"Please."
Amelia's whisper trembled as if the walls themselves might punish her for speaking. Her arms were wrapped tight around the newborn, her body shielding him from the candlelight of the sanctum. From the eyes of the stars. From the knives waiting to carve his fate.
"You have to help me," she said.
Isol stood motionless in the shadows, her back to the altar. The stone beneath her hands was cold, slick with centuries of blood and reverence. Once, she had prayed here. Once, she had believed in this place.
Now all she saw was the ruin it had birthed.
"I saw the mark," Amelia continued. "Selene chose him. He wasn't taken—he was chosen."
Isol turned. Slowly.
Something flickered in her expression. A hesitation. A crack in the mask she wore among the others. She stepped forward, the light catching her eyes—eyes that had seen too much and been able to do too little for far too long.
"Do you know what they'll do to you?" she asked. "To him?"
"I know," Amelia whispered. "That's why I'm asking you."
The child stirred in her arms, but made no sound. The crescent-shaped mark above his eye glowed faintly, as if Selene herself watched through it still.
For a moment, silence reigned.
Then: "I left the lower catacomb door unbarred," Isol said. Her voice was quiet. Steady. "If anyone asks, that's all I did."
Amelia stepped closer. "Isol—"
"I've seen them bind stars to children too weak to speak. Seen them cut brands into flesh not meant to bear them. I watched them chant while the screaming never stopped." Her jaw clenched. "I told myself there would be meaning in it. That some higher will would rise from the ruin. But all they made was him."
A pause. Her voice dropped further.
"This is the only thing that might make it right."
She pulled back the stone panel behind the altar and opened the path that hadn't seen light in decades. Dust spilled out like forgotten time.
Amelia didn't hesitate.
They ran.
---
They descended into darkness with only stolen stars to guide them. The old escape tunnels twisted and turned beneath the Cult's temple like a spider's nest, and Isol knew each path by heart. Her fingers brushed the wall as they moved, feeling for markings hidden from all but the oldest faithful.
Behind them, faint footsteps echoed. The alarm hadn't been sounded yet, but it would be. Soon.
Amelia clutched her child tightly. Orion. Her son.
Chosen.
The Cult would never forgive such a theft.
They would send everything to reclaim him.
--
A name whispered in reverence, in fear. A child forged through sacrifice—other children, marked and claimed, taken and branded, their stars carved out with ritual precision and fed into a single vessel.
Into Malek.
The result was a boy whose soul burned with power not meant for one being. A soul stitched together with suffering and divine fire.
Malek didn't scream when they gave him his third brand. He stared forward, unblinking, as the cultists whispered praise. He was not chosen by one star—he had been made a throne for many.
To the Cult, he was salvation.
To the stars, perhaps an abomination.
And now, because of Selene's intervention, there was another.
Orion.
The one that got away.
The balance had shifted. The High Council knew it. So did the stars. And deep in the Temple, Malek turned his head slightly, as if he felt the ripple of fate diverging.
He blinked.
The silver brand over his brow flared.
---
The gate groaned as they pushed it open—rusted iron, old and forgotten, hidden behind a stack of false offerings and prayer scrolls no one had touched in years. Beyond it lay the hollow ruins of the first sanctum, long abandoned.
Moonlight spilled through a cracked dome far above. Selene's light.
They emerged into it like ghosts.
Amelia stumbled, gasping for breath. Her legs burned. Her arms ached. But she didn't stop holding him.
Isol sealed the gate behind them. Her hands were shaking.
For now, they were safe.
But for how long?
They sat behind a fallen column, catching their breath beneath the watchful stars. The quiet was not comforting—it was the silence before something worse.
"Do you think they'll find us?" Amelia asked. Her voice was hoarse. "Do you think they'll send him?"
Isol's jaw tightened. "Not yet. But they will. He's not ready. He's still just a child."
"They've made him more than that."
"They've made him a weapon," Isol said quietly. "And if we don't get your son far from here… one day, that weapon will be aimed at him."
The chamber hummed with starlight.
