There is no looking back.

  She doesn’t so much think it as feel it, like a bruise blooming behind her ribs, sharp and insistent. No looking back. The command rides the edge of her breath even though she isn’t speaking, hasn’t spoken since the world behind her cracked open. The Temple at Highmarrow is gone. Gone in that final, awful way things vanish when there’s no one left to witness the ruin. The ache clings to her tendons, tight and grinding, and she can’t shake the sense that if she so much as glances over her shoulder her knees will give out.

  So she walks. Keeps moving. Keeps pretending her stride is deliberate rather than the frantic, too-quick rhythm her heart’s setting. Her priestess robes, pale, gold-trimmed, ceremonial, flare around her legs. They feel garish now, practically glowing in the dawn light. She hates them for it. She’d have torn them off and left them in the dust if she’d had even a heartbeat to spare.

  There’d been no time. No chance to strip away the life she’d lived up until the moment the walls shook and Elaria’s voice, steady, immovable Elaria, pushed the Starfire into her hands and said run. Just run.

  Don’t look back. Don’t you dare. Keep moving. Her thoughts tangle with the memory, collapsing into each other until they’re barely words at all. Stars, they’re all dead. They must be. She might be the last one standing and the thought presses cold, like a stone jammed beneath her sternum.

  Morning stretches slowly across the northern quarter. Shutters creak open. Merchants grunt as they haul their carts into position. A guard slumps in a doorway, bored and oblivious. The city yawns itself awake without the slightest clue that everything has changed.

  No bells. No smoke. Nothing. How can the world still be humming along like this? Didn’t anyone hear the clash, the screaming, the, something? Anything? But the sun lifts, and the quarter stirs, and the loss of Highmarrow hangs invisible in the air.

  Seren slips through them like an echo. A pale-robed shape drifting along streets still tasting of sleep. A fruit seller squints, suspicion flickering, but he lets her pass. A child lingers, tilting their head before skipping after someone else. Every stray glance feels like a hand pressing down on her shoulders.

  They don’t know. Of course they don’t. Just keep walking. Keep breathing.

  Heat lingers under her skin. The Starfire, nestled tight beneath her collarbone, wrapped in the folds of her robe, has quieted from its earlier frenzy. When she fled, it felt like she was holding a miniature sun, something too wild to belong in mortal hands. Now it warms her with slow, pulsing certainty, alive in a way that feels both reassuring and unbearable.

  She hasn’t spoken since she left the temple. The words keep folding back in on themselves, dull and looping. A circling drain she can’t pull free from.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  They’re gone. The names roll through her mind in a grim, uneven march, Elaria, the novices, the little ones who always ran ahead in the corridors, the sisters who braided her hair when she was small. Everyone she’s ever tethered herself to in this world has been cut loose. And that leaves her, standing in the wreckage of her own life, alone in a way that feels too large to swallow.

  She’d felt the sanctum doors break as if the impact landed in her own ribs. She’d heard that last detonation of radiant power, the one that rattled the bones of the temple. And then, nothing. A silence so complete it hollowed her out. She ran because Elaria gave the order. She lived because the others didn’t. Her hands curl into fists as she walks, knuckles blanching, nails biting into her palms. The grief sits inside her, dense, immovable, like a stone she can’t cough up.

  The merchant road dips gently. Trees lean in over the pavement, early leaves still tender from spring’s first breath. An old iron gate yawns open to her left. She doesn’t think, just steps through.

  A public garden. Small. Blessedly quiet. Benches arc along well-kept hedges, and ivy spills from clay planters in lazy cascades. At the centre stands a marble fountain, its thin stream whispering down into a shallow pool, the sound infuriatingly calm compared to the world she’s just fled.

  Seren stops at the basin and grips the cold stone.

  Her reflection stares back in broken, rippling pieces. A round face drawn tight with exhaustion. Dark hair half-freed from its ties. Brown skin dimmed under morning light. Eyes wide, rimmed in shadow, startled like a hunted creature. She barely recognises the woman looking back. A stranger wearing her bones.

  Who am I now, without any of them?

  The tears slip free before she can steel herself. Fast, hot. They fall into the fountain and disappear in the ripples as if they never existed at all. Her jaw locks hard enough to ache. She holds her own gaze with stubborn, brittle resolve, like maybe she can keep herself from shattering through sheer force of will. Her chest jerks, breath hitching, but she doesn’t look away.

  Don’t fall apart. Not yet. There’s a duty, no, a burden, waiting. She has to get the Starfire to Solmaris. After that, maybe she’ll be allowed to crumble. Maybe there’ll be space for tears.

  The truth stings: she obeyed instead of saving them. Survived while they didn’t. The wrongness of it settles somewhere deep, thick as poison.

  Highmarrow is gone. The novices with their contagious laughter. The children tugging at her sleeves during lessons. The sisters murmuring prayers at dawn. Elaria, steady, unstoppable Elaria, who had always been the best of them. Gone. All of them. Nothing left but ash and a silence too sharp to breathe around.

  Her face twists, unguarded at last. She presses both palms to the basin and bends over it as her shoulders tremble. Her breath breaks into ragged, uneven gasps. And suddenly it’s the sea again, water rushing in, her mother’s arms ripped away, the world turning sideways while she fought to stay above the surface. Alone then. Alone now. The grief tears through her with the same brutal edge, sharp as salt on raw skin.

  The Starfire pulses beneath her robe, soft, insistent, almost sympathetic. As if it can feel her unraveling. Its warmth spreads through her chest in a slow, steady tide, offering nothing that resembles comfort. Just a reminder humming under her skin. You lived for a reason. Don’t waste it.