‡Chapter Twenty‡
THIRD PERSON
In the infirmary, the walls were pale, lifeless, like old bones sun-bleached and left to rot. The lights overhead buzzed faintly, flickering at intervals as if struggling to stay conscious. A faint scent of antiseptic and something older—metallic, like rusted iron—hung in the air. Martina lay curled on a narrow cot, her back arched slightly, knees drawn up, a twisted form clinging to some primal sense of safety. Her skin was pale, damp with cold sweat, and her eyes were half-lidded, bloodshot, crusted with the remnants of dried tears. The hum of machinery pulsed around her—oxygen regulators, fluid pumps, heart monitors. They clicked, ticked, and hissed, merging into a lullaby of survival.
But beneath that manufactured rhythm, another sound began to rise.
Water.
It began faint—almost imperceptible—like the memory of rain hitting stone. Gurgling. Flowing. Trickling. Then rushing. A tide building behind her ears, filling the silence with dread. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. There were no fountains in the palace. No broken pipes beneath this wing. But still, she heard it. Water, churning through her skull, seeping down the edges of her consciousness. With every shallow breath, she felt the phantom chill of it slide into her lungs. Cold, sharp, alive.
She tried to lift a hand—just a twitch, a twitch—but her body disobeyed. Her limbs were leaden, her spine anchored into the thin mattress as if gravity had turned against her. The room tilted. Or maybe it was her mind. She wasn’t sure where the fever ended and the hallucination began.
Whispers joined the current.
They arrived without introduction. Without lips. Without shape. They weren’t voices she recognized, yet she knew them intimately—as if they were born from the same ache inside her chest.
"Chosen one," they murmured. The words were soft at first, like silk dragged across her skin. Then they sharpened. "Will you let it all drown?"
Her fingers twitched. Once. Twice.
"They said she was dangerous," another voice whispered, lower now, closer. Male? Female? It didn’t matter. It spoke with certainty.
"They said she had power."
"But they never told her how to stop it."
She could feel the whispers winding around her body, curling like vines, tugging at her thoughts. Pulling memories from her head like fish from a net.
Flashes of the past exploded behind her eyes—Luz, golden and grim, standing before the city’s children; miners screaming as dust rained from a collapsing tunnel; the flash of a knife in a riot; the warmth of hands she couldn’t name anymore. Faces she once knew blurred together, their voices lost beneath the roaring tide.
The whispering voices laughed. Not cruelly, but as if amused by her fear.
A nurse entered the room—silently, like a ghost passing through the veil. Her face was hidden beneath a medical hood, fabric drooping low to her chin. She moved methodically, wordlessly, like she wasn’t really human. She changed the damp cloth on Martina’s forehead with movements so smooth, so rehearsed, it felt wrong. Off. Mechanical.
Martina blinked slowly, tracking her.
For a moment, just a flicker, she thought she saw something.
Scales.
Beneath the gloves.
Or claws.
Or bone—bare and yellowed, jointed like a bird’s talon. But the fever was thick. Her thoughts were mud. Her heartbeat was thunderous, echoing through her ears like a war drum. Maybe it was the fever. Maybe it was memory.
Maybe it was truth.
She tried to speak—to ask for water, or silence, or anything—but her throat was dry. The words crumbled before they could form. The nurse said nothing, only offered her a look. Not pity. Not care. It was… reverence. Or fear.
Then she vanished.
---
Later that night, a stillness fell over the palace unlike any that had come before.
It wasn’t just quiet—it was reverent. As if the building itself was holding its breath. The stone corridors, normally echoing with the scurry of scribes or the clanking of armor, now stood empty. Torches, once ablaze along the walls, had been dimmed until they flickered like dying stars. Even the very air had changed—denser, slower, like moving through water.
A sacred hush had settled. Not from peace.
From dread.
The door to the infirmary creaked open.