Seven robed figures sat beneath a ceiling carved with constellations that pulsed in rhythm with unseen tides. Their faces were hidden beneath silver-veiled hoods, each one seated on an obsidian throne rimmed in starmetal. Between them, a ritual flame flickered—low, restless, unsettled.
"The light fractured," said High Seer Ithros, voice a rough whisper echoing through the circular room. "Selene intervened."
"She broke the Accord," hissed Matron Sireva, hands clenched tight around the arms of her throne. "No star has interfered since the Binding."
"And yet she did," said Virel, the youngest of the Seven, her tone clipped and brittle. "She chose the boy."
"Orion," Ithros murmured.
The name hung like a wound in the air.
"He was meant for Malek," said Sireva. "We marked him. We prepared him. His star was ours to sever."
"He was hers to claim," Virel corrected coldly.
None spoke for a time.
Because they all felt it. In the subtle unraveling of their flames, the trembling of their glyphs—something had changed. The stars were watching again. Not merely obeying. Watching.
"This is dangerous," said Ithros. "It's not just a matter of one star. It's a matter of will. The stars acted with it. So did Selene. That means others might, too."
"They'll remember," Sireva said, voice nearly growling. "What it means to choose."
"And if they do," Ithros said slowly, "then we are no longer gods. We are no longer the hands that carve fate."
Silence again.
Until Virel broke it. "Should we send Malek?"
A pause.
"No," Sireva said. "Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because he's not ready, He's simply a child," Ithros said, eyes narrowing beneath his veil. "And because if we send him now, we risk awakening more than stars. We risk awakening him."
Far beneath the Council's chamber, the walls bled with starlight.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically.
The stone itself pulsed with threads of raw celestial fire, burned in through years of branding, sacrifice, and ceremony. The sacred chamber—if such a word could still apply—was not a room but a forge. And in its center, the product of centuries knelt in silence.
Malek.
2 years old. Three brands. And not a single one he'd been given by choice.
His skin shimmered with a map of pain, the sigils etched along his body burning in rhythmic pulses—each one a stolen star, each one a memory that wasn't his. He didn't remember his mother's face. He didn't know if he'd ever had a name before Malek was given to him.
All he remembered was the voice.
"You were born for greatness."
"You are not a child. You are a vessel."
"You are the Celestial."
They'd whispered it into his bones. Etched it into his flesh.
A child carved by ritual, fed by the light of stolen souls.
Each time they brought him another—another small body, wide-eyed and trembling, dragged to the altar—he stopped asking questions. He stopped pretending he could be anything but what they were making him.
He never screamed again.
Not after the first brand.
Not after the second.
Not when they carved the third into the soft part of his chest, where a normal heart might break.
Malek stopped being a child a long time ago.
But he remembered what it felt like.
He just chose not to.
He sat now in stillness, legs folded in a circle of unlit flame, waiting. Not because he'd been told to. Because he always knew before they did.
He felt it. When one of the stars rippled. When one flared out of turn.
He felt Selene act.
He felt her choose.
He didn't know the boy's name. Didn't need to.
But the moment it happened, Malek opened his eyes.
His breath left a shimmer in the air. His silver brand, the first they gave him, flared softly across his brow like a broken crescent.
A star had chosen someone else, Someone not him. He should have felt anger, envy or fear.
But all Malek felt was the echo of a strange, unfamiliar word—
Why?
The question wasn't for Selene.
It was for himself.
He had never been chosen. Only molded. Shaped. Branded. Offered to the divine like meat to flame.
He could not remember ever making a choice that belonged to him.
And yet he stood, No one entered, No order was given.
But the stone beneath his feet moved, recognizing the shift in him. The air bent, starlight trailing off his skin like smoke.
Somewhere, in the spiraling chambers above, the High Council's flame pulsed.
They knew he felt it. Knowing he was listening they feared that because the truth was this :Malek did not accept his fate. He embraced it not because it was righteous not because it was good but because it was his.
And that, more than anything, made him dangerous. Because the boy they had made into a throne of stars was no longer content to be sat upon.
One day, he would rise.