1 🐦🔥
“You don’t belong there.”
The words didn’t echo so much as they resonated in the marrow of my bones. I was lucid—I knew, with absolute clarity, that I was trapped inside a dream, a boundary I should have been able to cross back over at will. Yet, every muscle remained heavy, frozen under a weightless paralysis.
Before me stood five figures. They had no facial features, no distinct eyes or lips, yet they did not feel terrifying. They possessed an aura that was unnervingly humane, yet laced with something ancient and divine—like guardians standing on the precipice of a distant universe. An intense, magnetic connection pulled at my chest. My heart physically ached for these unknown faces, reacting as though they were reaching out to call me home.
Then, the static broke. A sharp, familiar voice sliced through the vision, yanking me out of the abyss.
I gasped awake, my lungs expanding violently as air rushed back into my body. It wasn’t a nightmare, but the sheer physical reaction of my waking body made Patrick freeze. I looked up to find him standing over me, his forehead deeply creased in a frown. His gaze carried that familiar weight—not of terror, but of deep disappointment, as if he had just caught me stealing something strictly forbidden.
“It was the same dream, wasn’t it?” Patrick asked, his voice low, tired, and heavy with a frustration he was trying hard to mask.
I stared back at him, my lips dry and chapped, feeling the familiar wall of distance building between us. I knew no matter what words I assembled, no explanation would ever satisfy him. How could it? To him, I was slipping away into madness; to me, I was touching something real.
“I am begging you,” Patrick said, his tone softening just enough to reveal the raw desperation underneath. “Try talking with a therapist.”
A cold knot formed in my throat. I didn’t have time for a therapist. More than that, what could I possibly tell them? How could I explain that I was being haunted by five faceless figures who silently begged me to leave everything behind and go with them?
“I will,” I uttered quietly.
It was a lie, a quick shield thrown up solely to stop him from pushing the topic any further.
Patrick let out a sharp sigh, rolling his eyes as he looked away. The gesture hurt, but it was honest. He knew me too well; he saw right through the lie, acutely aware that I had no intention of listening to a word he asked.
“Will you at least address the press regarding the stunt you pulled yesterday?” he asked, his tone shifting from pleading to administrative control.
“No,” I answered. My voice was firm, stripped of any hesitation.
I didn’t owe an explanation to anyone—not to the public, not to the media. I had done what needed to be done, nothing more and nothing less. Every action I took was deliberate, regardless of how it looked to the outside world.
Patrick pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes as if trying to physically block out the headache blooming behind them. His composure shattered.
“For once, for God’s sake, would you do what I am asking you to do and not act like a puny sixteen-year-old kid?!” he snapped, his voice ringing through the room.
“Don’t shout at me!” I spat back, the prickle of anger flaring up to match his.
“Then don’t make me!” Patrick retaliated, his chest heaving as he breathed hard, struggling with every ounce of effort to contain the mounting rage threatening to spill over.
The silence that followed was suffocating. Patrick stood there, visibly working to drag his emotion back under control. He took a long, heavy breath, lowering his voice until it was almost a whisper.
“Please,” he said, the sharp edge of his anger giving way to sheer exhaustion. “I am doing this to protect you. Just explain to them what really happened. They deserve that explanation. Just do it.”
The weight of his protection felt like a cage, but seeing the genuine fear for my safety in his eyes made my defiance falter.
With a low groan, I forced my heavy limbs out of bed and dragged myself toward the bathroom shower to freshen up. As I stepped inside, the heavy glass door slid shut between us.
Even through the barrier and the rising steam, Patrick’s voice came shouting through, still pushing, still requesting answers, refusing to let the matter go.
“Yeah! Fine,” I muttered to myself under the rush of the water, the resentment settling heavy in my chest. “As if I have any other choice...”
── ༺ ☼ ༻ ──
I wiped the steam off the mirror with the back of my hand, staring at the face looking back at me. Wet hair plastered to my neck, water dripping off my chin, and a reflection that looked altogether too innocent for a woman carrying enough unexploded ordnance inside her chest to level a small province.
