bit the inside of my cheek hard, grounding myself in that sharp, metallic taste. “I don’t know if I want to.”
Another silence. But it wasn’t empty. It was watching again.
Always watching. I stepped back from the pedestal, rubbing at the sleeve where Lidia’s fire had singed it earlier.
I still smelled like ash. My gaze dropped to the book’s faint glow again.
“When you first spoke,” I said slowly, “you called me something.”
The pulse beneath the Codex’s surface stilled for a breath.
Starborn.
My stomach twisted.
It hadn’t just been a strange title. The Codex had spoken the word with recognition. Like it knew me. I forced the words out. “Why?”
That name is not mine to explain.
Only yours to uncover.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Any of this. I didn’t even want to come here.”
I looked away from the Codex, from its slow, eerie glow, and stared at the cracked stone wall beside it. “I was happy. I had a life. I had a mother.” My voice broke on the word. “I had a sister.”
A sister, you still do.
“No, I don’t. They died because of me,” I whispered. The Codex didn’t correct me. Didn’t lie. But its presence shifted.
Not because of you. Because of what seeks you.
I blinked hard, but the tears still came. I didn’t want them. Didn’t want this. But they slipped down anyway. Then pale light shimmered through the fabric. Beneath my shirt, just below my ribs, my rune pulsed once, then faded. Not a flare. Not like before. Barely more than a pulse.
An Answer that it is still there.
“If Maia knew that I did not belong across the Veil, then why did she wait until her death to tell me?”
Because love often chooses silence over truth.
I stared at the book. “And you know the truth?”
Another pause.
I know what could come of it. That is not the same.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
Begin.
The same word. Like a thread it kept weaving through me, catching where I frayed.
“Begin what?” I asked. “Training? Magic? Everything I don’t believe in?”
Whatever is left of you. Begin there.
The Codex didn’t speak again.
I waited for an explanation, for the Codex to make any of this clearer, but its presence drew back, the glow fading until it was no more than a dim pulse beneath the cover. I stood there for a long moment, cold and hollow.
No one would believe me if I told them. I didn’t even believe it.
Not fully. But the Archives no longer felt quite the same.
I turned away from the pedestal and slipped back through the rows of shelves, heart drumming quieter now, slower.
The air felt different—still ancient, still watching—but not hostile. Just… waiting.
Like the Codex had said.
Magic doesn’t die. It waits.
I paused at the door before pushing it open, glancing once over my shoulder.
The glow had vanished. No trace of it remained. Only the whisper of a name I didn’t understand. A name that wrapped around me like a second skin.
Starborn.