The Quiet After the Burn

The forest was still.

Smoke drifted lazily in the moonlight, curling through the air like breath. The crackling of dying embers was the only sound left. No more pursuit. No more shouting.

Only the sound of her paws crunching through scorched leaves.

Nyra had gone quiet.

Not gone—never gone—but sleeping somewhere deep inside, sated for now. Seraphine had taken back control, slipping into the stillness of her wolf form with uneasy grace. Her body ached—not from wounds, but from the fire. From holding it back too long… and then letting it go all at once.

She padded to the edge of a shallow stream, the water reflecting the pale shimmer of her fur. Still glowing at the edges. Still sparking at the paws.

She dipped her muzzle in and drank slowly.

The cold helped. The cold always helped.

Her reflection rippled—wolf eyes rimmed in gold, ash still clinging to her fur, a smear of dried blood across her snout that wasn’t hers.

I didn’t want to kill them, she thought.

But she had.

Because she had to.

Because they wouldn’t stop.

Because Nyra had been right.

She lowered herself to the earth, curling into the softest patch of moss she could find, her white tail draped over her nose. Smoke rose in lazy spirals from her paws. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted. A moth circled the edge of a dying flame and turned away.

For the first time in days, no one was chasing her.

And for the first time in her memory, she didn’t feel like running.

Sleep came not as a gift, but as a trap.

One blink, and the forest faded. Another, and she was somewhere else.

The scent of fire didn’t vanish—it changed. No longer sharp and wild, but homey. Contained. A hearth. A cloak wrapped around a too-small body. Her body. Her child body.

She was small again. Cold. Sitting cross-legged in front of a fire in a stone cottage—walls lined with dried herbs and mismatched candles.

A voice spoke softly behind her. A woman’s. Low. Warm. Familiar.

“Again, Sera. From the center. Not your hands—your heart.”

Her child-self concentrated. Tiny fingers trembled as she stared into the flame, trying to make it flicker.

It didn’t move.

Come on, she thought, come on, come on—

“You’re not forcing the fire,” the woman said, crouching beside her. Her face was shadowed, but the voice was clear. “You’re asking it to come. You don’t command the flame, little one. You invite it.”

The girl looked up.

“But it’s mine. It’s inside me.”

The woman smiled, brushing hair from Seraphine’s face.

“Then ask yourself why it only answers when you’re afraid.”

A sudden gust rattled the windows.

The candles went out.

The fire hissed.

And the shadows… changed.

They stretched. Reached. Split into claws.

The warmth turned to heat. The comfort turned to danger. The cottage was burning—no, exploding—embers raining from the ceiling like falling stars.

She screamed—

Seraphine woke with a jerk, her breath catching in her throat.

The stream still babbled. The moon still glowed.

But her paws were smoldering again.

And the moss beneath her was on fire.

She scrambled to her feet, stomping it out before it could spread. A sharp pain bloomed behind her eyes—the kind that came with unwanted truth.

That memory was real.

She hadn’t dreamed that cottage since her second death.

Why now?

Because something’s waking up, Nyra murmured from the depths. Something old. Something we buried.

Seraphine stared into the trees, suddenly very aware of how quiet the woods had become.

And how not alone she felt anymore.