Chapter 1
I always knew the mark would come alive again someday.
I just prayed it wouldn’t happen in front of anyone.
It started the moment I woke up — a faint warmth under my skin, like someone had placed a lantern inside my arm. At first, I thought it was the usual morning heat drifting in from the window. But then the warmth sharpened… and spread.
A slow burn.
A pulse.
Almost like a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
I ripped back the sleeve of my nightshirt. The mark — the one I’d spent seventeen years hiding — was glowing. Not softly. Not faintly.
It was alive.
Golden lines stretched across my skin like rivers of light. They shifted, moved, changed shape with each throb, forming symbols I didn’t recognize and patterns I’d never seen before. I gasped, stumbling back until my spine hit the wall.
“No… not again. Not now.” My voice shook.
The last time the mark glowed like this, I was eight. I’d fainted in the middle of the marketplace, and my mother locked me inside for three days, telling the neighbors I had fever dreams.
But this — this was different.
The burn intensified, searing its way up my arm and into my shoulder. I bit down on a scream.
Then I heard it.
A voice.
Deep. Ancient. Echoing from a place that wasn’t the room… and wasn’t the world.
“Adanna…”
I froze. The room felt smaller, the air heavier, as if something enormous had leaned close to whisper directly into my bones.
“No,” I whispered. “You’re not real. You’re not real—”
“Adanna.”
This time, it wasn’t a whisper. It was a command.
My knees buckled, and I caught myself against the bedframe. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shake the voice out of my head… but the moment my lashes touched, a flash of something—someone—hit me.
I saw a pair of eyes, burning gold like the mark.
A face carved out of shadows.
A presence too big to fit in human form.
He looked at me.
And smiled.
My eyes flew open with a scream.
A knock crashed against my door.
“Adanna! What’s wrong?” My mother’s voice sliced through the air.
I yanked my sleeve down, ignoring the burn stabbing through my arm. The glow dimmed a little, as if hiding just because she was near. I grabbed the blanket and threw it over myself just as she stepped in.
Her eyes swept the room—my shaking hands, my pale face. “Are you sick? You look like you’ve seen—”
“A ghost?” I muttered.
Her gaze sharpened. She lowered herself onto the edge of my bed. “Did it happen again?”
I hesitated.
She inhaled slowly. That was her tell — the thing she did whenever she already knew the answer.
“Adanna… tell me the truth.”
I pressed my lips together. My heartbeat was loud, uneven, drumming through my body like footsteps approaching.
“I heard a voice,” I whispered.
Her face drained of color.
“No,” she breathed. “It’s too early. It shouldn’t be waking yet.”
Waking?
The word coiled around my spine, cold and heavy.
“What do you mean ‘yet’? What’s waking?” My voice was barely a breath.
She opened her mouth to answer—
But the mark burned again.
So violently I jerked forward.
A gasp ripped from my throat.
My mother grabbed my arm before I could hide it. Her fingers dug into the fabric… and she froze.
Even through the sleeve, she could feel it — the heat, the energy, the movement.
“Oh God,” she whispered. “It’s alive.”
Alive.
I yanked my arm away, panic roaring up my throat. “Mama, what is happening to me?”
She looked at me with a fear that wasn’t new — but this time, it was deeper.
Older.
Like she’d been waiting seventeen years for this moment and prayed every day it wouldn’t come.
“Adanna,” she said softly, “I need you to listen.”
Her voice trembled.
“You are not cursed.”
For a moment, hope flickered in my chest.
But then she continued, her voice barely a breath:
“You are carrying something… someone… inside you.”
My stomach dropped.
And then she said the words that shattered everything I thought I knew about myself.
“A god is waking in your blood.”
