A Rise of the Cursed [Epic Fantasy | Arthurian Myth | Destiny as Choice | Slow-Burn Stakes]

The dark was not silent.

It breathed.

Cold roots shifted in the damp, unseen earth, sighing through centuries of weight and moss. The air pressed in like a burial shroud—wet, ancient, and alive. Somewhere above, impossibly far, the world continued turning. But here, beneath the heartwood of Yggdrasil, time had folded in on itself like dying paper.

She had not moved in years, months, days, hours. She did not know.

Not because she couldn't. Because movement meant remembering.

Stillness dulled the ache. At least until the roots began to stir.

They coiled around her limbs like ancient serpents, brittle but unyielding, once dormant, now twitching faintly to the rhythm of a forgotten name. Bark pulsed beneath her cheek—almost imperceptibly—as if the great tree was considering her presence again after a long absence.

Her lips cracked with disuse. A single breath escaped.

"…not yet."

Even her voice sounded foreign, scraped raw from disuse and memory. The runes beneath her skin did not glow—they whispered, faint as wind through bones. Their silence had once meant mercy. Now it only meant waiting.

Above her head, somewhere in the choking dark, the bark groaned.

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She remembered nothing.

No, that wasn't true.

She remembered the feeling of her temple pressed against cool stone while the sea poured into her city. She remembered petals suspended in water—white, red, and gold—floating over drowned mosaics of gods no longer worshipped. A final offering. A final song.

She remembered a hand.

Rough. Warm. Pressing hers.

"Cindy," Winston had said, easy and clumsy, the way people renamed things they didn't want to understand. As if saying her real name might tear the world open again. As if the softness of the word could cage what she was.

And it had.

For a while.

Somewhere deeper in the earth, something cracked.

Not a stone.

A seal.

The Celeste Empire had buried her with purpose. But it was not them who had sealed her fate beneath the World Tree. No—those faces belonged to another memory: younger, desperate, full of pity and rage. Albion. Adele. Winston.

In fear.

They carved no name on her tomb. They etched only runes—containment, isolation, silence. And still, the forest had not forgotten her. The roots pulsed faintly with old grief. Even the dark seemed to listen now.

She stirred, if only inwardly.

The name "Cindy" was still inside her like an old splinter: not hateful, not kind. Just… human. A word meant to make her smaller.

She whispered it now, not with bitterness, but with a smile like a blade pressed beneath the skin.

"Not anymore."

Memories floated past like ash on water.

Fai Chau's eyes—stubborn, red-rimmed, unbroken even in the aftermath.

Sebastian's silence as the massacre ended, not triumphant, but necessary.

There were others too—names harder to summon. The boy with the golden blade. The girl whose magic stung like frost. They had whispered words over her broken body, words meant to bind, not to heal. They had left her beneath the tree's judgment, thinking it would be enough.

The rituals—god-blood and starlight, the way magic had once burned like a second sun inside her veins.

The drowned ziggurat.

The weight of all of it did not break her.

It hardened.

She remembered a boy's hand on her shoulder. Not Winston's. Younger. His voice breaking as he said the words that sealed her here.

Albion.

She would remember him better next time.

Above, Yggdrasil exhaled.

The runes they'd carved into the stones, the vows they'd spoken in desperation—they had slowed her waking. Not stopped it. Nothing could stop it now.

The roots tightened, then flexed. Not to imprison—but to test.

She did not flinch.

Her fingers moved.

It was barely more than a twitch—stone cracking from beneath her fingernail, a thread of ancient moss sloughing away—but it sent a shiver through the runes beneath her.

They remembered her now.

So did the bark. And then—

With a sound like wood splitting under the weight of time—

The ceiling above her groaned.

A single sliver of bark cracked down the center.

Not wide enough to see through. Not wide enough to breathe.

But enough.

The tree had begun to open.

Xin Di did not smile But her eyes opened. And they were full of stars.