Mara Morgagen.
Yeah. That’s me.
Daughter of the late King Merlin Morgagen and Queen Melissa Morgagen, and the sole heir to the throne of Eldoria.
If you haven’t heard of Eldoria, you’ve definitely used our stuff. We are the economic spine of the entire Astra Empire—the largest empire on our continent, second in the world by population, but unmatched when it comes to sheer manufacturing weight. Astra might hold the title, but Eldoria holds the deed. People whisper that our royal vault is as rich as the Emperor’s.
Ok. Between us? They’re wrong.
We’re richer.
We manufacture everything. Warships, high-yield explosive ordinance, tactical artillery, right down to the phone in your hand and the toothbrush sitting on your bathroom sink. Roughly ninety-nine percent of the products keeping Astra afloat rolled off an Eldorian assembly line, and two-thirds of the global arms trade bears our seal.
In short: if it shoots, drives, clicks, or cleans, we built it.
Which brings us back to why I was currently standing naked in front of a fogged-up mirror, getting my ears chewed off through a heavy oak bathroom door.
“Princess, if you are not out of that shower in thirty seconds, I am calling a structural engineer to tear down the wall, and then I am resigning!” Patrick’s voice echoed off the marble tiles, crisp, sharp, and hovering right on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
“I’m drying off, Patrick! Cease the dramatic threat of resignation, you’ve used it three times this week and it’s only Tuesday!” I yelled back, wincing slightly as a sudden, familiar dull ache throbbed right behind my sternum.
That frantic voice belongs to Patrick Pixius. He’s twenty-seven, my Chief Butler, and unfortunately for him, one of my closest friends since our early teenage years—back when he first joined my ‘butler club.’
Is it right to call it a club? Probably not. Whatever.
It was more like a grueling training brigade, but he survived it, and now he spends his adult life trying to stop me from accidentally destroying the realm.
He was shouting at me for two very valid reasons: first, I was forty-five minutes late for a media briefing; second, I just don’t listen to him.
I looked down at my chest. Right over my heart, glowing faint and diamond-white beneath the skin, was the Stone.
Diamond? Stone? I don’t know what to call it. But I hope you get it.
To anyone else, my chest looked completely unblemished. But to me, looking through my own eyes, it was right there: a smooth, white stone embedded directly into my heart.
Five years ago, when I was twenty, my parents died.
Yeah, I know.
You don’t have to hit me with the sympathetic tilted-head look; I’ve come to peace with it.
Mostly.
On my way back from a diplomatic trek to Gorzath right after their funeral, someone decided the newly orphaned princess was an easy target and slipped a lethal, slow-burning neurotoxin into my drink.
I didn’t die immediately. Instead, I ended up wandering like a literal zombie through a desolate, high-altitude plateau—a bleak, treeless tundra where no human had set foot for centuries. Half-delirious and collapsing from organ failure, my fingers brushed against a cold white stone half-buried in the dirt.
The moment I touched it, the stone melted straight into my chest and fused with my heart.
Did it save me from the poison? Yes
Did it cure the poison? Technically, no.
The toxin is still trapped in my bloodstream, dormant, held in a permanent stalemate by the stone’s magic.
Am I dying? Well... I’m not dead yet, so let’s call it a solid ‘maybe.’
What it did give me, however, was a ridiculous suite of side effects. Rapid physical regeneration, the ability to levitate and fly, and the power to channel blinding, high-density light beams straight out of my palms.
I know it sounds like a cheap fantasy novel, but trust me, it’s painfully real.
Outside, Patrick pounded hard on the door panel. “Mara! I can hear you talking to yourself in there! Are you arguing with the mirror again, or are you actually putting clothes on?”
I pressed a hand over the faint white glow beneath my ribs, feeling the stone pulse in time with my steady heartbeat. Panic and residual fear flickered through my gut—the constant, terrifying knowledge that if this stone ever flickered out, the poison would finish its job in seconds. But I pushed the dark thought down, cracked a smirk at my reflection, and leaned toward the door.
