Chapter 17 — Trials of the First Light
1632 Words
The moment Eirena stepped beneath the shattered archway of the Sanctum, the air changed.
It thickened, became luminous, heavy, and alive, as if the walls themselves inhaled her presence. A ripple passed through the crystalline corridors ahead, spreading like a shiver through the entire celestial structure.
Kael stiffened behind her, one hand tightening around the hilt of his sword. “Something’s coming.”
“No,” Eirena whispered, her voice carried by a strange inner echo.
Something is waking.
The Sanctum answered her thought.
Light spiraled down from the ceiling, threads of silver and violet weaving into a pattern she felt in her bones but did not understand. The air hummed with a resonance that made her pulse vibrate.
Kael stepped beside her, eyes narrowing as the chamber brightened. “Eirena… your eyes.”
She turned toward him and stopped.
The reflection shining in his widened gaze was not her usual starlit blue.
Her pupils blazed white-hot, no iris visible, as if she were staring through reality itself.
“Kael… I can feel it.” Her hand rose, unsteady. “Something’s pulling at me. Calling to something inside me.”
Kael reached for her arm. “Then don’t answer it alone.”
But before his fingers could touch her, the Sanctum moved.
A quake rumbled through the floors, not violent but deliberate, shifting the crystalline pathways until they reformed into a spiraling ascent of floating platforms.
A staircase built from starlight.
At its summit flickered a door if it could be called that. It was an outline of radiant energy, shifting forms like a heartbeat made of galaxies.
A voice—not sound, not thought, but resonance crescendoed through her mind:
“ASCEND, EMBER OF THE FIRST.”
The words knocked her breath from her lungs. Kael’s hand clamped around her, steadying but shaking.
Eirena looked at him, throat tight. “It knows me.”
“It knows what’s inside you.” His voice was rough, strained with concern and something fiercer fear for her. “This doesn’t feel like a trial. It feels like a trap.”
Another tremor pulsed outward. The platforms shifted forming a narrow bridge.
Calling her upward.
Demanding her.
She swallowed hard. “I think this is what the First Starborn left behind.”
“And the Queen is somewhere behind us,” Kael said. “Maybe already descending.”
That thought chilled her far more than the Sanctum’s light.
She exhaled, steadying her trembling hand. “I have to do this.”
“I’m coming with you.”
Before she could respond, the platforms shuddered and split—a barrier of radiant energy slamming down between them.
Kael was thrown backward with a cry, skidding across the smooth crystal floor.
“Kael!” Eirena lunged, palms slamming against the shimmering wall, but it held firm. “Let him through!”
The Sanctum responded with another resonance that vibrated through her ribs:
“ONLY THE EMBER MAY ASCEND.”
Kael scrambled to his feet, rage flashing across his face as he struck the barrier with his sword only for the blade to crackle against the surface, starlight biting into its edge.
He cursed under his breath, fist pressed to the barrier as hard as her palms.
“Eirena,” he said, breath ragged. “I don’t like this. I don’t trust this place.”
“Neither do I.” Her voice trembled. “But it feels… familiar. As if it recognizes me.”
“Or it recognizes what it wants to take from you.”
Their eyes locked.
She wanted to promise him she would be fine. That she would return. That this was just another trial, another puzzle.
But she felt it.
The Sanctum wasn’t testing her.
It was awakening her.
And awakenings were rarely gentle.
She set her forehead against the glowing barrier, Kael mirroring her on the opposite side.
“I’ll come back,” she whispered.
His throat bobbed. “You’d damn well better.”
And then,
The barrier dissolved.
And the Sanctum seized her.
The Ascension Path
Wind that wasn’t wind swept around her, pulling her upward along the rising platforms. Each step echoed with a chord of light music that vibrated through her bones.
The air glittered with fragments of memory.
She saw shadows of the First Starborn shaping light with their hands, weaving strands of color into constellations. She saw them laughing with the Queen before she wore a crown of collapsed suns. She saw their hands almost touch And she felt grief so vast it hollowed her ribs.
The Sanctum was showing her the past.
No.
It was showing her what lived inside her.
The ember pulsed, warming her chest like a small trapped star, growing hotter with each step she took.
“Ember,” she whispered, pressing a trembling hand over her sternum. “Are you… remembering?”
A pulse answered.
Yes.
