SWNOVELXO Chapter 6: Chapter 6: The Woman Who Speaks in Curses
"Truth never walks in daylight. It waits behind veils, behind fire, behind the voice of a woman who's already died once to say it."
The dreams are getting louder.
Kaelith wakes each night with blood in his mouth and a name he doesn't remember whispering behind his ribs.
He doesn't tell the guards.
He doesn't tell his mother - what's left of her in the palace infirmary.
But every time he closes his eyes, the same vision bleeds through:
A girl with fire in her eyes.
A kiss that tastes like ash.
And a sword. Always a sword.
He doesn't know her.
But the dreams say otherwise.
Elara felt it too - the shift in the air. The way fate started bending at the corners like scorched paper.
She sat in the chapel ruins of Erenthel, her fingers tracing the same rune again and again into the ash-dusted stone.
𐤊
The Mark of Kaether.
She didn't remember carving it.
She only remembered the pain in her chest when she saw it.
"Your memories are alive," the cloaked woman had said, standing at the edge of shadow.
"But they are not yours alone."
The Woman in Silk had returned the next night - silently, like fog crawling across water.
Her voice didn't come from her lips.
It came from the space behind Elara's heartbeat.
"You were not cursed for loving him," she said, her face veiled in dark sapphire.
"You were cursed for something you've yet to remember."
Elara's jaw clenched. "What do you mean?"
The woman stepped closer. Her feet left no mark. Her body cast no shadow.
"The curse is not a chain. It is a map."
"To what?"
"To what you were... before your name was Elara."
That broke something inside her.
Because for all her lives, Elara had always believed the curse was punishment for loving Kaelith. For choosing him against the gods. For dying in his arms again and again.
But what if it had never been about him?
What if Kaelith was only the key… and she was the lock?
"Why me?" Elara asked, voice cracking. "Why this pain?"
The woman tilted her head, silk rippling like liquid night.
"Because you are not mortal, child. You are a relic."
"Of what?"
"Of what the world was before the gods fell silent."
Before Elara could speak again, the woman vanished - swallowed by wind and whisper.
And in her place, lay a book.
Old. Tattered. Bound in leather that smelled of thunder.
One word burned into the cover:
"Volundari."
The tongue of the flame gods. A language no one alive could still read.
No one but Elara.
She turned the first page with trembling hands.
The ink moved.
Not like writing - like blood.
It shifted, shimmered, and formed a single sentence:
"When the immortal heart remembers, the mortal world will bleed."
Elsewhere, Kaelith sat alone in his tent, rubbing his temple as the voices inside him grew louder.
"Elara…"
"Run…"
"Don't kiss her…"
He didn't understand.
He had never heard that name in his life - and yet, it echoed louder than the cries of battle, louder than the songs of the cathedral he once swore loyalty to.
He looked down at his hand.
His palm was burning.
Not in pain.
In memory.
Suddenly, a white feather fell from the ceiling of the tent, though there were no birds, no wind, no reason.
Singed at the edges.
Kaelith's eyes widened.
Somewhere deep in his blood, something snapped.
"Who are you?" he whispered to the night.
"And why do I remember your death like it was mine?"
Far off in the ruins, Elara whispered a line from the Volundari text she couldn't stop reading:
"He must remember the death he gave you - before he can remember the love he lost."