Prologue
Somewhere between memory and myth...
I don't remember how the fire started.
Only the sound it made.
It wasn't loud. Not at first. It was soft, like something breathing. Like a whisper crawling up the spine of the world. Then came the scent—burnt metal, scorched earth, blood cooling in the dust.
I remember standing still while
everything burned.
Not because I wasn't afraid. I was. But because I had been trained to watch. To wait. To calculate how long a person could scream before the silence caught them.
They called me Nova.
And in the City of Flame, that name meant bright death.
I was one of them—the youngest. A girl sharpened into a weapon before she ever learned how to dream. They fed us war stories like bedtime lullabies. Promised us glory if we obeyed. Promised us nothing if we didn't.
And I did obey.
Until the night the stars fell.
Until the night everything changed.
There was a moment—one breath between war and what came next. I remember someone screaming my name. I remember turning toward the voice. And then... light. Not fire this time, but something cold and electric. White. Blinding.
The next thing I remember is silence.
And then waking up beneath an unfamiliar sky.
No fire. No dust. No war.
Just velvet clouds and golden towers rising like poems in the distance. Hands that didn't hurt. Faces I didn't recognize.
And the lie they fed me like medicine: "You were never in the City of Flame. You've always belonged here—with us."
But even then, something inside me knew the truth.
Because even in a city of actors, I could still tell when someone was faking their lines.
Even if I couldn't remember my own.
Now I walk through this place of beauty and masks. I wear their clothes. I speak their lines. I pretend their stories are mine.
But every night, when the stars come out, something inside me pulses like a second heartbeat.
Something wild. Something dangerous.
And sometimes—just for a moment—I see the boy again.
The one with ash on his skin and fire in his eyes. The one who held my hand before the world burned.
The one I can't remember... but somehow, still love.
