SWNOVELXO Chapter 4: Chapter 4: The One Watching From the Flames
"A curse never walks alone. It drags watchers behind it — some silent, some smiling, all waiting."
I didn't sleep.
I never do on the nights I come too close to him.
Sleep means dreams.
Dreams mean memory.
And memory… is a knife I've already bled from too many times.
The tavern room was quiet, but my mind was not. The Queen is alive. Kaelith is returning to the capital. And I have just enough time to find my way inside the city walls before the gates close behind him.
But I'd be a fool to chase a curse without preparing for the next scar it might give me.
So I waited. Watching. Listening.
Until I heard it.
Three knocks.
Soft. Even. Measured.
No one should know my room. I paid in coin, used a false name, kept to myself.
But the knock came again.
Not demanding. Not hurried.
Just… certain.
I rose slowly, slipped the blade from beneath my pillow, and opened the door just wide enough to see.
No one.
Only the soft rustle of wind and a shadow vanishing around the corner.
I stepped outside, blade ready.
Nothing moved.
Then..
A whisper. Not in the air. Not in the room.
Inside me.
"You're not the only one who remembers."
I spun, heart slamming into my ribs.
"Who's there?"
Silence.
"He sees you in his dreams."
I dropped to my knees. The world tilted.
It wasn't fear.
It was hope.
Terrible, unwelcome hope.
He remembers?
No.
He can't.
Not truly. Not if he looked at me with such emptiness.
But dreams…
Dreams know what the mind forgets.
"Show yourself!" I shouted into the quiet, but the wind had already swallowed whoever - whatever- had come.
Later that night, I found something beneath my door.
A single white feather.
Burned at the edges.
In my third life, I was killed by a man who wore feathers just like this. A priest of the old flame gods.
His last words before I died:
"Watch the fire, girl. You're not the only one cursed."
I sat back on my heels, eyes locked on the feather.
The curse was moving.
And it wasn't just between Kaelith and me anymore.
Someone else was watching.
And they wanted me to know.