Three figures entered, robes heavy with embroidered threads of gold and midnight blue. Their hoods were up, obscuring most of their faces, but their presence needed no introduction. They walked not like officials, but like mourners—or perhaps pilgrims. There was something ritualistic in the way their feet didn’t echo against the floor, as if the stones themselves dared not announce their arrival.
The prophets.
Eberhard walked ahead, his posture rigid, shoulders squared in defiance. His hands were clasped behind his back, his jaw clenched tight enough to creak. He paused at the side of the cot, eyes narrowing.
He sneered, quietly, "She doesn’t look like a god."
The words came out small, meant for his companions—or maybe just for himself. Perhaps he hoped the girl wouldn’t hear. Perhaps he believed she wasn’t awake.
Martina’s eyes opened slightly. Red-rimmed, sunken, gleaming faintly with something unnatural. They didn’t move much—just slid in his direction, lazy and slow, like a predator not quite hungry enough to pounce.
But it was enough.
Eberhard flinched.
Falk stepped up beside him, slower, more cautious. His voice, when he spoke, was soft, but there was iron under it.
"The sea doesn’t look like death either," he said. "Until it drowns you."
At the foot of the bed stood Friedrich, taller than the others, quieter. He stared at her, eyes like dull glass—unreadable. He said nothing at first. Just watched. Studied her as one might a relic dug from the ruins of an old war. Not sure whether to revere it or bury it again.
When he finally spoke, it was with a tenderness so measured it bordered on sorrow.
"Martina," he said. "Do you know who you are?"
There was a long silence.
The answer didn’t come quickly. Her chest rose and fell with effort, as if each breath was a fight. Behind her eyes, water thundered—endless, crashing, loud enough to hurt. It filled her skull, sloshing against her thoughts.
She blinked once. Slowly. Then again.
Her lips parted.
"No," she whispered, voice hoarse and low. "But I know what I’m not."
Falk leaned closer. Curious. Testing her. "And what’s that?"
A twitch at the corner of her mouth. The ghost of a smile.
"Yours."
The lights above them shuddered, flickering violently. For a moment, the room plunged into darkness. Then dimmed to a pale, sickly hue. Shadows stretched too long along the walls, curling unnaturally like tendrils seeking warmth.
The air changed again.
Not colder.
Heavier.
The kind of weight that pressed into the ribs and curled around the spine. The kind that made even breath feel sacrilegious.
Then came the ripple.
It wasn’t seen. It wasn’t heard.
But it was felt.
A shift in reality, like the entire world had inhaled sharply and was now afraid to exhale. Something deep and ancient stirred beneath the skin of the palace.
The prophets froze.
None of them spoke. None dared to.
They didn’t need to.
Outside the infirmary, alarms began to blare. A deep, guttural wail that hadn’t sounded in decades. One that meant only one thing:
The anomaly had awoken.
---
The Prophet Tower erupted into chaos.
Red light pulsed from crystal sconces embedded in the ceilings, illuminating scrolls and books scattered across the marble floors. Scribes scrambled between tables, shouting into communication tubes, dropping parchment and ink. Seals were broken. Emergency orders dispatched. Hands shook as they signed declarations meant only for the darkest of days.
Guards stormed through the corridors like fire ants, triple their usual number, forming a wall outside the infirmary. They didn’t look inside. They didn’t dare.
Steel doors groaned as they slid into place. Lock mechanisms older than the prophets themselves clanked shut. Protocols that hadn’t been rehearsed in generations were suddenly remembered with perfect clarity.
Inside the throne room, though—
Silence.
The Emperor remained where he always had, seated on the obsidian throne beneath a vault of carvings that once told the history of a world before the refuge. But he wasn’t looking at them now. His gaze was fixed somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
He didn’t speak at first.
And then, to no one at all:
"She’s awake now."
---
Martina stood.
Not with intention. Not with strength. There was no spark, no thunderclap heralding resolve. Only a quiet shift in reality, as if the world exhaled and forgot to inhale again.