“I am contemplating the existential weight of my royal existence, Patrick! Give a girl five minutes to look regal!”
“You have two minutes before I start throwing your dress through the transom!” he shouted back, though I could hear the microscopic relief in his voice just knowing I was alive and talking.
“Moving, moving!” I called out, wrapping a towel tight around myself.
── ༺ ☼ ༻ ──
I took one last quick glance in the mirror, smoothed down my suit jacket, and braced myself.
The primary reason I was summoned to face the press corps today is because, well, as pretty much everyone knows,
I am Phoenix Vixen.
It’s hardly a secret you can keep hidden in today’s modern world. With advanced tech and gadgets in every hand, everybody has their own outlandish conspiracy theories about who or what I am. Honestly, at this point, it’s just easier to admit it than spend half your life explaining how it isn’t you.
Naturally, critics love to say I do it for attention. In today’s society, the moment you step up or do anything out of the ordinary, you’re immediately branded with the “attention-seeker” label. I genuinely don’t know how our world, Altara, manages to keep holding all these cruel, cynical people on her back.
Altara is the third planet from Arkellion, our sun. Our scientists have observed another planet sharing our habitable zone—a planet we’ve named Geovanna.
Who knows what its inhabitants actually call it, or what name they’ve given Altara?
Every time we’ve tried sending satellites near their zone, most of them get instantly shot down. But the few deep-space images we’ve managed to capture prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that intelligent life exists over there. The imperial government has made it crystal clear to us in Eldoria: they are watching us, and we have to be prepared for anything.
Well, we are. That’s just the plain truth.
Anyway, back to why I was currently being forced to explain myself to a ravenous pack of journalists.
Yesterday, I crashed—and by “crashed,” I mean completely burned to the ground—an illegal testing facility in another kingdom within the Astra Empire. The place was secretly turning ordinary humans into mutants.
Is “mutants” even the right term? I don’t know, but it fits.
Look, I don’t regret doing it for a single second. But it has kicked up an absolute political firestorm. The media is claiming my actions were an indirect insult to that kingdom’s local security, subtly implying they weren’t capable of handling their own affairs.
Worse, commentators are debating whether I’m staging a public rebellion or playing vigilante just to show off how powerful I am.
First of all: top marks for creative writing, press team. Second of all: that wasn’t my intention at all. I just wanted to make sure nothing catastrophic happened to Astra.
“I explicitly begged you,” Patrick muttered under his breath, adjusting my collar with hands that were visibly trembling.
“I begged you on my knees to let the Empire and that kingdom’s defense forces handle it. But no, Princess Phoenix had to fly in and incinerate the whole complex!”
“Patrick, relax, your blood pressure is going to blow out the back of your neck,” I whispered back, offering him a light, reassuring smirk, though my own pulse was hammered against my ribs.
“I couldn’t just sit on my hands and wait for those improperly created mutants to wander across our borders and wreak havoc in Eldoria. I simply destroyed the root of the problem.”
“And now you’re about to be torn apart by two hundred reporters who think you’re declaring war on our allies!” he hissed.
His deep blue eyes held a mix of sheer exhaustion, terror for my safety, and an overwhelming, protective desperation. He hated when I put myself in the crosshairs—politically or physically. Behind his exasperated butler persona, Patrick was petrified that one day I’d take a leap I couldn’t recover from, leaving him to pick up the pieces of a broken realm.
Underneath my witty defenses, a tight knot of anxiety twisted in my stomach. The white stone in my chest pulsed with a low, warm hum, a constant reminder of the volatile magic and dormant poison locked inside me. Facing down a facility full of rogue mutants was easy compared to this; weapons were simple, but politics were a minefield.
I hated feeling judged by people who sat in air-conditioned rooms while I bled to keep them safe, but I knew I had to play the part to shield my home.
“Well,” I said, giving Patrick’s sleeve a quick, affectionate pat to ground him, “that’s why I’m going out there to answer their lovely questions. Keep a fire extinguisher handy, just in case my natural charm doesn’t work.”
