Page 5 of The Shattered Rite
Their village, Lirin’s Edge, was small, poor, and bitter. The kind of place where the wind always smelled of woodsmoke and damp stone, where joy came hard-won and never without cost. The healers lived on the outskirts, past the cobbled square and down the slope of the ridge—close enough to be summoned, but far enough to be forgotten.
People whispered about them. It was said their blood was touched by something old. That their ancestors had once called dragons from the clouds and spoke in tongues older than the Flame. That when the dragons vanished, so too did the dragonriders’ purpose.
Now, the villagers said the legacy had curdled. That the bloodline had soured.
Half-souled. Strange.
And Eliryn? She was the worst of them. At least, that’s what they said. She’d stopped caring—mostly.
Magic itself was dying, and the world had started to turn on it. Powers once praised as gifts were now called curses. Creatures of legend had become nothing more than fading sketches in old books. In Lirin’s Edge, the change could be seen in small, cruel ways: the fireflies that no longer glowed in midsummer, the orchard’s frostward charms failing so fruitspoiled early, the village well losing its taste of mineral-sweet water. Even the herb bundles above their hearth didn’t hold their strength as they once had; remedies her mother swore would heal now only dulled the pain.
Sometimes, Eliryn wondered if her own failing sight was part of it—another symptom of magic’s slow death. If her vision and whatever power ran in her veins were bound together like twins, both snuffed out by the same wind. No one could tell her for certain, and no one tried.
Her blindness had begun before she was sixteen.
A girl whose eyes dimmed too soon, who drifted into thoughts too deep, who asked questions no one wanted to answer. A decade of whispers and turned backs had followed. She’d learned to live in the margins, to keep her head down when the stares lingered too long, to let their pity and suspicion slide off her skin like raindrops. The world had decided she was meant to fade quietly.
And then came the Flame.
Not just in Lirin’s Edge, but everywhere. At dawn, without warning, a pillar of flame erupted in the village square. No smoke. No heat. Just light—tall and golden, rising as if summoned by nothing but silence.
In its center, a name began to form.
Eliryn’s name.
In the square, beneath the gaze of every skeptic and stranger, her fate had been spoken—not as a request, not as a question, but as a command written in fire.
She’d stood there like a statue, her heart pounding loud enough to drown out the world. “Maybe they spelled it wrong,” she’d almost whispered, absurdly, as her name blazed in gold.
The villagers had stared. Not in awe. Not in pride. In fear.
No one spoke. Not even a breath.
Because when the Flame chose, it did not ask permission. It reached through time and blood, through myth and marrow. It saw things people no longer remembered how to see.
In other villages, the chosen were lifted on shoulders—warriors, scholars, wardens of noble houses.
But in Lirin’s Edge, they looked away.
As if by not meeting her eyes, they could pretend the fire had spoken someone else’s name.
Now, Eliryn traced the edge of the black pendant at her throat.
Smooth as river stone. Cold once, but now warm against her skin. She had worn it since childhood—a relic, she’d thought, from a line of women too proud to admit their legacy had crumbled into myth. But lately, it had begun to hum.
Not with sound. Not even magic, not exactly.
More like a weight. A rhythm.
As if it were waiting.
Her mother said it was one of the old gifts—passed down the bloodline, awakening only when the soul was ready. “When the stone burns in your hand, the path will open,” she’d told her once.
She said it would show her the truth, when the time came.
Eliryn wasn’t sure if that sounded like a promise or a threat.
“The Flame doesn’t just choose power,” her mother had said. “It chooses those bound to a thread. And yours is wrapped around something vast. Something old. We were dragonriders once, Eliryn. Our blood remembers. And one day, the world will remember with it.”