One moment, she was entombed in soaked sheets—skin fevered, breath shallow, her mind drifting like a raft on some vast and storm-lit ocean. The next, she was on her feet. Upright. Anchored. As though gravity had finally remembered her.
Her gown, paper-thin and ruined by sweat, clung to her like sorrow. The fabric was damp, clinging to every curve of her spine and ribs, tracing the shape of a body reborn through fire and flood. Her hair hung in wet ropes down her shoulders, plastered to her face and neck, water slipping from each strand like sea foam returning to the tide.
The air seemed to shrink around her.
Inside her, the river had stopped whispering. It thundered now. It howled. Not a current, but a riptide, a great roaring force that crashed against the confines of her flesh, demanding release. It surged with every heartbeat, with every breath, until her body felt like a vessel too fragile to hold it.
And still—she moved.
One step. Then another.
Each one heavier than the last, not with exhaustion, but with something older. Older than her, older than this place. Each step struck the floor like a tolling bell.
The guards at the door stood at the ready—postured, trained, devout. Eyes sharp. Hands on blades. The kind of men who would die before they bent the knee.
They never stood a chance.
Her presence touched them like a windless frost. Time itself seemed to falter, stutter, then fracture. One guard’s mouth hung open mid-command, frozen in the shape of a name that would never be spoken. Another’s sword hovered in the air, held by a hand gone slack, eyes wide and glassy.
Martina didn’t stop. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even look at them.
She didn’t need to.
The corridor warped as she passed. The air bent like heat haze, twisting the marble into ripples. Shadows contorted, stretching long and thin, trying to flee her light. The torches flared—one final act of defiance—before dissolving into pillars of steam. The walls, ancient and revered, breathed around her like beasts disturbed in slumber.
The stone cracked beneath her feet.
Hairline fractures split outward, spidering across the ground like veins filled with light. A pulse radiated from her skin. It wasn’t visible, but it was felt—by the palace, by the paintings, by the portraits of long-dead rulers that stared in horror as their world unraveled.
She passed the murals that lined the hall—monuments to a glory that had never truly existed. Tales of conquest, of divine right, of blood turned into law. And they wept. The pigment blistered. The gold leaf peeled back like flaking skin. Entire histories turned to ash in the wake of her footsteps.
Something behind her groaned—a ceiling beam, maybe. Or the air itself.
The storm within her had taken form. It wasn’t just water anymore. It was voice. Voices.
A thousand of them. No—more. Screaming and singing and pleading and laughing. All at once. They filled her bones, poured into the hollows of her soul, until she wasn’t walking anymore. She was gliding. Feet barely touching the floor, like the earth itself was too afraid to hold her.
And then—
The great hall.
Wide as a cathedral. Silent as the grave.
At its heart stood the Emperor.
No crown. No armor. No retinue. Just a man dressed in simplicity, the kind worn by someone who had once been powerful enough to choose when to be humble. His robe hung loose, frayed at the edges. His hair, once dark and commanding, now silvered at the roots. His face sagged with sleeplessness, with years, with the weight of a thousand choices made in the dark.
His hands trembled at his sides.
"You were supposed to rest," he said, softly.
It wasn’t a command. It wasn’t even disappointment.
It was fear, dressed in gentleness.
Martina stepped forward.
Each footfall echoed like thunder across the stone. Too loud. As if the floor itself wanted the sound to carry. As if it was announcing her arrival.
"I was supposed to obey," she replied.
Her voice was quiet.
But it rang through the hall like prophecy.
A silence followed. Thick. Pressed between them like glass, ready to shatter.
"You’re not ready," the Emperor whispered.
A flicker of something passed across her face.
Her eyes glowed now—not blinding, but steady. Like a lantern beneath the waves. Like a memory refusing to drown.
"I was never going to be," she said.
They stood across from one another.
Two ends of the same fault line.