He let out a sharp, ragged sigh, his expression softening into an affectionate, exasperated smile.
“Just try not to blow up the podium, Mara.”
“No promises!”
I took a deep breath, plastered on my best royal smile, and pushed through the heavy double doors into the blinding flash of the media cameras.
── ༺ ☼ ༻ ──
“One of these days, I am going to get permanently blinded by those damn flashes,” I groaned, throwing myself back into the leather seat of the armored sedan and shielding my burning eyes.
I had somehow survived the media war zone outside, but barely. Honestly, standing in front of two hundred aggressive journalists firing rapid-fire questions at my face was infinitely harder than incinerating a batch of inflammable, dead-walking humans yesterday.
What should I even name those things? They weren’t quite zombies, not quite soldiers... it needs to be something creative.
Combustible creepers? Crispy mutants? I’d brainstorm later.
I turned toward the driver’s side and exhaled heavily.
“Patrick, I am formally requesting—no, ordering—you to physically tackle me the next time I try to do something like this if it means facing reporters afterward.”
Sitting in the driver’s seat, Patrick started the engine.
He didn’t even turn his head as he mumbled under his breath, “As if I haven’t been trying to stop you since day one—ever since you got those ridiculous powers.”
I couldn’t help but smile at him, even as his sharp blue eyes cut toward me in the rearview mirror, delivering a stern, unrelenting look.
“Relax, Pat,” I said softly, leaning my head against the headrest.
The morning sunlight spilled through the tinted windshield, catching his bright red hair so that it glowed like spun gold. Sitting there, a full foot taller than me, his massive frame completely blocked the harsh glare of the sun from hitting my face—a giant, grumpy human sunshade.
Patrick let out a long, deliberate breath, adjusting his posture before deciding to switch gears. He shifted the conversation away from the political disaster we’d just dodged and brought up something that had been quietly eating at him.
“Your recurring dream,” Patrick began, his voice dropping into that low, cautious register he used when he was worried I might snap.
“Does it have anything to do with the stone in your chest?”
I rolled my eyes, a fond smirk tugging at my lips despite the exhaustion creeping into my bones.
“Patrick, I have told you a million times: I’ve been having those exact same dreams since I was a little kid. Long before my parents died, and long before I ever went to Gorzath or ended up with this power.”
I closed my eyes for a second, the vivid memory of the dream flashing behind my eyelids.
Five faceless figures standing before me in a weightless abyss. No eyes, no lips, yet radiant with an ancient, divine presence. A magnetic pull in my chest so intense my heart physically ached for them—as if they were calling me home—right before a sharp voice sliced through the vision and yanked me back to reality.
“Well, if you won’t talk to a therapist,” Patrick said, breaking my train of thought as he navigated the car through traffic, “why not try a painting hypnotist? Someone who can put you under and paint the figures directly from your description?”
I blinked, genuinely caught off guard.
“A painting hypnotist? Do people like that even exist? What is their actual profession even called? ‘Hypnotic portraitist’? ‘Subconscious illustrator’?”
“I’m serious, Mara,” Patrick replied, his tone laced with a mix of exasperated affection and genuine concern. Beneath his practical butler routine, I could hear the deep, agonizing fear he carried every single day—the fear that my powers, these dreams, or the poison trapped inside me would eventually pull me away from him and swallow me whole.
Seeing the raw worry tightening the corners of his eyes, my sarcastic armor softened. I knew he did all of this—the nagging, the scheduling, the shouting—just to keep me alive.
“Alright,” I said gently, giving him a warm, reassuring look.
“I’ll give it a try.”
Patrick let out a quiet, relieved sigh, his shoulders finally dropping an inch as he focused on the road ahead. I turned my head to look out the window at the gleaming streets of Eldoria, holding onto the heavy silence between us.
That was all I could talk about for now. The press conference was over, but the mysteries in my head—and the stone in my chest—weren’t going anywhere.
