Woven Between Her War And My Weakness

The silence between us grew heavier as the days passed. Not because we had nothing to say, but because we both knew the weight of what had been left unspoken. The air inside the cabin thickened with every breath, with every shared glance, with every whispered voice echoing through my dreams.

Kael had changed since the outpost attack.

She spoke less.

Slept even less.

And when she did speak, it was in short, clipped phrases, like her words were being rationed.

Me? I was caught between curiosity and fear.

Fear of what we were running from.

Fear of what I might be becoming.

We left the outpost before dawn.

Kael had secured a new map, ancient and fragile, with inked lines that led toward the Wastes.

"Why there?" I asked as we hiked under a sky smeared with blood-orange clouds.

"Because it's the last place they'd think to look for us," she muttered. "And the only place where the Marked were once free."

That word again.

Free.

It felt too fragile to trust.

The journey was brutal. The terrain kept shifting, like it didn't want to be known. Hills folded into canyons, rivers dried midstream, and creatures I'd never seen before watched us from the shadows. They had eyes that reflected firelight and teeth that gleamed like polished bone.

One night, as we rested near a dying fire, I asked her the question that had haunted me since the dream.

"Kael, who was she? The girl I saw?"

She didn't answer right away.

Instead, she threw another log onto the fire, and sparks danced into the air like dying stars.

"That wasn't just a dream," she said finally. "She's real. Or at least... she was."

I leaned closer. "You know her?"

"She was the first. The first girl marked like you."

My blood turned cold. "What happened to her?"

Kael turned her gaze toward the fire. "They broke her."

The silence that followed wasn't empty. It screamed.

By the third day, we stumbled across an abandoned church, half-swallowed by vines and time. The stained-glass windows were shattered, the altar burned, but something about it felt sacred.

Kael checked every corner like always.

I stood in the center, my Mark glowing faintly.

"It's reacting," I whispered.

"To what?"

Then I saw it. Etched into the stone beneath the altar, barely visible under layers of dust:

Rae, Daughter of Fire.

I dropped to my knees, tracing the letters.

"How did it know my name?"

Kael didn't answer. She stared at the carving, her jaw tightening.

"This place was part of the rebellion," she said. "They must've known about you. Or someone like you."

I felt something shift inside me. Like I had just stepped into a story I didn't know I was writing.

And then... the ground shook.

Kael pulled me up. "We have to move. Now."

Outside, the horizon was black with approaching dust clouds.

"Storm?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Worse. Drones."

We barely made it out. The drones swarmed the ruins, scanning, burning. One grazed my shoulder with a stun beam. I collapsed behind a fallen tree, heart racing, limbs numb. Kael dragged me deeper into the woods.

My head pounded. My Mark burned.

I screamed.

And everything went white.

When I opened my eyes, the trees around us were charred.

The drones were gone.

Kael knelt beside me, eyes wide. "You... you did that."

I sat up slowly, shaking. "Did what?"

"You burned them out of the sky. Without touching them."

I didn't know what to say.

My body felt both empty and full, like something had entered me and left a trail of lightning.

Kael wrapped her arms around me. "It's happening. The prophecy… it's real."

We sat like that for hours. Just breathing. Just surviving.

Until I whispered the truth I had been afraid to admit:

"Kael... I think I'm losing control."

She didn't pull away.

She held me tighter.

And in that moment, under a sky full of smoke and silence, I believed her when she whispered:

"Then I'll hold on for you."

To be CONTINUED.....