The maker and the unmade. The king and the storm. The man who built the dam and the woman who was the flood.
The floor trembled.
The columns moaned.
"You’ll bring the flood," he murmured again—not as a threat. Not even as a warning.
As truth.
Martina tilted her head. Something moved in her eyes—something soft. Not pity. Not fury.
Understanding.
And then—
A smile.
Small. Quiet. Meant only for him.
"No," she said. “You did.”
And somewhere
, deep in the belly of the earth, something ancient split.
The world listened.
And answered.
With ruin. 
A sound split the silence—low at first, like a groan from deep within the bones of the palace. Then it climbed, twisting into a shriek of tearing stone and wailing steel. Pillars cracked. Arches convulsed. Chunks of marble rained from the ceiling like the first drops of a storm long withheld. The floor split behind her in jagged lines, veins of molten light racing outward like a heartbeat finally allowed to beat.
The Emperor staggered back. His mouth opened, not for prayer, but for breath—sudden, panicked, mortal. All at once, he looked small. Not a god. Not a sovereign. Just a man. Caught in the shadow of a reckoning.
Martina walked forward.
Each step echoed with the weight of a thousand silences endured. A thousand lies believed. Her presence dragged the storm in her wake—shimmering water rising in coils, suspended in the air like threads of glass. It gathered around her shoulders, her arms, her crownless head. A cloak of currents. A halo of tide.
"Martina," the Emperor breathed, like a father calling a daughter back from the edge.
But she was already gone.
The girl who once wept behind walls, who begged for clarity in the dark, who prayed for mercy and received only chains—she had drowned long ago. What remained now was a vessel filled with fury, with memory, with every unburied truth this palace had tried to forget.
She raised her hand.
Not to strike.
To show.
The air around her convulsed. Visions bled into the room—ribbons of color, of sound. Echoes of past lives and hidden sins twisted together into a vortex of memory. The Emperor watched, helpless, as scenes unfolded around him:
—Soldiers dragging a screaming child from her home.
—Prophets with bloodied palms, blessing executions behind temple doors.
—Tunnels flooded with starving refugees, sealed by decree.
—And above it all, the throne—silent, untouched.
"You called me salvation," Martina said, her voice carrying like wind over water. “But you only ever meant sacrifice.”
The Emperor dropped to his knees.
Not out of reverence.
But because the palace itself had begun to collapse. The walls he’d built—of stone, of lies, of legacy—shattered around him. The stained-glass windows exploded outward, a rain of fractured saints and long-dead martyrs. Statues split down their spines. The great dome above them cracked open like an egg, letting in no sky—only dark. Only the howl of the flood returning to claim its own.
Martina stood in the eye of it all.
Unmoving.
Unyielding.
She was the storm, yes—but not just destruction. She was the memory of water before it was dammed. The scream of truth unshackled. The rising tide that would not be stopped this time.
The Emperor looked up at her, lips trembling.
“What will you become?”
Martina looked beyond him, through him, to the crumbling corridors and the voices still singing within her chest. Her eyes were no longer glowing. They were deep. Vast. Like ocean trenches.
"I don’t know," she said.
And it was honest.
And it was terrifying.
Because what she would become was no longer prophecy.
It was choice.
The flood did not roar—it breathed.
It exhaled through the shattered seams of the palace, rising with terrible grace. Not a tidal wave, but a slow, inevitable swell. It crept along the mosaicked floor, curling around toppled thrones and broken bodies, climbing staircases like a ghost come home. It didn’t drown—it revealed. Every inch it touched glistened with buried truths: names carved beneath coats of arms, bones behind false walls, prayers scratched into stone by dying hands.
The Emperor could only watch as the water reached his knees.
“Please,” he whispered.
He wasn’t begging for mercy.
He was begging for meaning.
But Martina offered none.
