No witch dead or alive, past or present ever dared to manipulate the fire element for sorcery until the first witch who called herself AshFall. A coven was born of her ideals, and her true blooded descendant carried on her name and powers.
**Lullaby For Sadness— Eternal Eclipse**
In the Palace of Flames — home to the Azure Witches, descendants of ancient fire practitioners — a shrill scream tore through the charged, cold air, cracking against the desolate night like a whip.
The scream belonged to none other than the Head of the Witch Coven, the revered High Priestess Valata Ashfall. A woman now enduring the most brutal peak of womanhood: childbirth.
"PUSH!" barked the wet nurse, her voice raw from countless repetitions through a night that had long since soured into terror.
Blood flowed. Valata screamed. Maids wiped her brow with trembling hands. But the child stubbornly refused to come.
Kneeling by the bedside, Ember — the forgotten daughter, reduced to servant status for her failure to inherit her mother's gift — stared into the crackling fireplace, as if willing some hidden power to awaken in her.
Meanwhile, the elders of the coven, the junior priestesses, the servants, and even the slaves gathered in uneasy silence, watching their hopes wither by the minute. Midnight had long since passed, yet the miracle they had waited for nine months was yet to arrive.
Five agonizing hours had dragged by, and still the child refused to be born. And the wet nurse, voice trembling now, muttered what everyone feared: it might all be for nothing.
"PUSH!" came the command again.
Her mother obeyed, screaming with all the strength left in her battered body. The sound seemed to rattle the stone walls themselves — and from the rafters, ravens startled awake, cawing wildly, circling the Palace of Flames like omens.
But this final scream worked a miracle. A new cry split the air: the sharp, piercing wail of a newborn.
Relief swept through the room like a gust of warm wind. Shoulders sagged, and smiles broke across tense faces.
"It's a girl!" the wet nurse announced needlessly. Only a woman could become a witch. Bearing a son had... other consequences, ones too dark to voice aloud.
Ember heard the cry and a tear slipped down her ash-colored cheek, then another. But she didn't look away from the fire, even as sobs wracked her small body.
"Congratulations!" chorused the gathered witches — ignoring, deliberately, the broken girl kneeling by the bed.
The Velth Reader entered then, her presence heavy and ominous. She took the newborn from the wet nurse, cradling the bloody, crying child as she began the same ritual that had once doomed Ember.
Ember held her breath, dreading the inevitable.
"What is her Velth strength?" asked Valata, brushing away the maids tending her torn body. Her eyes burned with desperate curiosity.
The Velth Reader conjured a blue flame, her magic bathing the child in shimmering light. Then she smiled.
"My, my! Her Velth is that of a Supreme Witch — nothing less than your own strength, High Priestess! Congratulations on securing your successor!" she cried, her voice trembling with awe.
A cheer erupted around them. Tears, real and unchecked, streamed down faces hardened by years of ruthless survival.
The bloodline of the Azure Witches, feared to have ended with Ember, would live on.
"Congratulations, High Priestess, on the birth of the Heiress!" they echoed in unison.
Ember, who was still staring at the fireplace, lost in the dance of the tongue-licking flames, stood on unstable feet from where she had been kneeling. Wiping away her tears discreetly, she bowed to her mother.
"Congratulations, mother," she said, trying her best not to look at the child, her newborn sister, whom she hated before she graced the world….
….her sister whom she hated even more now… even though it was true that the newborn was innocent.
But her mother didn't spare her a lick of attention while all in the room shifted uncomfortably as if they were noticing Ember for the first time.
Her mother instead cradled the child in her arms, a smile stretching on her face while Ember stood uncomfortably.
"Ember," Her called to her in a soft yet commanding voice, "the Old Ones will come and take you tonight. Leave, and never return."
Ember blinked back hot tears as her body started to shake for an entirely different reason. Hours ago, she had deluded herself into thinking she had power when she fed the fallen god her blood.
But the truth couldn't have been more obvious. Standing right there in that room filled with her coven members, her place in their world couldn't have been more clear.
Yet, she simply could not accept it. She found it hard to accept that during her birth, some wicked bored god picked her out of many children and decided to curse only her.
It was so hard to accept.
"Give me some time, mother," Ember pleaded in a shaky voice, "I might still manifest my powers. They are after all stories of late bloomers." She laid out her pathetic excuse again, while all the shame in the world weighed on those little shoulders of hers.
Her mother's furious eyes rested on her. "You've no place here, Ember. Your name was never added to the ancestry gentry so by all means you were never my daughter. And I see you still find it hard to to come to terms with it, but you're an Echo Witch, certainly incapable of carrying the bloodline of the AshFall's! If you didn't bloom at birth, you certainly won't bloom now. Not even if the fires of the world burned for you alone!"
Ember flinched at the words that whipped against her like a whip crack. Every word of it was immensely harsh, but none of it was untrue.
Being an Echo Witch—E rank was a once in two hundred occurrence —but being one who happened to be the daughter of a Supreme Witch was certainly a rarity, and Ember feared she was the only one like that in their world.
And for the failure she created, her newborn sister had arrived to wipe away that shame.
Her newborn sister whom they had all expected would be everything that Ember had failed to be. Her sister, who would fill the heavy silence left behind by Ember's disappointing existence.
And the Old Ones, witches who stuck to the old ways and trained witches without magic would take her in… and Ember was sure she would die there within a month of their harsh, brutal training.