64. Wren
Itake to the air in a rush of feathers and heat, the wind catching me hard and fast as I climb higher, faster.
Away from the castle. Away from the war. Away from everything that feels like it’s closing in—
Towards the only place left that might have answers.
The Duskfen stretches beneath me, dark and endless, its waters reflecting the distant glow of firelight like scattered stars. I don’t slow. I don’t rest.
Branches whip past, mist curls around me. My wings burn, but I push harder.
Please.
Please.
The Star Gate rises from the heart of the forest, its ancient, weathered stones humming faintly with something older than magic. I land hard in the center of it, shifting back too quickly, stumbling as my legs take my weight.
“Help me,” I breathe.
Nothing. The stones remain dark and silent.
This was always a long shot, of course, but it was better than doing nothing, better than trusting the voices in my head—
I laugh once, sharp and bitter.
“Right,” I mutter. “Of course you won’t.”
The fates don’t answer prayers. They don’t respond to desperation.
And I am out of time.
My hands curl into fists.
“You made me!” I shout, my voice cracking through the stillness. “You need to tell me what to do!”
The sun has long since set now, but the stars do not move to answer me.
Something hot and furious rises in my chest.
“Fine,” I snap. “Fine! Be useless!”
The anger spills over, and my fire answers. It surges up from beneath my skin, wild and unrestrained, roaring to life in a column of white-hot flame that tears upward into the sky. It’s not controlled, not careful.
It’s rage.
It burns brighter than it ever has before, hotter, higher, reaching like a hand towards the heavens. The flames stretch impossibly far, licking at the sky itself.
And something answers.
The stones of the Star Gate flare to life, one by one, light racing through ancient carvings, sigils igniting in patterns I don’t recognize but somehow understand, like a language spoken to me in childhood that I’ve only just begun to remember.
I stagger back, breath catching. The air hums, the sky moves and swells and splits open in a burst of light.
“We did not make you, one-called-Serawen.”
The voice is not sound. It’s inside me, and everywhere at once.
I freeze.
Light gathers above the circle, condensing into shapes—twelve of them, forming slowly from nebulous clouds of starlight, vast and featureless.
They’re almost human, except for the wings.
Great, sweeping wings of constellations and void, stretching out behind them like fragments of the night sky itself.
“You made yourself.”
My breath stutters.
“I—what—”
The world shifts, falling back through time. I see my mother again in the woods, the day she met my father. Only I don’t see him this time. My focus is narrowed on her, and the bird in her cage.
On the feather it leaves behind when she frees it.
Blue. White. Violet.
Like the night sky.
My gaze stays on the feather as the scene twists. It relocates to a box on a desk in my mother’s room.
It vanishes the night I was conceived… and the thirteenth fate? The ‘wandering star’ that Cassiel spoke of, the one that hasn’t been seen in twenty years?
That vanishes the night I was born.
Another vision overlays this memory—the prophecy being translated by the elders, rewritten, argued over. No one can decide what the bird means. When I’d first heard it, I assumed it was me—my name—but now…
The sky fractures again. Great creatures streak across the void, wings blazing—not red or gold, but deep blue and white and violet, their flames cold and brilliant, like stars given form.
“They called us firebirds, once,” comes the voice again, “when they could not even paint our forms, nor conceive our magnificence. They hunted us for our power, so we took it away from them.”
Visions show the people of old trapping one of the beautiful creatures in a golden net, breaking it down, ripping off its feathers, cutting out its heart. It bleeds gold.
“But we were not firebirds…” The voice sounds again. “We are starbirds.”
The word settles into me. I know this word. Why do I know it?
“And you, Serawen,” the twelve say as one, their voices folding over each other, vast and unyielding, “Are one of us. The maker of fate and the destroyer of it.”
I stagger, something in my chest opening, breaking apart and reforming all at once. All retaliation dies on my tongue.
A star vanished from the skies the day I was born.
No, I realise. It didn’t vanish. It reformed.
Their words are true. I’m half fey, half human, and entirely something else. That bird my mother rescued, perhaps swayed by her act of kindness towards it, saw fit to bless her with a child infused with its own magic… its own soul.
My fire… it isn’t just destruction. It never was. It’s life. Creation. Change. I can be both, neither. I can be anything I want to be. Anything at all.
My heart pounds. Cassiel’s voice echoes in my memory.
It would take a miracle.
Something inside me settles.
If a miracle is what it will take to end this war, then a miracle is what I will give them.
The flames around me steady, no longer wild or uncontrolled.
I lift my head, meeting the gaze of the star-formed beings above me. I have my answer.
I know what I am.
And what I have to do.