She staggered, gripping a floating shard of crystal for balance. Images surged through her mind galaxies bending, stars singing, the First Starborn standing beside the Queen, their light entwined like twin flames.
And then, the betrayal.
The shattering.
The scream of a dying star.
She collapsed to her knees, gasping as if the explosion tore through her a second time.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Please… stop.”
The Sanctum did not stop.
It showed more.
The First Starborn’s last moment, their essence torn apart, fragments scattered… one drifting silently across the cosmos until it sank into a mortal bloodline generations ago.
Her bloodline.
Her chest pulsed again.
Harder.
Hotter.
No longer an ember, but a coal beginning to flare.
The Inner Chamber
Finally, she reached the top platform.
The radiant door pulsed once or twice, then dissolved, revealing a circular chamber. It was silent save for a low hum of energy. Crystalline pillars arched overhead like ribs of a god.
At the center hovered a sphere of swirling starlight incandescent, shifting, impossibly alive.
The moment she stepped inside, the doors sealed behind her.
She was alone.
Except she wasn’t.
The sphere spoke without words:
“EMBER OF MY EMBER.
SHARD OF MY SHATTERING.
SEED OF MY END.”
Her heartbeat stuttered.
“You’re the First Starborn,” she whispered.
The sphere pulsed not in affirmation, not in denial.
A voice formed inside her, softer than the Queen’s, older than the stars:
“I am what remains of what I was, and I have waited for you.”
Eirena’s knees weakened. “Why me?”
“Because you were born where my last fragment fell.
Because your soul was strong enough to hold what others could not.
Because fate is a spiral, child and you have reached the center.”
She stepped closer. “And what do you want from me?”
The light brightened, swirling faster.
“To finish what I could not.”
She froze.
The chamber trembled.
“The Queen must be undone.
And only we can do it.”
“We?” she repeated, breathing unsteady.
“You and the piece of me within you.”
The floor vibrated beneath her feet, and cracks of light spiderwebbed outward from the central sphere.
Eirena’s pulse quickened. “You want to merge with me.”
“Merge?” the voice echoed.
“No, child. I want to awaken.”
The light surged outward and slammed into her chest.
She screamed.
The Awakening
Light poured into her, blinding, burning, reshaping everything it touched. Her veins flared white-hot. Her bones rang like struck crystal. Her mind split wide, flooded by memories that weren’t hers and power she’d never imagined.
She saw galaxies form and die.
She saw the Queen’s first smile.
She saw her last.
She saw the First Starborn fall,
and she felt the echo of their death as if it were her own.
Her body arched, lifting off the floor as tendrils of starlight wrapped around her like vines.
“STOP!” she gasped. “I can’t.”
“You can,” the voice insisted.
“You were chosen.”
“I didn’t choose this!”
“Then choose now.”
The chamber cracked again as energy spiraled violently. The floor split open to reveal an endless chasm of swirling light and void beneath.
“Choose to rise…
Or be crushed beneath what hunts you.”
Eirena’s breath hitched.
She saw the Queen.
Descending.
Searching.
Hungering.
Coming for her.
The ember inside her flared not in fear, but in defiance.
Eirena clenched her fists, teeth bared against the torrent of power.
“I choose,” she whispered.
The chamber stilled.
The First Starborn’s voice softened.
“Then awaken.”
Light exploded.
The Resonance Form
When the blinding glow faded, Eirena collapsed to the floor, gasping, sweat dripping down her temples.
Her hands trembled.
But they glowed.
Not faintly.
Not weakly.
Her skin shimmered like starlight trapped beneath glass, constellations forming and dissolving in her veins.
Her hair floated weightlessly, tipped in silver fire.
Her eyes burned white-gold, not mortal, not human.
For a moment, she did not recognize herself.
“What… am I?”
The First Starborn’s voice answered, gentler now:
“More than mortal.
Less than divine.
You are the echo of what I was and the end of what she has become.”
As Eirena pushed shakily to her feet, the chamber rippled.
The barrier around the Sanctum fell.
Kael’s distant shout echoed through the fading resonance.
And another sound followed.
A sound that made her blood run cold.
A voice older than time.
A voice dripping with fury.
A voice she knew.
“Found you.”
The Queen had arrived.
And Eirena, newly awakened, barely steady on her feet turned to face the descent of the one being who should never have been her enemy.
But was now destined to be.
- Writer