She turned from him. Slowly. As if severing some invisible tether between them. The final cord between creation and creator. Behind her, the Emperor fell forward, not into the water—but beneath it, swallowed without splash, consumed by the thing he thought he could control.
The great hall, once gilded and grand, now stood silent, baptized in lightless water. Every reflection fractured. Every shadow deeper. The portraits on the walls had wept themselves into ruin. The banners above had rotted to threads. And yet, Martina walked on.
The flood followed her.
But it did not drown her.
It listened.
Around her, the palace stretched into corridors that had never existed before—paths built from memory, from blood, from the forgotten corners of the empire. Her bare feet left no ripples as she passed through them. The flood parted for her, like reverence. Like recognition.
She moved not as a girl, not even as a god—but as a question the world could no longer refuse to answer.
And somewhere deep below, where the weight of history pressed heaviest—beneath the roots of stone spires, beneath the catacombs and condemned archives—something opened.
A door.
Old as sin.
Older than the Prophets.
Older than the first lie.
It recognized her. It had waited for her.
Martina stood before it.
Her breath misted the air.
The water pooled at her back, silent and wide, as if holding itself in suspense.
Her hand rose—trembled slightly, for the first time—and rested against the door.
A pulse answered her touch. Not violent. Not warm.
But alive.
And the door began to move.
Not by her strength, but by invitation.
Beyond it, a stairwell coiled up into blackness.
She hesitated.
Not out of fear.
But out of understanding.
Because this wasn’t just another descent.
It was the final one.
The one that led not to the end—
—but to the beginning the world had tried to erase.
Martina stepped through.
The stairs did not end.
They ascended.
Worn stone, damp and coiled with roots. Each step creaked beneath her bare feet as though protesting her return. The walls narrowed the higher she climbed, pressing in like ribs around a rising breath.
This was no grand corridor. No gilded gate awaited her. Only a passage carved by hands that remembered sunlight through memory alone.
With every step upward, the air grew colder—but not dead. Sharper. It bit at her skin, filled her lungs with something close to forgotten.
The surface.
She could feel it now.
The whisper of wind above stone. The pressure of space unconfined. Her body trembled, not with weakness, but with anticipation—as if her bones remembered sky.
Behind her, the palace moaned, its foundations fracturing under her absence. The storm followed in her wake now, humming like a second heartbeat. Quiet, but present. Hungrier than ever.
She reached the last door.
It wasn’t locked.
It didn’t need to be.
The metal was warped from age and radiation, green with rust and weeping black oil. Symbols had been etched across it—wards of warning, not protection. She pressed her hand against them. They burned. Then dissolved.
The door gave way with a hiss. Not a creak. Not a groan.
A gasp.
Martina stepped into the light.
And stopped.
There was no sun.
Just sky—ashen and trembling, torn open like a wound. Clouds twisted like flesh. Smoke plumed from distant hills where factories had once stood proud. Nothing grew. Nothing lived.
But everything watched.
Ruins stretched before her like bones picked clean. Vehicles melted into the roads. Towers split in half. Shadows flickered in places they shouldn’t. Not beasts. Not men. Just remnants.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She was standing in the world of victors.
And it was silent.
The wind howled low, like a lullaby gone sour. Dust spiraled around her legs, clinging to her soaked gown, painting her pale and gray. Every part of her burned from the cold—but she didn’t shiver.
Instead, she took one step forward.
Then another.
The ground didn’t greet her like a daughter returned. It tested her. Cracked beneath her weight. The storm inside her sparked again, quietly, and the sky above twitched.
Lightning flashed across the horizon, illuminating something massive shifting in the distance—too tall, too many limbs, too quiet.
She didn’t flinch.
She walked on.
Through ash.
Through memories.
Through the ruin of promises made by men now buried.
Behind her, the door to the underground closed.
Ahead of her, the new world waited.
And she—no
longer feverish, no longer dreaming—walked into it.
Not as a savior.
Not as a God.
But someone trying to understand her own self.
_____________